It's beginning to become a tradition. If it's January, maximum lawyer is heading to Scottsdale to Mastermind. January is the perfect time of year to step back, assess where your firm is, and create a strategic plan for growth. This Mastermind is designed to give you a jumpstart to make sure 2025 is your most successful year yet. Our day and a half events combine business training and hot seats. On day one, you'll learn how to use AI and automations to drive growth with the latest tech innovations for law firms, followed by Mastermind hot seats on day two, where you'll receive tailored advice and strategies on what to do next. You'll walk away from this event with an action plan created from personalized solutions that you can implement immediately. To learn more about this event and grab your ticket, head to maxlawevents.com. This is Maximum Lawyer with your host, Tyson Mutrix. In this episode, it's our very first guest that is going to be here for the new format, and it's the one and only, Jim Hacking. So this is going to be a little different for both of us. It's interesting because Jim and I, we have recorded almost 700 episodes together, and for the first time with both of us on the show, the intro is obviously different. You probably already heard the new music. It's different. How I introduce the show is different, and it's the end of an era, and I kind of want to take a moment to reflect on that before we get into the episode. So it's kind of crazy, but for nearly a decade, it's just so hard to believe, but Jim and I have had countless conversations both on and off the show. We've shared insights, and we've interviewed incredible guests, and most importantly, built an amazing community of maximum lawyers. We've learned a lot along the way, and truthfully grown as both lawyers, and friends, and business owners, but as with all great things, they do sometimes come to an end, and there comes a time for change. And so today marks Jim's first episode as a guest of the Maximum Lawyer podcast, and not as a co-host. Before you worry though, don't. Jim and I, we are great friends. We remain great friends. We will always be great friends, and while I'm going to be, I'll definitely miss our amazing talks that we'll have together. He'll never be too far away from the amazing community. He's going to be an active member in the Guild still. He'll still be around. He and I will still hang out, but his role is just going to change a little bit. He's going to be focusing a lot on his firm, and so he's not going to be in his official capacity anymore. So Jim though, before this is more directed towards you, before we dive into today's episode, I just want to say thank you. Thank you for your partnership, your wisdom, and for being on this wild ride with me. This show would not be what it is without you, and I know the entire Maximum Lawyer family feels the same way that I do, but I hope that you'll enjoy this show. It is, it's really, I asked Jim questions I've never asked him before. Also we get into some, you know, reasons why he's, you know, leaving. We get into some plans that he has for the future, but it's a, it's a really good episode. I enjoyed it, and I hope, hopefully, you will too. Enjoy the show. All right, so we're going to start with some light stuff to kind of get us through that. I want to hear a story about something that you've never told me, like something about you that I don't know. That's hard to say, because I think I've told you just about everything. I think I would say that in high school, I felt very inadequate. I really felt awkward. I was one of the youngest ones in my class. I didn't feel, I had a lot of friends, and I enjoyed my time at school, but I always felt off. I always felt different. I really took to heart at St. Louis Uhi that they said to be a man for others, and I did take that to heart, I think. But as far as relating to other boys in high school, I had a few friends that were sort of good friends, but I felt sort of different. As I watch my daughter Nor go through high school now, and I see how effortlessly she glides through the experience, it's very different than the experience I had. You'll see when your kids get older, just that they're so fundamentally different from you, that I've just been reflecting on how high school was tough for me. It was, you know, in my eighth grade year, I'd had a bunch of seizures. And so I just was feeling like I was getting back to equilibrium, and I didn't feel connected for a big chunk of my life. It wasn't until later that I felt like I could really connect with people like I do now. That is a little surprising knowing what I know about you, because I was just, and for some reason I was thinking about this earlier today, is when you had us over to your house earlier this year, and you had all your friends and family over, right? And like you saying that, it doesn't drive with what I've witnessed. So when do you think that's changed, when it changed and why it changed? My therapist is a Buddhist, she is a Buddhist, she was my therapist. She said that I have high rata, that I am very good at gathering people to myself. That's where my energy comes from. And that's true. I think my energy was bottled up though, because of what had happened to me when I was a kid with the priest, and because I had eaten so incessantly for the years that followed, that it wasn't until I started going to Over Eaters Anonymous, and I started telling my story, and I started getting out of my shell and my comfort level, that I really learned how to talk and connect to people at the same time. So when you go to an Over Eaters Anonymous meeting, they're sort of like an opening preamble, and then you do, you know, I say the third step prayer, and a couple other prayers, and you sort of have announcements, and then after that, usually somebody will be the speaker, and they'll speak for like 10 or 15 minutes, sort of like us, and then you go into, everyone gets to comment or talk about how what the speaker shared on sort of impacts them. And I think I really unpacked a lot of stuff. I was an Over Eaters Anonymous for 10 years, 13 years, and I have friends who knew me back then when I first started going, and they said, basically, for the first two years, all I did was bitch. All I did was complain. Man, I can relate a little bit to that, I know a little bit about that. I'll get to how you've changed over time, too. So it was really just letting out a lot of stuff that was frustrating me and made me sad and heard, and so I think that by the time, I don't know, by the time we got started or sort of in between there, I just sort of got much more in touch with myself and with what was important to me and sort of being my authentic self. So the Over Eaters Anonymous, like when did that start? Like, how old were you? That was, well, here's what happened. So when I graduated from college in 1992, I weighed 320 pounds, and I said I was going to go save the world. I joined the Jesuits, and I moved out to Denver. It was what they call in the program a geographic cure. And I thought, oh, if I just moved to Denver, everything will be fine, and I'll sort everything out. And I don't have to worry about myself, I'm just going to save the world. So it was really an avoidance thing. And so I was there for six months, eating like a fiend. And I said to my novice master, it's time for me to go, I don't belong here. And somebody had picked me up with the airport, he said, "Where do you want to go?" I said, "Let's go to McDonald's." So I continued eating right there. And then that was in '92, December, and then I moved out on my own in April of '94 in anticipation of starting law school in August of '94. In those first two weeks, I just ate nonstop. And then I started going to my first meeting in May of 1994. So it was a while ago. And I guess what was, I guess where I'm missing, what was that triggering event where I'm enough as enough? I can't do this anymore. I was thinking about that. Truth be told, I had repressed what had happened to me with the priest. And it was one time when I was getting ready for work, I was taking a shower, and it all just sort of came back and hit me what had happened. And so sort of going to meetings and understanding what had happened is what opened up the door for me to start healing. So there is a, I think this is a good time to talk about this quote, that it's a Tolstoy quote that makes me think about you. And it's, everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself. And it makes me think about you because when we first met, you were, and I never knew a lot of the things that I know about you now, obviously, but you weren't, you're not the same person, right? You were a different person back then. And I've seen this change in you, obviously to the better, like you are a much more positive person than you were back then. So I was making the joke about the bitching comment because you did bitch a lot back then. But you have, you've never been afraid to change. And like, where do you think that comes from? Well, that quote has haunted me for a long time ever since I've heard it. