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The Managing Partners Podcast

Darren Wurz

Episode # 348
Interview on 11.26.2024
Hosted By: Kevin Daisey
Home > Podcast > Essential Strategies for Law Firm Financial Success

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About Darren Wurz

In this episode of the Managing Partners Podcast, Kevin Daisey interviews Darren Wurz, founder and CEO of the Lawyer Millionaire, focusing on strategic planning, retirement, and exit strategies for law firm owners. Darren shares his journey from financial advisor to specializing in law firm consulting, emphasizing the importance of financial clarity and building lasting value in law firms. The conversation covers the unique needs of law firm owners, the significance of recurring revenue, and actionable tips for strategic planning and successful exits.

Key Points Discussed:

  • The Importance of Financial Planning
  • Three Value Drivers for Law Firm Growth
  • Recurring Revenue
  • Owner Independence
  • Proactive Tax Planning
  • Strategic Exit Planning
  • The Power of Collaboration
  • Leveraging Financial Planning Models
  • Community Building

Practical Takeaways:

  1. Law firm owners should prioritize financial clarity, plan for recurring revenue, and aim for independence from day-to-day operations.
  2. Proactive tax and exit planning are critical for long-term stability and success.
  3. Building a strong advisory team and engaging with professional communities can help lawyers scale their firms effectively.

Episode Transcript:

Darren Wurz (00:00)
it is your fiduciary responsibility to be as wealthy and financially successful as possible.

Kevin Daisey (00:08)
Hey, what’s going on everybody. Welcome to another episode of the managing partners podcast. I’m Kevin Daisy and I’m your host today. I have a really cool guest and we’re going to be talking about strategic planning, retirement, exit planning, all kinds of cool stuff for law firm owners that are tuning in. I’m going to be listening to myself as an owner of a company and, taking as much as much as I can from, from Darren today. So

Just before we jump into Darren and his story and his background, I always give a shout out to our partner in this podcast, sponsor, Answering Legal. You want to check them out. They specialize in answering phones for law firms. Intake is so huge and how, how do you respond to a lead? Obviously we do marketing and getting leads to reach out to you is one thing, but responding and getting back to them is,

another big thing. So check them out, answeringlegal.com forward slash array. And you can get 400 free trial minutes. You can check them out. We use them ourselves. So, great people over there and this someone you should check out for sure. So, all right to the show, Darren, welcome to the show. Good to see you.

That’s awesome. Well, congratulations on that. And, yeah, you know, so many similarities there with me and you, think, you know, was in marketing forever since I was 23, 2006 is when I cut the cord and jumped and started my own company, but I didn’t really know what I was doing. I wasn’t focused. I didn’t know what I didn’t know. So yeah, niche in the legal space for me didn’t happen until many, many years later. So.

Darren Wurz (01:51)
Yeah.

Kevin Daisey (01:59)
I wish I had taken advice and done it a lot sooner and focused and, but to your same point, I had lawyer clients, but I had all kinds of other clients. then, you know, we, made that choice after a lot of analysis and thought and talking to my clients and, and, but no, I just love lawyers and I love working with them and helping them and they’re great people. And yeah, I got so many of their friends and

Darren Wurz (02:11)
Yeah.

Kevin Daisey (02:26)
guests on the show, of course. And so, yeah, I don’t see any difference really. They run a business, I run a business, you run a business. And, but I truly believe lawyers help people at the same time. you know, choosing that, that wasn’t my thought in the beginning, to be honest with you, it was more of like a marketing. I had to choose something, you know? So, and a lot of lawyers need help. There’s a lot in that, that area where you’re talking about that.

Darren Wurz (02:33)
Yeah.

Yeah. Right, right.

Kevin Daisey (02:53)
that struggle to grow or to, to build a firm properly or to, to be able to exit or walk away or leave it to their employees or whatever it may be. so, and there’s a lot out there. There’s a lot of options. There’s groups, there’s all these things, but I think that also can make it confusing for some to find the right place for them. and, and so, yeah, it’s pretty cool what you’re doing. So appreciate the story.

Darren Wurz (03:04)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah, thank you so much. And you know, it’s really evolved as we’ve learned, you know, more about what really law firm owners need and what’s really valuable to them. So, you know, we do the financial planning. That’s always what we’ve done. But then we have added additional help for our clients because we know that our clients, number one, are focused on building their business. So we’ve added resources. We’ve added tools around business planning.

