Building a $10 Million Law Firm as a Non-Lawyer CEO With James Hansen

November 6, 2024 | Written by Gladiator Law Marketing

James Hansen is the CEO & Co-founder of Genesis Legal Group, a law firm specializing in family law and criminal defense. A serial entrepreneur with a background in banking, insurance, and digital marketing, James has a track record of building successful businesses through strategic hiring, digital client acquisition, and a client-first approach. In 2021, he co-founded Genesis Legal Group under Arizona’s new law allowing non-lawyer ownership of legal practices, and in under three years, he grew the firm to 23 attorneys and $10 million in revenue.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[1:36] James Hansen talks about the lessons he learned from his early entrepreneurial endeavors
[5:16] James’ journey after law school and the experiences that shaped his path to founding a law firm
[12:04] How Genesis Legal Group was established and the impact of Arizona’s new law on non-lawyer ownership
[13:50] James discusses his role at Genesis and his approach to law firm management
[17:21] Leveraging exceptional client experiences and SEO to attract clients
[19:08] Pivotal moments that accelerated Genesis’ growth trajectory
[20:46] Key principles for developing a positive and growth-oriented workplace culture
[23:58] Unique challenges James faces as a non-lawyer leading a law firm
[25:37] James’ advice for business owners on finding purpose and effective leadership

In this episode…

Breaking into the legal industry without a law degree isn’t easy, and leading a successful law firm as a non-lawyer might seem impossible. Yet, with the right strategies, mindset, and approach, even unconventional paths can lead to impressive milestones. So, what does it take for a non-lawyer to build a $10 million law firm from the ground up?

According to James Hansen, a visionary entrepreneur and a non-lawyer CEO of a law firm, it starts with understanding the client experience and creating processes that directly address client needs. He highlights that scaling a firm quickly requires a keen focus on hiring experienced attorneys, building a strong internal culture, and maintaining high service standards. These elements help not only in attracting clients but also in retaining top talent. By aligning his approach to legal services with clear goals and operational efficiency, James has been able to overcome challenges and establish a high-performing law firm.

In this episode of 15 Minutes, host Chad Franzen sits down with James Hansen, CEO & Co-founder of Genesis Legal Group, to discuss what it takes for a non-lawyer to run and lead a successful legal practice. James shares how he used digital marketing to drive client acquisition, the importance of intentional hiring for growth, and his philosophy on cultivating a team-focused culture. James also talks about the pivotal experiences that helped him scale the firm rapidly despite not having a traditional legal background.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Special Mentions

Quotable Moments

“At an early age, I learned that it’s not just how quickly you can get things done, but figuring out what clients want.”
“The pivotal moment for me was realizing everything done to attract clients must also attract team members.”
“Understanding your motive for starting a law firm helps shape the steps you need to take in the future.”
“If you don’t respect and listen to yourself, your team won’t respect you either.”
“We filter out a ton of potential clients because, from a profitability perspective, we just can’t help everyone.”

Action Steps

Understand your motive: Reflect on the reasons behind starting or growing a business. Understanding your motive provides clarity and direction, aligning actions with long-term goals.
Embrace digital marketing: Invest time in learning and implementing digital marketing strategies, including SEO and online content, to attract clients organically.
Hire experienced talent: Focus on hiring skilled professionals who align with your business values, even if it means paying more upfront. This approach helps build a competent team that requires less training and can contribute effectively.
Develop core values and culture: Spend time developing and instilling core values within the company and focus on building a strong culture. This creates a cohesive environment, attracting both clients and employees who resonate with your business ethos.
Seek professional coaching: Consider hiring a professional coach to provide guidance and feedback on your business journey. A coach can help clarify goals and actions, leading to more informed decision-making and personal growth.

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by Gladiator Law Marketing, where we deliver tailor-made services to help you accomplish your objectives and maximize your growth potential.

To have a successful marketing campaign and make sure you’re getting the best ROI, your firm needs to have a better website and better content. At Gladiator Law Marketing, we use artificial intelligence, machine learning, and decades of experience to outperform the competition.