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, yeah. No, I knew the quote. When you said Tolstoy, I knew which quote you were talking about. I didn't know what verbatim, but I knew the general sentiment. And I think a lot of people do get caught up in trying to save others instead of focusing on themselves. And there's a, there's a great character in Charles Dickens' novel Bleak House, which is a 1300 page novel about how terrible lawyers are and how it's all about an estate fight. And at the end of the day, the only people that get paid are the lawyers. The lawyers over 13 years eat up all the, all the proceeds of the estate. But there's a character in there, an old lady who has all these kids. She has like seven kids, but she spends all of her time talking about saving the children in Africa and collecting coins, but her kids are like bare, bare-footed and have no clothes and they're dirty and they don't have any food. So I think about that. And I think about the Tolstoy quote, because in a lot of ways, it's harder to work on yourself. It's harder to look inside. It's harder to focus on, you know, improving ourselves. And I think the other part of that, that sits on top of that for me, is that man for others, slew high stuff, that the Catholic church taught me and the Jesuit taught me, which has a lot of benefit, but sometimes I felt obligated to do it. I felt like I had to earn my place on earth by helping other people. I think, I mean, that's a noble cause, obviously. Was there every time where like the change was for, for bad, you thought you were changing for good, but actually ended up being a bad thing for you? Because I think you and I are both are in agreement that change is good. Like you want to constantly evolve, but because it seems like you've progressed in the right direction, but has there ever been that time where you're like, maybe that was the wrong turn. Well, of course, I think this is something we've talked about before in 2012. Remember when I opened up the firm in 2008, my thought was that I would be a lawyer for immigrants, that I would do all different kinds of things for immigrants. Well, I also was having to pay the bills and keep things moving, so I was still taking contingency fee cases on things that weren't related to immigrants. And I thought, oh, I can try this civil rights class action case. Oh, I can try this criminal defense case, neither of which I should have been doing, and both of which severely threaten the safety of our firm and my ability to pay Adela and me and everybody else. So I think, you know, yeah, I've certainly, you know, how I am, I get excited about things. As I said about my father at his eulogy, he took violent likings to things and I take violent likings to things, and sometimes I go off on weird tangents. What do you think that is? What do you think you, you, I don't have ever heard you call it violent tangents, but violent likings, violent likings of things, like, what do you think that is? Violent tangents too. Well, I'm a 10 quick start. I think maybe that I have a bit of the grasses greener over there, or if I just find the right combination of things, if I just click this box or do this, take this course or, you know, get rid of this activity, then everything is going to turn around. Everything is going to change. I'm generally a very optimistic person, but I do get drawn sometimes to, oh, I get a little board, I think, and I think, oh, that would be fun. Yeah, I do have those where like, if I pay for this thing, or if I do this thing, it's going to fix everything. And I think that there's only, oh, one time, one thing I can think of where like, I did, I paid for something like a service for the firm, then it actually did change a lot. That's whenever we hired new Sears, I wish I was getting paid for this ad for them. And you're happy with them. Yes. But I was like, at a certain point, I was like, there's no way it's going to be as good as I think it is, but you know what, this is going to be great. And it fixed all of our medical records department, but is there anything like where you actually did think it was going to fix everything in a certain area of the firm and it actually did? Probably when I went to a Ben Glass event and Gerry Oginski was there, he's a medical malpractice lawyer from Long Island, and he was presenting on the Power of YouTube, and I thought, hmm, YouTube might be something that turns out good for me. There, that's a great example. Yeah, where you, yeah, you picked it up and you stuck with it. It's one of those rare things that Jimmy Hacking picked up and he stuck with. That's interesting. One of the other things if you picked up like that, that you've stuck with it, you'll always like, is therapy one of them or are you doing therapy or is there therapy? My therapist and I went back to look to see when I started and I just finished up therapy about a month ago and she looked and I had started with her in November of 2014, so almost 10 years. I am a 10 quick start and a three follow through. One of the amazing things about the fact that you mentioned we've been doing this show for eight years is, I mean, that was because I didn't want to let you down, right? It's good for me to have something to hold me accountable. It's good. I've also had long streaks, long streaks where I exercise every day or where I made a YouTube video every day, so those are the kinds of things that help me keep my focus. Yeah, you've taken where, like, it could be a weakness, I think, that you, like, streaking could be bad, I think, too, or, like, for sure. Where you look at it, I only did it for this long. You've kind of reversed it like, I'm going to do it with this streak as long as I can, which at least a lot of positive results, which I think is pretty cool that you've done with and done that. So our friend Marco Brown says, "There's some things worth doing, it's worth doing every day." And I like that approach. And obviously, you don't want to get compulsive about it. Like I do sometimes, you want to have balance, but streaks can be really helpful. You know, I've talked before at Max Lockon about Jerry Seinfeld's method of coming up with jokes. And he just had a wall calendar that he printed out and put up on his wall each month, and his job was just to tell a joke and mark an axe, and he just wasn't supposed to break the streak. Anything like that that you're doing now, other than, like, videos or what else, anything that you are, even if it's not on an actual calendar, that you are mentally putting a mark on a calendar? I would say no. I've been a little bit distracted lately. Yeah. Why is that? I don't know. I've been ending some things, and I've found myself with more open space, and I was thinking to myself just this week, you know, Jimbo, you probably need a little more structure. Like, you know, we say it all the time about the great thing about owning your own firm is nobody tells you what to do, but the curse of owning your own firm is nobody tells you what to do. You have to be focused, and I think Tyson that it's okay for there to be peaks and valleys of focus. I think if you're focused 24/7 for years and years, that can be a problem. I also think, you know, I turned 54 