Like, let’s help you with that, you know, because that ties into your wealth. mean, growing your business, that’s your easiest way to grow your income, grow your net worth, et cetera. And then we’re like, wow, we have such an incredible group of clients. Let’s let them connect with each other. And so we started doing client events and allowing for networking amongst clients. We’ve really built this really powerful community.

Kevin Daisey (03:57)
It is.

That’s awesome. That’s amazing. just kind of to cut in early, what’s the best way folks can find like your business online and what’s the web address?

Darren Wurz (04:26)
Yeah, it’s really simple. It’s thelawyermillionaire.com and that’ll, you’ll find everything you need right there.

Array Digital (04:39)
Today’s episode is brought to you by answering legal. Now I just switched my company array digital over to answering legal. And it’s made my life a whole lot easier. If I can’t get it to the phone, there are 24 seven virtual receptionists take the call and take them through a full intake process. So we never miss new business again. Now, answering legal has been at this for more than a decade.

and they specialize in answering phone calls for law firms like yours. They even have a brand new, easy to use app and they integrate with all the top legal softwares and platforms. So for my listeners today, we actually have a special deal of a 400 minute free trial offer of answering legal services that you can try out by going to answeringlegal.com forward slash array. You can also call

631-437-4803 and use special code DAISEY. That’s my last name. D-A-I-S-E-Y. So go check them out and let’s get back to the show.

Kevin Daisey (05:55)
Okay, cool. I wonder

if people would be able to hear that now and then we’ll make sure they can connect with you at the end as well. so check that out. No, think that’s, that’s so interesting because over time, you want to learn, like to my team, I’m like, we’re working with lawyers who really figure out their business inside and out. Like as if we ran our own law firm and

Darren Wurz (06:00)
Sure.

Mm-hmm.

Kevin Daisey (06:23)
How do we play a role in that? Right? How do we know more about running a law firm than some of the clients that we have? Like, cause I have a lot of people that sign up, they don’t really know what they’re doing yet. They, they have, they want advice and we, you know, I feel like we can provide, even though we don’t get paid to provide law firm business operational advice, but, but I feel we can, I feel like we’ve learned so much, run our own businesses and, and the podcast and things. it’s, really allowed us to.

Darren Wurz (06:25)
Yeah.

Right, right.

Mm-hmm.

Kevin Daisey (06:52)
go deeper, just like you’re talking about with what you’ve done. Super important to actually just go as deep as possible. So I love it. So can you tell me, know, if I was a lawyer, engage them with something like, like kind of what’s that life cycle like? And I obviously want to talk about some like extra strategy and some things like that, but what’s the typical client that comes to you, what their needs are and how you identify that and what’s that kind of.

Darren Wurz (06:55)
yeah.

Kevin Daisey (07:19)
starting point look like.

Darren Wurz (07:21)
Hey Kevin, good to see you. Thanks so much for having me on today.

Kevin Daisey (07:25)
Absolutely excited about the conversation today. you know, I always liked to start with, introduce yourself and, tell us your story. How’d you get to where you are to where you’re on the show, sharing all this good stuff today.

Darren Wurz (07:39)
Yeah, absolutely. Well, I appreciate being on the show. I’ve been listening to your podcast and seen a lot of your clips and social media stuff. So it’s great to be here. So I’m the founder and CEO of the Lawyer Millionaire Founders Network, and we are a unique financial planning organization built exclusively and specifically for law firm owners.

Kevin Daisey (07:50)
shit that.

Darren Wurz (08:05)
You know, it’s been a journey. I started out as a community financial advisor, built my own business in Cincinnati, Ohio. I started out after college as a teacher, taught school for, taught eighth and ninth grade science actually for five years before I decided to make a transition into the financial advisory business. And it was really my dad’s encouragement because dad,

was a financial advisor his whole career. Started to finally listen to his advice. And really I found out that I’m very much an entrepreneur. I like to, I’m very creative. If you’ve read, Gino Wickman’s book, Traction, he talks about the visionary and the implementer. I’m very much the visionary mold.

That’s me. I’m always coming up with new ideas, always trying to tinker. Kevin, I see you pointing at yourself. Yeah. So, you know, we have that in common. I didn’t really have the opportunity to do that very much as a teacher. so, you know, building my own business was really the opportunity to do that. And it wasn’t so much, you know, being a financial advisor. I really enjoyed that. I enjoyed working with people, you know, helping them plan for the future, helping them secure

Kevin Daisey (09:00)
That’s me too.