To learn more, go to gladiatorlawmarketing.com or schedule a free marketing consultation. You can also send an email to ad**@gl*******************.com .

Episode Transcript

Intro 00:01

You’re listening to 15 Minutes, where we feature community leaders sharing what the rest of us should know, but likely don’t.

Chad Franzen 00:12

Hi, Chad Franzen here, one of the hosts of Share Your Voice, where we talk with top notch law firms and lawyers about what it takes to grow a successful law practice. This episode is brought to you by Gladiator Law Marketing, delivering tailor made services to help you accomplish your objectives and maximize your growth potential. To have a successful marketing campaign and make sure you’re getting the best ROI, your firm needs to have a better website and better content. Gladiator Law Marketing uses artificial intelligence, machine learning, and decades of experience to outperform the competition. To learn more, go to gladiatorlawmarketing.com where you can schedule a free marketing consultation. James Hansen is Co-founder and CEO of Genesis Legal Group. He is one of the first non-lawyer law firm owners in Arizona and the US. After building a $10 million law firm in less than three years, doing 90% family law and 10% criminal. A veteran entrepreneur with a gift for hiring the right people and helping them meet their goals, James received his education in the trenches of building small businesses from a young age, driven by his entrepreneurial spirit instilled in the third of 12 children in a family where he learned to create his own opportunities. Hey James, thanks so much for joining me today. How are you?

James Hansen 01:20

Happy to be here. I’m doing great.

Chad Franzen 01:22

Hey, tell me about your entrepreneurial spirit that you grew up as a, you know, one of 12 kids. What was your first entrepreneurial endeavor that you remember?

James Hansen 01:36

Paper routes. Started in paper routes at a really young age. Eight years old. Me and my older brother, the third of 12. So me and my older brother got some paper routes. We delivered The Arizona Republic, which is the major newspaper here in Arizona, the Phoenix Valley. So I grew up about an hour away. Small town in in outside of Phoenix. So that was where I first learned to that the better of work, the quality of my work depended on how much I was able to collect. Because we had in the early days, we actually had to get the collect, collect the money for the subscriptions for the newspaper and also the tips that you got. So at an early age, I learned that it’s not just how quickly you can get things done, how efficiently, but trying to figure out what people want, clients want and deliver on that.

Chad Franzen 02:26

Well, you did that at eight years old. Was that a morning route?

James Hansen 02:30

It was. Yeah, it was a morning route on my bicycle. Started out on my bicycle. Eight years old, obviously. And and it was interesting because the Sunday papers back then were like huge. And so we had these bags that would go over our front handlebars and the front and back, and we’d we’d max them out because we’d have to make another trip home to refill. And so sometimes you hit a hill and you go, you go flying over the handlebars. And I have, I have dents in my shins from the, from the chain falling off my bike as I’m pedaling, the chain falls off and your shin hits the pedal and makes. So it makes a dent in your shin and you’re bleeding. So I have those great, great life lessons that I that, you know, as a kid, I hated it, right? As a kid, I hated the fact that I had to work. My dad’s mom, my my my paternal grandmother, her second husband owned a small farm. And planting cotton. And so at a young age, I started chopping cotton, as it’s called, where you walk through the cotton fields, chopping weeds in the summer times. And so, you know, there would be me and my cousins walking up and down the cotton fields at a young age. And then, like the next field over, there’s a bunch of migrant workers chopping the chopping the weeds in the cotton fields. And so I had I had some great lessons, some great teaching as a at a young age of how to work. Hated it though, in in the moment. But looking back on it, those experiences have been have shaped my life And I’m is like you, like you mentioned in your intro, I’m a community college dropout. I don’t really have a lot of formal education, but my education is in the trenches of learning how to how to work with people and how to get alignment with, with people and, and to achieve great things together.

Chad Franzen 04:09

So at eight years old, that’s what about like second grade? I’m guessing there weren’t that many other second graders with jobs. You must have been rolling in it compared to your classmates.