this year, and I think there's part of me that's just sort of taking it a little bit easier on myself, and just, I know that at the firm we've hit a plateau, I know that it's going to take different kinds of thinking and different kinds of activity for me and the other people on leadership to break through it. But sometimes I think I'm just resting to get ready for the next thing. Sure. Well, I'm going to skip ahead then to the firm, I'm going to talk about that a little bit. What do you think at this time next year? So August or October, I mean, October of 2025, what do you think you'll be doing at this time next year? Well, I would imagine I'll still be, I think I'm going to focus a lot of the free time that I've been developing on YouTube. I think I'm going to go even more heavy on YouTube. I think there's a real opportunity for me to, you know, we had that guest on the TikTok fellow last week, that lawyer. It's fantastic. It was fantastic. And I knew he was fantastic because our friend Ryan McKeen told me. And so I think there's an opportunity there for us to get into a position where we're referring out a lot of immigration stuff, and I'm just creating pure content. I mean, I think we'll always have a place for the firm, but I think there's a lot of cases that we don't handle, and that I could see me starting to do more partnerships. Luckily, with maximum lawyer and everything else, I view myself as pretty collaborative, but due to our network and people that we know, you know, we know, I know immigration lawyers all around the country now, and there's no reason why I couldn't partner up with them on stuff. And owning a law firm, especially when you get to the size of we are like about 50 people, there's a lot that comes with that, a lot of people management, a lot of issues, raises and salaries and all that stuff. So I'm still all in on the law firm, but for my own day to day stuff, that doesn't get me all that excited. I was going to pull up Julio's last name, but now I can't remember how to pronounce his last name. It's the perfect. I remember. Oh, he had our day. They're very good. Yeah. I remember as Oi was the key. Yeah. He told me how to say it right before. And then I did it. You did it. I did it. And now I can't remember how to say it. Right. Nicely done. To back to the firm, though, I am curious about the whole idea like referring out. So are you thinking you'll niche down even more and just just refer out the stuff that you don't do? Or are you thinking refer out more of everything? Well, you know, our good friend, Joshua Shibe did a presentation that my son Yusef brings up about once a month and he is dad, you have 50,000 people on your email list. You have a 45% open rate. You should be actively trying to get car accident cases to refer to all of your friends and actually. I agree. I know. I know. I just haven't done it. There's just so many other things to do. So that's some. I mean, with a megaphone we have, we're at almost 140,000 people on TikTok, which of course is nowhere near as big as Julio. But you know, you can make a huge impact with 5,000 followers, right? So we could be doing a much better job. So if I get a little more focused and I have a little more time, I think these are the kinds of things that we can do with the firm to really boost things. I think this is smart because the mistake that sometimes people would make in that same situation, I've got the big microphone. Let's take on car crash cases as opposed to like, let's, let's market for them and refer them out. Is that at all, do you have that desire at all? It's so funny. The, there's really only two other practice areas or case types that I would ever think about creating and it's something that we've talked about and it's really just based on Amani's expertise, my wife's expertise, I would never want to get back to doing discovery. I would never want to get back to depots. I wouldn't want to be supervising lawyers that do those things because when you supervise lawyers that do those things and then those lawyers leave, you end up doing those things. I don't want to do those things. The only two areas that I think are very niche that I think are really ripe for disruption are elder law or, you know, Medicare, Medicaid planning and what would you call it? The advocacy, advocating for school, for kids in schools either for gifted services, which I think is very, very underrepresented and for kids with challenges. So I think there's a, there's a audience out there for both of those things that the lawyers who are practicing in those areas have not even scratched. And what do you mean? So I think that there are a lot of families that could benefit from having an advocate with these school districts. We've had to fight twice, one to get different benefits for different access to the help that they needed for one of our very, two of our gifted students, one of whom, I'm talking about our own children, one of whom had learning disabilities as well. So the school districts put up all these obstacles and I think that if there's a way that you can figure out how to charge people appropriately, and I think these school districts really overreach and really just say, "Oh, they're doing okay. They're doing okay." I think on the gifted side, especially that there's just not nearly as much advocacy as there could be, Amani has broken through that twice. We won in Webster. We came this close to suing the district and it was only because we had copious notes of every dumb thing that the gifted resource person had said that they folded and gave our son services. And then when we got to Parkway, we sort of had to do it again, although it was a lot easier in Parkway. Because you had a model where you could go off of. Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. I think the struggle would be in that situation. One, it sounds like a new practice area almost because no one really talks about that. And then also getting paid. But if you're talking about gifted programs, you're probably hard talking about wealthier families for the most part. And so I could see how you could charge it an hourly or flat rate or whatever, so yeah, that's an interesting one. Yeah. A lot, we've been through, my aunt now and Amani's mom before have gone through this whole thing of the idea that you're going to have to pay for the treatment that people need towards the end of their life. And there's all that stuff you can do with trust, irrevocable trust, or Medicaid planning that some people are doing. But I think the marketing of it is really off. I spoke to the Elder Law Association of Missouri a couple of years ago at Ameristar. And the looks of shock when I mentioned very, very basic marketing things was eye opening to me and it made me think, oh, this is a market that we could really take off on. Remember when we were down, Gary asked us to, no, it wasn't Gary. So two of us, we spoke down at the Social Security Disability, that conference. Yeah. I can't remember what the name of the conference was. We had the same looks. Yeah. There's like the 10 basic something about marketing or something like that. It is interesting. I guess I kind of got the impression that that's been changing with the legal field in general. Do you think that's still? As younger people come through, they understand usually that you need to be well marketing well. You know, our friend Steve Bartle jumped out of the box and went way ahead of a bunch of other family lawyers who didn't understand digital marketing. And so yeah, I think it's changing. Yeah. Have you considered bringing in like a full in-house marketing team to do your marketing stuff? Well, we have four people that do nothing but marketing for us. You mean like outsourcing it? No, no, no. I actually have full like marketing department. So like, so you have many people? Four. Four. Okay. So you do have a full team then. Right now you, your newsletter is drafted by someone else now. You're not doing it anymore. Right. Okay. So you are essentially just recording the videos and doing the shows. What do the rest of them do? Well, we have one person who just deals with TikTok. So when I go live on YouTube now, I