Darren Wurz (09:24)
you know, make sure they were secure going into retirement and that sort of thing. But then it was, you know, the business building. And I caught a wind of that as I as I networked and met people in the community and met business coaches and business advisors who advised me of the importance of having a really well-defined niche. And that, you know, I knew that in the back of my mind and for all the same reasons, everyone fights that idea. I fought that idea for a long time.

You know, and it was really happenstance that that I decided to focus on on legal and on lawyers You know, I’ve always been a fan of the legal profession always enjoyed, you know legal dramas and and you legal books, you know, you know fiction, know, of course But you know, I had a lot of clients who were lawyers and that was just really what I did I looked through my client list. There were a lot of lawyers I said, well, let’s focus on the legal industry

Well, know, initially that was more of a marketing move, but as I got into it and as I learned, I found this, you know, sub niche of law firm owners specifically. And what I really found compelling and exciting about working with law firm owners is that they were just like me. They’re building businesses. And I’m like, how cool is that? Like, I want to tap into that and I want to be a part of that story with you and helping you.

be as successful and achieve the future that you’re looking for, right? So the pandemic was really the accelerant on this fire for me because the old methods of networking, community-based networking kind of were all suspended. And so I had to focus virtually. And it was at that point that my practice really went nationwide and

we started getting law firm owner clients from across the country. Today, we have just this fabulous network of law firm owner clients that span everywhere from California to New York to Florida. And yeah, it’s been a lot of fun.

yeah, thank you for the question, Kevin. Clients who come to us, you know, are usually either, there’s kind of two camps, but they’re small law firms. Either they’re a true solo and, you know, maybe they have an assistant and a paralegal, or maybe they have started to add some actual attorneys to their team. I think our largest client is somewhere between 10 and 20 attorneys on their team.

And then we have solos. Typically, and really we’ve built three different packages for different sizes of law firms. So we’ve got, you know, a package that’s more tuned to the solo practice. One that’s more mid tier for, you know, you have a couple of attorneys on your team and one that’s for the larger law practices where you have a double digit size attorney team and you really need some in depth, you know, business planning and financial planning support.

and things are complicated. But the typical case, you have been working, you’ve built up your business to a pretty successful level, right? You’re making high six figures, but you are stuck in the grind, right? You are working hard. And there’s a lot of things that have kind of gotten in the way of you getting out of that. mean, ultimately you are at a place

where you’re probably a little bit sick of the grind, you wanna be able to elevate to a place where you can have some more time freedom and you can achieve the financial success that you really aspire to and want. And I’ll just make a quick argument here, Kevin, of why it is your fiduciary responsibility to be as wealthy and financially successful as possible.

Here’s what.

Kevin Daisey (13:22)
I love

it.

Darren Wurz (13:24)
When you go to court, right? And you’re worrying about the mortgage and your credit card bills, you’re not going to be as effective for your clients. When you’re going, let’s say you’re not going to court anymore. Let’s say you’ve, you’ve delegated all that out. Let’s say you’re running the business. You’re not going to be taking care of your clients and your employees the way you need to, the way you should.

Kevin Daisey (13:36)
Hmm.

Darren Wurz (13:50)
You’re not going to be running as successful and profitable of a business if your financial house is in disarray. We’re talking about your personal house, right? So there’s a real tangible connection between having your finances in order, having a budget, having sufficient funds in your emergency account, knowing your own trajectory to reach your wealth goals. There is a huge tangible connection between that and your success.

as a law firm owner and as a business owner. So, you know, I just wanna underline that. And really our goal, our mission is to help our clients elevate out of the daily chaos, find clarity in their financial lives, in their business lives, et cetera, and really truly become the picture of financial success that they have always envisioned, become that truly, you know, time freedom, you know,

time-free, financially free, successful law firm owner, right? That’s a part of their dreams. And that’s what we want to help them do.

Kevin Daisey (14:57)
I love that. I think a lot of people try to sell that too and talk about that. putting in the action and doing the work, that’s a lot harder, right? But I love that because I mean, I love what you just said because…

Darren Wurz (15:06)
Right.

Kevin Daisey (15:10)
If you’re running around like crazy, you’re trying to deal with all the issues and do the work and employees and team and all the struggles that come with the business, then, and you’re on the edge of you could be out of business next month. That every client that signs with you is at risk and that has no clue what’s going on behind the scenes. So you’re, you’re not doing them a good service. If that’s the way you’re handling things, if you’re running around like crazy.

Darren Wurz (15:30)
They are.

Kevin Daisey (15:40)
You’re short on time. Maybe your temper is even short. Everything’s just on the rails.