James Hansen 04:17

Yeah, yeah, I was. But you know, I didn’t I didn’t, you know, my parents were great. Like, I got a certain amount of money to spend. And the rest went to savings. And so I remember at a young age, like on a Saturday morning, riding my bike down to the gas station and buying a candy bar or something, or or using a Coke machine and buying a Cherry Coke. And because those things, we didn’t have those things in my house growing up. We didn’t have treats. We didn’t have a lot of a lot of things that that I wanted. And so I found that I was able to get what I wanted in life by working. And, and I could either stay at home and work for my mom and dad around the house, in the yard, or I can go work for someone else and make money and have the money to spend the way. Not not all the way, because my parents managed a lot of that money. But but they did give me some spending money to see the fruits of my labor for sure.

Chad Franzen 05:05

So before, let’s go through kind of your journey from, you know, leaving community college to starting Genesis Legal Group. What were some of your experiences kind of in that in-between period?

James Hansen 05:16

Yeah, so when I was 19, I, I’m a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and I served a mission for my church, a two year proselyting mission in Brazil. And and I paid my own way for that. So I saved up my money for that. And when I got home, the first job I had was at a bank. And so I worked at a bank and I was able to I learned how to talk to people and learn how to really understand what they wanted to add value to their lives. And I did that for about two and a half years before I got fired, and I got fired because I was too busy talking to people and wasn’t able to balance my drawer. So I worked at one of those one of those branches that was inside of a grocery store. So in those branches, you’re a personal banker and you’re a teller. And so this I worked in a in a part of town, which was very big for this was during the housing boom. So we had a ton of Hispanic workers that would come in and cash checks. And that was when banks first started charging a check cashing fee, where you get the thumbprint on the check and you charge a check cashing fee. And so I felt bad that I had all these Hispanic people coming through. And because of my experience serving a church mission in Brazil, I spoke Portuguese. And so I was able to learn, you know, Portuguese and Spanish are very similar. So I was able to I could speak enough Spanish so that they would understand me, and I would open up checking accounts for them, because it was cheaper to have a checking account than to pay the the $5 check cashing fee 4 to 5 times a month. So and then I would do, you know, home equity loans. And I wasn’t really focusing on balancing my drawers. So drawers after after being over like $1,000 two times in a in a month. They had to. They fired me. Which was the best thing that ever happened to me, because it got me out of that industry. And then I started doing insurance. I started selling auto home insurance and did that for two and a half years, and I opened my own agency. I grew that to about 16, 16 agents. I sold that, and the primary reason I sold that, because I wanted to learn leadership, and I wanted to learn how to lead a big team effectively. And the gentleman who who approached me to purchase my insurance agency had had some really, really good leadership qualities that I wanted to instill in myself. So I sold that. I ran all the sales and marketing for that company for about two and a half, three years, and then I started another insurance agency again. Now at this time, my the catalyst really for me getting into the legal space was in 2007, my insurance agency was one of five, I think, 4 or 5 insurance agencies to pilot selling the Hartford AARP auto and home product in Arizona. Arizona is the first state that they allowed local agents to sell that product because AARP, they were huge. They were big into the brand. And who could sell that? And so Hartford, the Hartford approached me and said, hey, we want we want you to sell our brand locally. And so I had to go through some training, and my guys had to go through some training to, to get that brand. And I had like one of my, one of my insurance agents wife did my website. It’s a 2007. So part of the compliance I had to have that put on my website. So I had her put that. We now sold AARP through the Hartford policies. And like I kid you not, like 2 or 3 weeks later, one week, three people walked in my door like the front door and they’re like, hey, we want to quote through the Hartford AARP. And and I was so confused because at this point, I’m buying leads like, I’m buying leads. I’m having my guys calling the leads. I’m calling the leads. We’re working these leads. And people walked in my door wanting a quote like this has never happened to me. I’ve been doing this for a long time. And so I inquired like, how do how do you find me? Oh, we googled it. What do you mean you googled it? Yeah, we put in Google AARP agents Arizona, and you came up. And so we came down here. I was like, what? Like, how does this happen? And so that led me into digital marketing SEO. And I’m like, oh, I control what the search engines say.