also go live on TikTok. She feeds me all the comments. She's just part time. She just feeds me the comments. And she also responds to all the comments. She adds people to the database when they come in through TikTok. Then we have another person who just says all the other platforms, Lynneath. That's her job. She deals with all the other platforms. My house sort of oversees everything. Does the newsletter, does the branding and that stuff. And then this fourth position, we're sort of going to change, I think, a little bit. We're feeling it's just going to be focused on local marketing in St. Louis. I still think we're doing a really poor job of marketing ourselves in St. Louis. It's really so funny because you and I as maximum lawyers have fans and friends all around the country much more so than we do in St. Louis. Sure. The immigration firm, it's almost the same thing. Only 15% of our business came from Missouri last year. That's interesting. It's crazy. Although Gary gives me, Gary Burger or Buddy, he gives me crap, but he's like every, every time he meets someone that already knows me, he always calls me, do you know everybody? So I do have that. I do think that the plaintiff's bar is a lot tighter than the immigration bar in St. Louis. So I do have that benefit over you. I am interested about this tightening up on St. Louis. Are you afraid that that might weaken your national presence if you do that? Well, I don't want it to be an either or and I think in my mind I have thought it either or because immigration's federal and because we talked to law firm owners about where do you want to get your business. I didn't want to be out glad handling. I didn't want to be out taking people to lunch. I wanted to do it all from our office so that just lent itself towards digital. But I probably swung too far over and we have a very energetic, bubbly person in our office who is really good with customers and clients and she's been asking to do more. So I think we're going to segue her into at least part time doing that and see how it goes. And then what I think you do is then you make that the model for other cities. Do you think it hurts that you're not an immigrant yourself? Probably a little bit, but we have so many immigrants in our office and so many people representing different countries that I think I don't think so. Yeah, I would. I like what you do and I think I would stay on that approach where you make it a lot about your clients and like their stories. I think some of your most successful posts have been about your clients. Success stories, success stories and dirty tricks, those are the two things that people like the most. They love to hear about how we were able to overcome and help somebody and they love to hear what are the dirty tricks or secrets or things that people don't know about the immigration service. You leaving Maxwell, so you're going to have some time, extra time in your hands that you already kind of mentioned, which could be a good thing, could be a bad thing. As long as you've got it the right way, I'm sure it would be a good thing. But what does that mean for your firm? Like you leave in Maxwell. Well, for my firm, I think that it's going to give me more time to have sort of singular focus. This is another interesting thing that comes back from high school. So I was a B student. But I had a job. I did some sports and I always liked to have like seven things that I was doing because then that was always a built-in excuse for not excelling at one thing. So that's something that's been with me for a long time. So I've been asking myself, what if I'm focused? What if I'm laser focused? And I've been shedding different parts of things that I've been doing. It really came home to me when I talked about this in the context of me leaving maximum wear. That when I had the boys, I volunteered to be the Denleader for Cub Scouts. I volunteered to be the coach for baseball. So I was helping sort of all these other parents raise their kids, right? And I got accolades and thank yous and I enjoyed it. And it was fun. And I was spending time with my boys, right? But I was never sort of all focused on them, either in sports or in anything. Well, when Nor came along, Nor started high school after my youngest son went to college. So I thought to myself, hmm, I can just pour everything into her. I can go to every game. I can practice with her. I can take her for lessons and just throw a lot more at it and see how it goes. And just like I'm going to give whatever time I have to her. And so, you know, I think I've told you this before, but when I worked, when Adele and I first opened, we rented space from an attorney named Kevin King. His daughter had a soccer scholarship to Auburn. She played Division I soccer for four years. Kevin went to every game for four years, just about. I think he missed a couple. But I thought, boy, that would be cool to have a firm that's up and running and resilient enough for him to be able to drive all around the southeast United States to see his daughter play soccer. And I decided then to try to start building something so that when in 2027, when we're graduating from high school, that if she plays college softball, which hopefully she will, then I'll be able to do the same thing. And so whether I trade this maximum lawyer time for a firm time, I think I will to a degree simply by being more accessible. I don't know that I'm not going to go back into like handling cases or stuff. I'm still going to be doing my higher level thinking. But I think that we've hit this plateau. We won the Inc. 5,000 fastest growing firms two years in a row, like in 20 and 21. And then since then, our growth has halved each time where this year, we're probably going to break exactly even to what we made last year. So what I'm going to do is try to figure out how to go from five to ten. That's interesting. The revenue is the number you're talking about, right? That's revenue. So what about profit? I mean, how was your profit done during that time? Good. Okay. Good. Is it, has your profit gone up or is it stagnated too? This year probably go down from last year. Are you tired of the marketing guessing game? Does your website feel more like a digital billboard than a client magnet? If you're nodding along, you're not alone. And it's time to stop the uncertainty and start getting real results. Let's talk about your marketing spend. Are you just shelling out money every month and crossing your fingers? Do you ever wonder what impact your marketing is really having on your revenue? Well, it's time to take the guesswork out of the equation with Rise Up Media. We've been working with them for over a year and the feedback from our fellow members has been fantastic. Rise Up Media is here to take your marketing to the next level. They'll even perform a full audit of your online presence, giving you the good, the bad, and even let you in on what your competition is up to that you're missing out on. And the best part, there's no obligation, no catch, no pressure. If you decide to work with them, their contracts are month to month. That's right. No long-term commitments tying you down. So what are you waiting for? To learn more about how Rise Up Media can transform your firms, visit RiseUpMedia.com/MaxLaw and Rise is spelled with a Z. RiseUpMedia.com/MaxLaw. Okay, so that's not good. No, that's the first time since 2012. When you were really at your, when you were scaling the fastest, so as you were growing the fastest, your revenues were climbing the fastest, how were your profits at that time? They were good, but we were sinking a lot back into the firm. So, you know, one thing I've learned from you, when we talk to law firm owners and they're talking about their inability to grow, you immediately jump to how much cash you're taking out, how much cash you're taking out, how much cash you're taking out. And that's been a warning to me to leave more money in there to make sure that you can grow. Because you do need that cash to grow, you need to build that infrastructure. And we had our leadership off-site yesterday and Adele and I were sort of defending the infrastructure changes that we made in