Darren Wurz (15:44)
I have seen this? I have seen law firm owners that make high six, seven figures are running seven, eight figure firms and are on the verge of bankruptcy. They’re one bad month away from bankruptcy. I mean, that is truly the reality. So, you you, you may be very successful, but there might still be a lot of risk built, you know, caked in to what you’re where you are. And

We want to help you build the foundation where that’s not a concern, right? That’s not a worry about you at all. And the reason I phrase it that way, in terms of we want to help you become and elevate to that level of success that you’re looking for is because law firm owners are not thinking about retirement. Retirement is not a part of their vocabulary.

Kevin Daisey (16:35)
Grind, grind, grind.

Darren Wurz (16:38)
most financial planners don’t understand law firm owners because the language of the financial planning industry is retirement. It’s investments and retirement. And yes, we want to make sure that at a certain point, if we’re not able to work anymore, we’re going to be okay. It’s more than that. It’s about maybe scaling the practice, maybe maintaining some involvement.

but also then having the time and the money and the resources to enjoy more of the things you really wanna do in life. So the way we work with our clients is thinking like that, thinking about how we build in passive income, how we’re gonna create income streams in the future so that you can have both. You can continue running your practice or continue being involved, but then also be able to do more of the stuff that you really wanna do in life.

Kevin Daisey (17:35)
No, I mean, backing up to a point you made too is if, you know, my company’s, I don’t know, probably about six million in revenue. If we’re going to business a month from now or could easily, you know, is that really a success? You know, or is it just, it’s not really a success that you’re looking for. It’s success to me would be that stable. I could leave for a month, two months, quit.

Darren Wurz (17:50)
Right.

Yes.

Kevin Daisey (18:00)
whatever, and, and things are good. the, company runs and has management and team that, and a good culture that will continue, to run itself and grow itself if, if you’re not available, what if you get sick for a few months or whatever. So yes, success is not running like crazy and you could lose it all tomorrow to me. So you got to figure out for yourself, think. What does success look like?

Darren Wurz (18:07)
Yeah.

Right, right.

And,

you know, that’s really why we emphasize the idea of building your law firms value as a business asset. Because when you think in terms of value, you’re thinking about building something that’s going to last. And when you really start to think that way and its value over profit, because profit is great. You know, it’s kind of a three tier system, right? Everybody boasts about revenue. Revenue doesn’t matter. What matters is profit.

And then even profit really doesn’t matter because profit is year to year, right? Profit can change. What matters is value. Are you building lasting value in your business? Is it something that’s gonna last beyond you? Because if you’ve built it that way and you’ve thought about it that way, then you have reduced risk greatly. You’ve built something that’s gonna last for yourself and last for your family.

Kevin Daisey (19:19)
Yeah, no, I love that because yeah, as owners, we can just soak every bit of profit out and be like, we’re, you know, we have this much profit. but, me and my business partner, we’ve done some analysis, like I got real estate, he’s got real estate. We, I put money into the market and crypto and all these other things. And the return on our investment for the money that we put back in our business far exceeds any return on investment that I’ve, I’ve gotten anywhere else.

Darren Wurz (19:26)
Yeah.

Yes. Yeah.

Kevin Daisey (19:49)
And so

that we’re leaving money in, or we invest for this or that, or we forego a distribution to, you know, to do something within the company or buy a company or start another one. It’s always paid back. And we track this on a spreadsheet. Like what is the money that me and him had put in? And then what’s, what’s the company worth? We do evaluations. And yeah, it’s.

Darren Wurz (20:03)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Kevin Daisey (20:17)
So we track that and say what is our value in lifetime return and our business is better than anything. Yeah.

Darren Wurz (20:24)
Kevin, love that you mentioned this. Yes,

I love that you brought this up because most financial advisors don’t understand this, which is why they’re going to want you to invest in the market because that’s the way they’re compensated, right? Typically, a financial advisor is compensated based on what you invest with them. And so, you know, not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with that, but that biases them towards wanting you to do.

wanting them wanting you to direct your money towards the stock market. But as you mentioned, most of the time, you know, if you’re if you’re doing the right things, investing in your business can generate a significantly higher ROI than the traditional stock market can’t. Now, you still it’s still important to have some investments, I would argue. But that’s one of the reasons we created the model that we have.

Kevin Daisey (21:13)
You have to diversify.