And so at that point, I really started focusing on digital marketing and focused on how that can be impactful for insurance for insurance agencies and businesses in general. And when I sold my insurance agency, I had a really good friend of mine who was a lawyer approached me, and he was he had had a business partner, and the business partner was the Rainmaker. He went and got the cases. And then my friend, they actually both my friends, my current business partner now, he was the he worked the cases. So he had one rainmaking generating the revenue, generating the cases and one Working the cases. Well, the rainmaker passed away in a car accident. And so my now business partner Kevin approached me and he said, hey, I know you’re doing this website, this internet marketing thing. We didn’t call it internet marketing at the time. And he said, is this something you can help me with? I’m like, sure, I’ll give it a try, but you have to figure out what what niche you want to focus on, because I can’t just do at the time he’s doing whatever type of case he can get. And he said, well, I want to do pie and I and I said, well, everybody wants to do pie, but let’s pick something else. So he’s like, well, I don’t know, what do you think? And I had done some keyword research to figure out that family law wasn’t very competitive online. And we could and we could really focus with a short period of time and generate some new cases. And so I built a family law website for him. Boy, 14 years ago. And and after 3 or 4 months, I look at how it’s ranking on Google and it’s like killing it. It’s getting all this traffic. It’s like ranking one for the top keyword for divorce and the second largest city in Arizona. And so I approached him and I say, hey, Kevin, like, you should be killing it. Like, you should be getting a lot of consultations coming in calling. And he’s like, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Like I’m struggling, dude. And I’m like, what? This doesn’t make any sense. So I swapped out the number on the website to be that went just forwarded to his phone system in his office to be a tracking phone number. And I started tracking and listening to the calls, and he just not answering the phone because it’s him. One attorney and a part time receptionist legal assistant at the front desk, and they’re just not answering the phone when these leads came in. So we changed some things around, and that kind of led to the trajectory of his firm growing and getting more stable there. And so that’s kind of what led me into getting involved in law firms, because it’s generating the lead and it’s converting that that convert into a paying client. And then it’s the whole client life cycle with, okay, we got to get reviews to keep helping with the, with the, with the with the new business coming in. And so we started doing coaching and we started doing, we started working together to, to help help that.

Chad Franzen 11:49

Wow.

James Hansen 11:50

Sorry. Sorry.

Chad Franzen 11:51

Yeah. No, that’s that’s amazing. That’s amazing. So yeah, you just kind of learned. You just kind of learned from everything that you did. What? So. So tell me about how kind of, you know, the official Genesis Legal Group came about.

James Hansen 12:04

Yeah. For sure. So, so my my current business partner, Kevin, he had he had grown his firm to him and another associate, which was his brother in law, and they had one paralegal and one legal assistant slash receptionist. So it was for for four people in the office. One day in mid 21, 2021, the brother in law says, hey, Kevin listed my house yesterday. I’ve got two offers on it and we’re moving to Missouri. We’re out of here. We’re out of the state. And Kevin’s just like. Okay. He calls me on the phone and he’s just freaking out because he doesn’t. He needs his billables to keep to keep the expenses going. And he doesn’t know, like he’s he literally calls me panicking. He doesn’t even call his wife the sister of the brother in law who’s quitting. He calls me and and I and this is 2021, mid 21. And so the ABS, the alternative business structure had been out for about a year and a half. And, and I just was like, dude, this is the best thing because like, you’re a great attorney and I’m great at building businesses, let’s get an ABS and let’s move forward. And so we did that in mid 21. We, we we started working together. Got the abs that took a while from application through through the the the committee and getting the actual license for that. That took about a year. And then in and we continue to operate making a transition from his from that law firm into Genesis until August of 20. August of 23. So last year, August, we changed. We officially changed the branding and we started doing criminal defense.

Chad Franzen 13:43

So how so? What’s kind of your role then? Obviously you’re you scale the business. You do all the marketing things like that.