the last year. And we think that's poised to help us then break through this plateau that we're at. Nice. Yeah, it really is easy to just suck the money right out of it. It's like, "Oh, I got this money I have. I can go buy a new couch." I mean, you know, it's whatever it might be, but it's one of the easiest ways of killing the business. Or at least, you won't kill the business, but you might kill the growth and that's what sucks the most about it. Let's shift gears a little bit, because I do want to talk to you a little bit about the podcast. Do you know the first question that you asked me on the show? I have no idea what the first question was, I asked you. How did you know so early that you wanted to start your own firm? That's a great question. So let me ask you, how did you know so early that you wanted to start your own firm? That's a great question, because I definitely had what Michael Gerber calls the entrepreneurial seizure. So after I settled my lawsuit with the Archdiocese and I was able to pay off my loans and I knew that Amani working at St. Louis U as a law professor would pay our mortgage and we got our health insurance through SLU. That's when I started thinking going on my own. At this point, I had become a partner at that small maritime firm that I worked at for about nine years. And I went to court, I had referred a case to our friend Amy Gunn, and for some weird reason there was a mistrial right when I walked in. And so I waited with her and the client that I had referred and the client gave Amy a huge hug and I was like, I'm not getting much hugs dancing around on barges. So I always knew that I could do it because I'd seen my dad do it. In 1990, my dad had left his architectural engineering firm where he was the director of marketing and he opened up his own architectural engineering firm with another fellow. So I always knew the benefits of owning your own firm, of being your own boss, of setting your own agenda and sort of working towards your own success as opposed to somebody else's success. So I always had that in the back of my mind, but then I definitely had that entrepreneurial seizure. I got to get out of here. I got to do this. This has to happen now. Going down, immigration helped related questions at the mosque for, at that point, almost ten years and it was just time. How do you think you might have done it different? If you were to start it today, what would you have changed about how you started? Great. Great question. Number one, I would have done just immigration from the get-go. Number two, I would have started YouTube earlier. I always was working on my email list, so I'd make sure to do that. I would not have taken as much money out of the firm at the beginning. I would have, I think those are the things I would have done. I think we started talking about max law probably in 2015. I know that we had the famous Butterburger meeting at the Culver. Culver. When you were still eating meat. I was still eating meat, Beth, then. It's hard to believe. I was drinking back then, a lot of things back then that I did that I don't really do much anymore. What do you think you were searching for whenever we started max law? Well, at the time, I very, very, very much loved a podcast called I Love Marketing with Joe Polish and Dean Jackson. They had a back catalog, much like a lot of people find us and go through our back catalog. There were about 200 episodes at that point, 150, and I went and listened to all of them. I just thought that that's another thing about me is I've always felt not entitled, but that the world needed to hear from me. I don't know what that is, but clearly I have that because I spent all this time on YouTube ranting and raving. I spent eight years with you creating this podcast and talking, sharing my thoughts. I thought that owning a law firm was a lonely proposition, a lonely proposition that no matter how you try to explain to other people, even to the spouses of law firm owners or the number one employee of law firms, it's just different and that I was looking for some place to talk about that, to workshop that, to experiment with that, to interview people that are doing cool stuff. I thought that you and I were having good conversations at the time, so why not share this piece of what we were doing, and Gary Vaynerchuk had always talked about documenting the journey and really that's what we did. I think that that's what is the coolest part of this is that we can hand this off to our kids. You can listen, kids can listen to it, and this is actually a good segue into something I wanted to ask you about earlier when you were talking about your kids. I got a hint of maybe the way you've been able to parent nor, that you have a little bit of regret about maybe how you parented the boys, so knowing that they might hear this at some point, what would you say to them about that? Oh, no regrets, no regrets. I mean, it's a different life having three boys and a girl in the house versus having a girl in the house. It's just different. No, no, no. Great times, I coached all three kids, I helped with all their teams, I was there all through all their scouts, I spent a ton of time with them, I was never working too hard or working too much that I was outside of their sphere of life, like I was always part of it. So no regrets, just really, I think part of it was just to see an experiment, like what would happen if I did that, and plus not to offend the boys if they're listening, nor had the most athletic ability thanks to her mother, so it just like, it just never lined up for them to do the kinds of things that she does. Yeah, I like to hear that, good, that's awesome. So from like the first podcast, I went back and listened to it, because I wanted to... Were you laughing? I was kind of laughing, but I was interested by something. From the very beginning, that question that you asked me, it took several minutes for us to get into any questions. We were talking, we were just vibing, it was really cool. And it was almost like we were dictating an e-book. It was really interesting, but not like it didn't sound like we were reading anything, but we were just talking, and it was really cool. Why do you think that is? Because we have very different backgrounds, you know, how old are you? I'm 54. And I'm 41, so we're over a decade apart in age, different backgrounds. So why do you think that is? Well, I would harken back to when I met you, which is when you were sitting right there in the front... Can you picture the room? Yeah, I know exactly where you sat in the front row on the aisle. I think that I think we had both had good bosses and bad bosses, and I think we both thought that a lot of lawyers did a lot of dumb things. And I think we both... See, because you really remind me of my dad. You've never said that, that's interesting. Yeah, you really remind me of my dad in that he had a harder child than I think than you did. I know he did, because he was beaten and stuff, all that stuff. Yeah, that didn't happen. Right now, I know. But I think I saw in you the hustle that my dad displayed and that I wanted to emulate. I think that you were always focused, you always had that damn notebook, you were always writing shit down, you wanted more than what you had, and you were excited about the possibility of testing your boundaries and exploring how far you could go. Yeah, that is interesting. Back whenever you were doing the teaching, was that one of those things where you were trying to do a bunch of different things and not none of them really great? That's when I was broke. Yeah. That was 2012. Yeah. I only taught that class once, Tyson. Barb Gilkerz took the semester off, it might have been summer or it might have been fall, but she took the semester off and I went and spoke at that class a lot like you did later, but I only taught it once, so really that's just very serendipitous I think. The approach that you took where you brought in people that were essentially specialists in a certain area to talk about certain things, I think my favorite class, other than the Debbie champion class, which was great, she's fantastic, probably my favorite though was the one where you had someone, I think it was from Simon's firm, come in to talk about answering the phone and stuff. Yeah. I don't remember from that one. Yeah. That was maybe the smartest thing you did. Was that something you came up with or was that something that they were always doing? No, Barb would have a speaker like every other thing. I was just busy and sort of lazy and again, like with this podcast, I wanted to hear from smart people. You know, my favorite two episodes were Mike Gunn and Dennis Kennedy. Dennis Kennedy told that whole story about how he was working at Thompson-Coburn and he would charge by the hour for an estate plant and he would write it out by hand or dictate it, then his secretary would type it, then he would edit it, then she would edit it, then he would edit it, then she would and then they would build a client for all that time and then he developed a system on his word processor to automate all that and he's like, "Well, shit, I just, you know, technologicalize myself out of a job." That was a really good one. I think we both need to check in with Dennis. I haven't checked in with him in a while, but you had mentioned the thing about being broke at the time, right? So how would you say that, I don't know if that's not quite failure, but that's something where you were struggling, how would you say that that led to you starting the podcast? So that's great. So now by the podcast, that was 2015. So I turned things around mostly because Amani came to help, but I'm recognizing another trend because when you asked me if I had any regrets about the boys, the one thing that I didn't do so great at and what actually got me into therapy in the first place was that when our second son was born, which was 20 months after when our first son was born, I came to my wife and said I was going to run for state rep. And so what I do have Tyson is in times of stress, I want to look for an escape. So I was stressed out about not making money, so I went and taught a class. I was stressed out about having two kids and not knowing what to do and not getting any sleep to wanting to run for office. A lot of times there's something noble in front of it, or at least facing it, but at the end, I'm trying to avoid current circumstances. Interesting. That's very interesting. On the topic of regrets. Yes. And I don't like talking about regrets that much, but I do, I do have two questions about them. I didn't plan on asking the one about the boys. This one, do you have any regrets about Max Law? Yes. You know that I don't really like conflict. Yeah. And there were two guys that helped host a show with us, and at a time it got sort of messy, and I wish we had done a better job of nailing that down and making peace with that. So that's one thing. I also feel like in some ways I held you back because you would want to do stuff. That's why I'm excited to see what you do with me retiring is to see what you do with it. Because I say no a lot, right? You are, you, you are, no, you're a no guy. That's for sure. No one's a no guy. No, not always. Yeah. Depends on what I want to do. I'm a yes guy. Yeah. You push me lots of different times. Certainly with Max Law minimum time, I felt really self-conscious about asking people to pay for that or to charge for that. And I think that do is just sort of some self-worth kind of stuff, but no real regrets. I've enjoyed it. I've benefited from it entirely. I missed the conference. The conference was great. No, I don't think any real regrets. We think you're going to miss the most. You can't say me. I'm talking to you on Saturdays for sure. Yeah. Other than that, because that's the, that's one of the ones where like I'll, I'll definitely miss the Saturday chats with you because we, for everyone that's not in the guild, you know, I chat every Saturday and people get to listen in on it, which is, and you, it's funny because usually it's almost like no one's like, I don't know anyone's in the room almost, but we do monitor the chat. But other than that, it's like, we're just talking about whatever. Yeah. I think if I'm to put on a romantic spin to it, definitely when somebody has a breakthrough in a mastermind, there's no replacing that either with hot seat with us or with in an actual meeting room. I've seen people make huge leaps in a 35 minute chair, right? We've gone to cool places, we've had cool meals and cool locales with sunsets and, you know, you just had a ton of fun. I'm glad Paul Yokobitis pushed us to do the mastermind. I think that's been a great aspect of the guild. I'll miss those. Probably just talking to you as regularly as I do. Yeah. We should, we'll have to find out what replaced me for that. Some other way. What do you think whenever you retire, whenever that may be, let's say 20 years. So you'll probably be well retired by then. But how do you think you'll view this era of your life? Well, you know, I'm not a good secret keeper. You're not. You're a pretty open book. Yeah. I'm not a good secret keeper. I've only told two people that I was leaving Maxwell beside you. One is Kelsey and the other is Brian Manning. And Brian Manning said, Jim, you should be really proud of yourself. You helped a lot of people. And I think to me, I mean, for me and you, I think we've helped a lot of people. I do, too. We've benefited from it tremendously. But I think at the end of the day, we've helped a lot of people get from struggling solo to having a firm that's running. I don't know that we've done a great job from like stage, I think we've done a great job from stage one to stage three. After that, I don't know just because, you know, you and I are still moving into stage five. So I don't know that we've done as well a job. But I think they're just the friends that we've made and the times that we've had together and the breakthroughs that we've seen, it's just like nothing else. It's really cool. Yeah. It's created this community that I think it existed in small pockets, places. But it really kind of like created like this place for everyone to come to that's, you know, kind of on the road, you know, which is pretty cool. How do you think with that, though, I want to stay on this topic for a second, how do you think that if you come to take a step back, because I think about this quite a bit, like what mark do you think that max laws had on the legal industry as a whole? I think we tapped into something that needed tapping into. I think that the ABA and the lawyer organizations do a great job of telling us all the things that they can't do that lawyers can't do. I think what we've done is shown people what's possible to empower them to build the firm that they want. You know, I spend most of my time in hot seats asking people, where is it that you say you want to be? Maybe why aren't you there? And how can we help you to get there, right? And so I think what we did is we greatly expanded the idea of what's possible. And you know that every year, for at least the last five or six years, people have come to us and said, "I listened to every episode before I had the nerve to go out on my own." I mean, that's a huge thing. That's almost like me helping bring a spouse here from overseas, like we're changing the trajectory of people's lives and their firms and the people that work for them. We're helping people be happier, right? And I just don't know that there's that many people out in the world freeing people like that. Sure. Yeah. That's a really good point. You said the favorite thing about masterminds and stuff. Mine is that we ask them what they want and they say one thing because they say that that is the thing that they think is what everyone expects them to say. And then you keep pushing and you get past that and you really get to really what they want. Why? Why? And that's the part that I think is really cool. We're like, it takes some time to kind of break down those barriers sometimes, but that's the cool moment where you're like, "Now we've affected you. Now we've changed your life." And I think that's what's pretty cool. What's cool about podcasts is that you could listen to it and they can make those decisions in their head because they don't need it. They're