James Hansen 13:50

Yeah. So my partner Kevin he, he he practices. So it really interesting story. This may kind of help give some context as to what we both do is and when we first when we first became partners, our first two hires were like, I knew I knew we could we could just dial up the leads and we could get consults like we could get. That’s not a problem. We just needed attorneys to work the consults, to work the new clients. And so we hired, you know, we’re we’re starting this new business. And and the thought is, okay, let’s let’s hire some new attorneys because they’re cheap, right. And so we hired two new female attorneys. Great people, awesome love and respect these two attorneys. After nine months or so, they both quit and they had full caseloads and they’re like, hey! Family law is not for us. We can’t we can’t handle the stress. Their first job. First job out of law school. First job. And so they just they were completely naive as to what it was to practice law. So nine months later, they quit. They both had full caseloads and one quit in like 2 or 3 weeks later, the other one quit. And my partner Kevin, he now now he’s the only attorney in the office. So he’s he’s taking these cases and these attorneys are going to different practice areas. They’re not even practicing family law. So the majority of these cases, they want to stay with us. And you know he’s getting piled on all these cases. And I’m just sitting back thinking I’ve been growing and working in the business while he runs, while he works as an attorney, worked the cases. And at that point, I’m just like, you know what? Lesson learned here is we need to hire experienced attorneys. It’s going to cost more money, which I don’t necessarily like, but it should. It should be better because they can bill at a higher rate. We can give them the cases. We don’t have to coach or train them how to practice really. And so at that point, we started we just started I had a pipeline already of potential candidates. But at that point I really started digging down into paying them more than I was willing to pay, because I knew that was going to help us generate do better case management and, and, and convert these, these consoles into paid clients.

Chad Franzen 15:56

How long did it take before the, you know, the hurdle of paying more than maybe you were comfortable with became not such a hurdle anymore?

James Hansen 16:06

It it wasn’t really a hurdle in the sense of like because I learned the lesson, like, you know, new attorneys just aren’t aren’t what we’re looking for because, you know, if you can’t, if you don’t have lead abundance, if you don’t have the ability to give a lot of potential client, or if you don’t have the ability to generate a lot of consults, then yeah, it makes sense to go slow. To hire someone new, you can train them. But we could literally load these new attorneys up from the get go after 2 or 3 months. They’re completely full. They have 60, 50, 40 to 60 cases. And it was just more like once I learned that lesson, it wasn’t a hurdle. It was just a matter of, okay, I’m not going to be making it’s going to take me a little bit longer to actually make this profitable, because, again, it takes 3 or 4 months to fill up an attorney and then and then they’re full. But then you have to build on the cases. So there’s about a 6 month lag from the time you hire someone before they’re profitable. So yeah, it’s just more of a mindset. Once I learned the lesson, it was just this is what we have to do. This is this is the path.

Chad Franzen 17:10

So it sounds like building a client base has has not been really a problem. What kind of things do you do to attract and acquire those clients?

James Hansen 17:21

A lot. It’s it’s really a what what we focus on. What I focus on is the client experience from the beginning is and we have and we have systems in place to monitor the client experience, because ultimately, the only way that we’re going to be able to continue to grow is by having great client experience. And then when we have a great client experience, how can we monetize that client experience for additional new clients? So how can we get them to write an online review consistently? How can we get them to do video testimonials so that we can use that in our marketing messages? So, you know, it’s about creating the organic the organic traffic through SEO. It’s about creating the ads, the the ads, the LSA ads, the Google ads. But you have to be able to convert that traffic. You have to be able to convert that those impressions into people actually calling you. And right now it’s to the point where we filter out a lot. So we get I mean, we filter out a ton of the potential clients that call in because we just especially in family law, there’s a lot of people who want free legal advice. And and we’re so busy that not that we want don’t want to help everyone out. It’s just we can’t from a profitability perspective. And so we have we create some barriers of entry to do a consultation. There’s some there’s some hurdles that that potential clients have to jump through before they get a consultation scheduled, which ultimately makes us more perceived in legitimately more valuable.

Chad Franzen 18:56

Yeah. You know, hitting that $10 million revenue milestone in under three years is pretty remarkable. Were there any kind of pivotal moments or growth catalysts that accelerated things?