not talking to an audience. So they can actually, they can self-reflect. They can listen to things you've said, what I've said and what the guests have said. And then they, okay, I know I've been doing this one way, but then I've got permission to pivot and do this thing over here, which I think that that part's pretty cool. I think the people that do the best either on the hot seat or talking us on the podcast or at a mastermind are the ones who are the most vulnerable, right? And I think that I remember we had a mastermind before the first conference that we did at the casino and three people talked about alcoholism and there were tears and it was just very, very powerful all before we headed into this great conference, right? And so I think that lawyers are taught to put up a lot of shells and to the extent that we've helped people break through those shells both from the outside in and the inside out and to be able to sort of be themselves has been great. I also think we can't underestimate the blind spots that we have and it's in listening to the stories of others that at least for me, I would find myself saying, I can't believe that guy's doing that. And then I think for about five minutes ago, wait, that's something I do, right? And I think, you know, you get a ton out of sharing your own story, but you really get a ton. And I think the reason why people like listen to the podcast is because they see themselves in each person. 100%, yeah, nothing ticks me off much more than like hearing me basically criticizing in my head someone and then like, oh, that's me, like that, you're realizing it's you, you know, it's the worst. It is absolutely the worst. Because sometimes you would just look at me because you knew what the person is about me. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. But that that part's frustrating. What do you, I want to ship back to like you running the firm. What do you think? And you can't say, you know, helping clients or helping people. Yeah, it has to be about actually running the firm. Okay. So what would you say is your favorite part about running a law firm? Well, you know, there've been a lot of things that I've shed in the law firm, you know, I mean, we have over 50 people now and there's nothing that any of those 50 people do that I didn't do at some point, right? There's more people doing it, but there's not anything, any tasks that I haven't done. And I think that the job of growing growing as a leader and growing your firm is letting go of more and more things. You know, we've talked about this before. First, you let go of the things that you hate to do when you're not good at. Then you do the things that you hate, you give up the things you hate to do that you are good at. Then you give up the things that you like to do that you're good at. Then you give up the things that you're really, really good at. And so I always think the last two things that a law firm owner should give up are keeping track of the numbers and marketing, right? So that's something I've been thinking about, like, what is it that I really like to do? And I don't know why I really like signing up cases. I had a lead come in the other day, I grabbed it off Slack, we have a little channel where the intake lawyers and every now and then I'll just do it just to sort of stay fresh and it also motivates the team when I, you know, talk to leads and stuff. And there was a guy he called and he said he'd been interviewing a couple of lawyers and I'd done a training on, like, closing because I've, you know, I've been talking to Gary. Show of your skills, a little bit. But on a Gary, Falco, it's and everything. Yeah, I should send them the recording. Well, I said to myself, I am not letting this guy not sign. And so he had been, he had hired another lawyer in Virginia to file a lawsuit like we do. And that lawyer wasted six months and never filed it. Oh, no. Six months. And these lawsuits are all about delay, right? Yeah. I said, brother, I said, I knew in my head, I said, brother, if you sign today and make the first payment, I will have this lawsuit on file by five o'clock Monday. And I knew that I would have it on file by noon Friday. I didn't tell them that. Yeah. But I knew that, and so he signed, he paid, he got us the documents that night. My overseas paralegal worked on it overnight. We had that to him draft review at nine a.m. and it was on file at noon. I just got a real thrill about that. Yeah. So I also helped sort of slow down or possibly stop somebody's deportation this week. I had to go to court. So I'm good at lots of things, right? But where I really get my energy, I don't know why is the marketing, it's the talking and it's the signing up. I just don't know why. Talk more about how the law firm owner is like stepping in to, whether it's like leads or something like that. And I'm not saying you have to do this all the time, but like how are you stepping in and like bringing your energy to it and really kind of taking charge, like how that affects the rest of it. So that's straight from Grant Cardone. Grant Cardone has a whole couple chapters about that. The team gets totally jazzed when I get on a case and sign it up and they go back and listen to them. I don't know. I just think, I think people like to know that you understand what they do, that you're encouraging them and you're not afraid to get your hands dirty. I think that it builds camaraderie, it builds trust. I think that it really gets them motivated to know that, you know, you're right there with them. Yeah. So I think something that you do, I think you kind of downplay a little bit your skills at being an actual lawyer. I think you talk a lot, I mean, you talk a lot about marketing and all that. You do downplay it a lot. I don't know why you do, but it doesn't matter. That's not what the question is. Do you think you need to be a good lawyer to run a successful law firm? Well I do think you need to understand everything that's being done. I've had a friend who was not an immigration lawyer, who had an immigration lawyer in his practice and I think it's almost impossible to supervise that person without being actively engaged in that practice area and understanding how it all works. I don't know that you have to be a good lawyer. I'm certainly not the best lawyer. I do downplay it. The main reason I downplay this because I don't want to handle any cases anymore. I always say, "I'm going to give you to my wife. She's a much better lawyer than me." It sets the table, right? That's really why I downplay it. I also have sort of fun with it, but also it allows me on the show to avoid questions. But no, I mean, I think you have to understand how everything works. When I was in college, I was in charge of what was called then the Billkin bus line or the fire line it was called then. There were school buses that would drive the med students from Frost campus down to the med school. For the first year, I drove that bus and as a student, I got a CDL with my car. Oh my gosh. That's crazy. Actually, I got in an accident in the bus before I had my CDL. I wasn't supposed to be driving it. Oh my gosh. I was the boss the second year, and after that second summer, I got a new boss from the administration. He said, "Jim, take the week off. I'm going to learn how everything works." He did that so that he could then talk to me about everything in the business. I think that was Steve Sarat. I've always thought that Steve was really smart in that. That was a very wise approach. I think that in order to supervise anything, you have to be able to do it and understand what it is that you're asking people to do. I started at a law firm basically answering the phone, doing the mail and running errands. You learn it from the ground up, then you understand everybody's job. Yeah. I think that's a really interesting point because I go back and forth about that question. I don't know if you do or not, but it makes me think about my previous employer and how he would go to these conferences and he would learn back then, it was like the reptile stuff. He would come back, but he would talk about, "This is how we're going to start doing things," but he wouldn't tell us really what it was that we were going to start doing. It was never really implemented. Nothing was ever implemented. We did things how the firm was always doing them. I got to a point where I feel like he didn't really understand what everyone was doing. He just didn't understand the firm. I thought there was a massive disconnect. I think that that's right. You do have to understand it, but then everyone else has to understand it, too. I remember we have a friend who had an office in Boston and in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles was where he was spending most of his time. He had built his firm in Boston, then he wanted to move. He went to a wedding in Los Angeles, and he told me at some point when he would come back to Boston, he was just that guy that comes back from L.A. and yells at us. Don't want to be that guy that just comes back and yells at them. No. No. No. No. No. Because they sense that they can get a whiff of that. If they have any sense that there's a gap between what they're actually being asked to do and doing and you, that's going to really build discord. Yeah. It's also tough that if you don't have a presence at an office, like a regular presence, that's bad, too. I think so. Yeah. I mean, you can overcome it with Zoom calls and all that stuff, but at the end of the day, they have to know that you're paying attention. 100%. Or you have to have someone reliable there that's running that office. All right. I'm going to read another quote for you. Oh, before I do that, I want to ask you something else. What do you think is the difference between running a law firm and being an employee? When you're an employee, hopefully, your workday and tasks are planned for you. They're organized. They're sort of hand delivered to you. When you own a law firm or have a podcast, you have to be ready to adapt on the fly. You have to juggle different things. We've gotten to the point now, I was talking about this yesterday, that if we make a decision in one department, it can really impact how things happen in another department. So for example, let's say we decide to lower our fees or lower our fee structure, make it easier for people to sign up, well, that's most likely going to lead to more cases, which means the operations team is going to be busier. So then that can impact customer service, which can then impact Google reviews, which can then impact the intake team and their ability to sign up cases. So I would say it's very easy to be singularly focused when you're an employee, but when you are a law firm owner, your head has to be on a swivel and you have to be able to keep track. That's why numbers are so important. That's why systems are important because you have to be able to see quickly and I emphasize quickly that there's a problem. Yeah. There's several studies about quick decision-making and the most successful people in the world have high confidence. Jason Selb talks about that, but then also the other one is like quick decision-making. And it's funny, it's the study talks about how it doesn't even have to be the right decision. It just has to be a decision, which I think is really interesting. The Norman Schwarzkopf has a quote almost just like that. Yeah. Well, here's the quote I want to ask you about. Now I'll be very impressed if you do know this one. "It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation." And that's by her Melville who wrote Muppet Dick, as you probably know. So it is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation. And I want to get your thoughts on that. If you had told me that was Steve Jobs, I would have believed that too. That sounds like a Steve Jobs kind of quote, and certainly that was his mantra at Apple. I believe that our job in the world is to be in touch with our authentic self. It's really hard to know your authentic self, to stay connected to our authentic self. I was asked this week to go talk to the law students at St. Louis University. I went back and forth with the lady, and she wanted me to title my talk, "How Immigration Lawyers Stay Up to Date on the Rapid Changes in the Immigration Nationality Act." The Immigration and Nationality Act hasn't been updated since the early 90s. So in a way, there have been no changes, much less rapid changes. Part of me wanted to yawn, and part of me wanted to, that was nauseous. So that's a terrible title. So what do I do? I go there and I do exactly what I want to do. I titled it, and I had one slide about how we stay updated. And then I just talked about, I told my whole story, I did all my antics, you know, all my acting and ravings, and people loved it, right? So that's because, in a lot of ways, I'm pretty in touch with who I am, what's important. And I was at my daughter's parent teacher conference yesterday, and she has a little bio page in her journalism class, and it said, "Unpopular opinions." And she said, "Burken socks and socks go together." Like I've never said that to her, I've never, that's what she said, and that was her quote up on the screen, "I almost died." But, you know, I am who I am, and you did that great presentation at MaxwellCon 2021, I think, about what did you call it? It was nerds and weirdos. Nerds and weirdos. Yeah, I mean, Gene Wickman would say, "Let your freak flag fly," right? So I think that authenticity is rare these days, and if you can be authentic and be connected to who you are, that's going to be one of the biggest measures of your success. You're also going to be happier. So that is exactly why I asked you, or read that quote to you and ask you about it, because I was going to reference the nerds and weirdos, because the thing that I think I've learned from you the most is about being authentic and being original, because it's something with just some about my upbringing, I struggle with like kind of letting the walls down quite a bit. And so I've learned that quite a bit from you about just being authentic and being yourself. I was even going to talk about the, I wrote down socks and crocs because it's easier to say, but it's really Birkenstocks and socks when it comes to that Maxwell presentation. I went back and actually read the transcript about it, and I had talked about how Bernard had sent those socks. Remember, he ate our faces off. You still had good, nice, and you wore them, which I thought was hilarious, but that's just who you are. On that one, I think someone posted, I think Michael Alby had maybe posted about it, like posted online. That's what's cool about it, like it makes you memorable. So I think that that's awesome, like that's one of my favorite parts about you. I was with my kids, we were all in Vegas last weekend for my sister's wedding, and you know, there's a lot of downtime at weddings. Oh yeah. And especially when you don't drink. So as the night went on and the drinking got heavier and heavier, I was sitting with my two younger sons, and they were just talking, I mean, I don't mean to brag or anything, but they were talking about what great parents we were. It was really like a full circle moment. They were talking about, you know, they have a lot of friends in college who are struggling, who are sort of directionless, who sort of had either tough childhoods or hard teenage years or whatever, and they talked about how, you know, lucky they felt to have us as their parents. It was really just great, great stuff, and one of the things they said, as evidenced by my crazy sister's wedding in Las Vegas, is they said, we have a cinematic life, right? Like why, why not have a technicolor cinematic life? You only go through once. I think one of the great things about what happened to me when I was a kid is that it made me appreciate every day and to think big and to just be brazen, right? Be brazen with life. And I think that it's just so easy to get worn down and the system is built for you to conform and just to just say, "Fuck all that," and do what you want. Life's too short. You only get one chance. You only get one chance. I can't think of a better way of ending the episode. So thanks, brother. You got it, man. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [ Silence ]