James Hansen 19:08

You know, we’ve been really fortunate, really, really fortunate where we’ve had. We’ve just been able to hire good people and like like we’ve we’ve we’ve met like we haven’t been 100% at that. We’ve learned. But hiring good people who have alignment with our core values and knowing where we’re going. Casting the vision with them of of here’s what we’re doing and here’s why we do it. And here’s the goal. I think I think that’s that’s something that as you’re growing a small business or law firm in the beginning, that’s something that a lot of law firm owners don’t take the time to do in terms of what is our avatar employee. And so I think probably maybe to answer that your question is the the pivotal moment for me, that’s been the catalyst was the thought of everything that I’ve been doing to generate new clients, to attract new clients. I have to do the same thing to attract new team members, right? So I need to create video testimonials of our current clients for potential new video testimonials of current employees, team members, or potential new team members. And doing those things sets us apart. So we’ve had we’ve had just so many people like, I don’t even have a job that open right now. And we have people calling us like we I mean, we have a potential. Bring it on. Someone hopefully should hear from him this morning. If he accepts our offer. But, I mean, it’s an additional million dollars in revenue bringing this one attorney on to the practice to the firm.

Chad Franzen 20:40

So so would you say kind of developing those core values is the key to to cultivating the right culture?

James Hansen 20:46

Yeah, it’s it’s definitely important building out your core values, spending some intentional thought and time to develop those. And then it’s how do we implement that. How do we implement that in into the day to day, the day to day things that everybody does into into the culture. But then it’s also having difficult conversations with people. And this is the one thing that I think a lot of business owners, and especially law firm owners, they don’t have the difficult conversations with team members. When they need to, if they’re not meeting performance. So so building up the culture of building out the core values, building out our ideal avatar client and our ideal avatar employee team member. But it’s also baking in what is the expectation? What is the commitment? And then it’s holding them accountable if they don’t reach that commitment. What’s the accountability? And a lot of people don’t want to hold them accountable because it’s a difficult conversation. Like, what am I going to do? Am I really going to fire this person? Does it really make sense for me to have this conversation if I’m not willing to fire them? And, and and it’s not so black and white. And so those are a lot of the things that really have led, led led to that is, is the the culture. The culture is super important. And for example, we had a we had a team event, we do quarterly recognition events and and then so we spent about a we have lunch in the office, we have a catered everybody comes in and we have about 54 team members right now. And everybody came into the office, they ate lunch and then we had a presentation. The presentation was very inspirational. It’s almost like you’re going to a motivational speaker with some awards, quarterly awards. And then we went to everybody, went to Topgolf, and I was talking with some of the team members at Topgolf, some, some attorney paralegal that that found us, came to us in early March and they said, do you want to know what, James? We hit the jackpot coming here like this. This is so awesome. We are so we are so thankful that we went down this. And then one of them was like, hey, this. I was totally expecting something different. Than what? Than what this event was. And I thought, well, what were you expecting? And she said, well, I was expecting like a boring meeting that you see from bigger firms. Like, here’s what you have to do, here’s the policies and procedures. And we didn’t even talk about that. It’s about focusing on the individual and helping each one of our team members get better in their personal lives because they bring that to work. If, if, if the team member if the team members come to work on Monday, the same that they left on Friday, they’re not improving their personal life. They’re not going to improve their professional life as well. And so that’s that’s in our culture. It’s not just growth from a firm perspective, but also personal growth. They need to be experiencing personal growth and the satisfaction and joy that comes from personal growth, because they bring that to work. So that’s that’s the culture that that we are building, trying to build the vision of the culture.

Chad Franzen 23:38

Yeah, yeah. Very cool. Just a couple more questions for you. So, you know, as I mentioned, you’re one of the first non-lawyer law firm owners in the in Arizona and in the US, certainly the first one that I’ve spoken to. What are some of the what are some of the challenges kind of being like the, the leader of a crew of attorneys when you’re not an attorney?

James Hansen 23:58

You know, again, for us, we’re super transparent about that in the interview process and type of the type of attorneys that we hire are just great people. So for me, it really hasn’t been a challenge. Now, my business partner, Kevin handles a lot of the legal services and the application, the legal services. I don’t get involved in that at a macro, at a at a micro basis, at a macro. I do. So to be honest, it hasn’t been a challenge at all. It’s it’s been awesome.

Chad Franzen 24:32

Great. I have one more question for you. But first tell me how people can find out more about Genesis Legal Group.

James Hansen 24:38

Yeah. Best way to go about it is GenesisLegalGroup.com. We have a ton of YouTube videos. We have a ton of our social content is we’re working on that, but it’s the basic content you’d probably see from a normal law firm. So it’s not it’s not too engaging. But we have a lot of content on YouTube and our website. And what I love doing is helping people grow. And so if there’s any law firm owners who are struggling with how to grow their firm, I’d love to spend some time with them to maybe get them to refocus on what they can do differently.

Chad Franzen 25:09

Yeah. I was going to ask you as my last question here. You know, for maybe either an entrepreneur who just, you know, maybe a serial entrepreneur who just likes to open businesses and see what they can do. Or for a lawyer who isn’t an experienced business owner, what kind of advice could you give to one of those people in terms of opening a firm that they would never learn, either in law school or, you know, through owning other, other businesses?

James Hansen 25:37

Take some time to figure out why you want to do that. I just read a book called The Motive. I forget the author. Patrick last name starts with an L, but the book really, really is everything that I’ve not everything, but a lot of what has been on my mind recently is understanding. Your motive of why you want to do something is so important. Is your motive for starting a law firm and growing a law firm so that you can rest and relax and not have to do things? Or is your motive that you can serve more people? And understanding your motive really is going to help figure out the steps that you need to take in the future. And I think a lot of people and listen myself, including I still have three other businesses that I run. I’ve helped start a mortgage brokerage and another insurance agency, a digital marketing agency. I’m not really involved in those right now, but understanding why you want to do those, is it so that you can get a dopamine hit for your ego? Is it so you can have that on your LinkedIn profile, or is it because you genuinely want to help people and you think that you can, because the decisions that you’re going to have to make later on as you grow your firm or you grow your business, those all are going to filter back to the reason why you chose to do what you chose to do. And what I was saying earlier is like, I’ve been there, man. Like, I have five kids. My wife doesn’t work. I’ve been there where I’ve been fired before. And it’s like, man, I gotta hustle. Like I gotta hustle like I did in my paper route days. Like like in my days in my in high school. Like I went three days without sleeping because I was working so much and my year after high school. And so I get that, I get you have to provide and I get that. But but try to take the time and whether that’s with yourself in the mirror, with a spouse, with someone that you love or that and that loves you have an open mind and be and be and be open for feedback. And maybe it’s with a coach I like. I think people don’t take the time to have a professional coach in their life, but take the time to try to really figure out why you want to do what you say that you want to do, whether that’s growing your firm, whether that’s doing whatever, but also in addition to understanding why. But like you have to be the example, like if you’re going to hire people, you have to be the example for them. They have to want to be like you. Like I realize that like, I got I got to the point where I was about £300 and I realized that I don’t like myself. My kids don’t listen to me. And maybe it’s because I don’t listen to myself to like I’m saying, I’m going to do these things, I’m going to change my life, but I never do them. And your team is going to see that you’re going to hire people, and they’re going to see that what you say isn’t aligned with your actions, and that you don’t get the respect. And you want to be the leader because you’re the leader and you want to and you want to be respected. You want them to respect you. But if you don’t respect and listen to yourself, and those aren’t proven in your in your actions every day, like what you’re doing when in the dark, when no one’s watching is important and you have to you have to understand that. So you have to be fully committed. And and it’s easier to be fully committed when you know why you want to do what you what you say you’re going to do.

Chad Franzen 28:48

Okay. Awesome. Wow. Great advice. Hey, James, it’s been great to talk to you. Thank you so much for your time and all of your stories and your insights. Really appreciate it.

James Hansen 28:56

Awesome. Thanks, Chad.

Chad Franzen 28:58

So long everybody.

Outro 28:59

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