Darren Wurz (21:19)
which is not based on commissions or investment fees. We replace that with a flat monthly subscription model. And so you just pay a flat fee and that frees us up to give you objective advice to say, okay, here’s what we think you should do with that money. And we can say, yeah, put it in your business. Cause there’s this great opportunity that came along for you. And we’re not gonna be biased towards, you know, put it in your portfolio cause then I’m gonna get paid more.

Kevin Daisey (21:48)
So you’re

a fiduciary, right? Yeah, that’s the way to go. that’s, that’s the way I go with my financial planners and it’s that’s the best way to get your new, the best advice based on, what you should do. And, but also they’re say, they say you shouldn’t do that or whatever, but, it’s taking their experience and, and, and then working with other people too is, know, your lawyers, your CPAs, your accountants,

Darren Wurz (21:49)
Right, right, absolutely.

Right,

right.

Kevin Daisey (22:18)
And pulling that all together is, is really important because everybody’s got, everybody’s got their wants, you know, the lawyer wants to protect you. The tax person wants to save you taxes. you know, so it’s, it’s kind of looking at the full picture. think it’s important.

Darren Wurz (22:24)
Yeah.

Yeah, you need that team. And one of the things I’ve noticed, Kevin, is the most successful law firm owners have a really well-developed team around them. They’ve got a whole team of advisors, a business advisor, a tax planner, financial planner, life coach. They’ve got the whole team built out. I’ve noticed that it is a very common characteristic of the elite level business owners and law firm owners.

Kevin Daisey (23:02)
Yeah, a long night, a trick story. had a, a business owner. actually owned a financial planning company. and I had started my, my marketing company and I didn’t really have an office space. And so I met, I saw him at like a networking event and, he’s like, Hey, I heard you need, you’re looking for like an office. Like, yeah, just like a one office. Like I don’t need a full office building or anything like that. He’s like, I have a huge office class a, I got the space.

to scale out to, but it’s going to be a while before I, I do that. So five hundred bucks a month, you’ll have a break room and full access to the whole building and everything like that. so, you know, became a good friend of mine too. And, very successful, you know, hundreds of staff, that he built multiple times and sold and kind of rinse and repeat. And then he was like, Hey, I’m, meeting with a business coach. then I was like, that’s cool. And then.

Darren Wurz (23:52)
Yeah.

Kevin Daisey (23:59)
Literally like a month or so later. He was like, yeah, I got this other guy coming in as a different business coach. I was like, I thought you had a business coach. She’s like, yeah, well I do, but your coaches, you know, they can’t last forever. He’s like, I need something different. Or he’s got like two or three at a time. I was like, what? What are you talking about? I thought it was crazy. I mean, I was like 20 some years old. I didn’t even have a coach. So, and then how much they cost. I was like, my God.

Darren Wurz (24:15)
Yeah. Yeah, right, right.

Yeah. They might have right.

They might have different areas they focus on, you know, so maybe one’s more sales, one’s more marketing, one’s more leadership. Yeah, definitely.

Kevin Daisey (24:28)
complete.

But that was the first time

I was exposed to like, what are you paying someone like a thousand, 2000 a month and you got like two or three of them and that’s insane. Like that’s, that’s, that’s a lot of money. And so, but to your point, you know, that’s a, something you’ll see with great successful people. Yeah. You’re, they’re gonna take advantage of that. And that’s to them, money well spent. Right. So

Darren Wurz (24:45)
Ha

Mm-hmm.

Right, Yeah, absolutely. you know, that’s we we see that all the time with our clients. You know, our clients may have more than one financial advisor, and that’s perfectly fine. You know, they may have someone else who is managing the investments and they bring us on for all the other financial planning pieces. That’s great. We love to be a part of that team. And that’s, you know, we recognize that our top law firm owner clients

Kevin Daisey (25:04)
I love it.

Darren Wurz (25:31)
They have that team in place and we’re not here to disrupt that team at all. We just want to be a value add to that team. Help that team be that much more successful.

Kevin Daisey (25:41)
Well, I love it. Got to be collaborative. Same with the marketing. Like there’s the bigger firms we work with always have other marketing agencies, partners, vendors. it’s just the way it goes. So you got to, if you’ve got a way to work together and be successful at what you’re, you know, the whole picture, right. what, what part do you play and how can you help the whole thing be successful? So, well, just, know, as we have a few minutes left here, I don’t want to hold people up too long in this episode, but,

Darren Wurz (25:57)
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Daisey (26:09)
You know, a couple of pro tips or maybe some strategic planning or exit strategy kind of things that our audience could be thinking about, especially if you have some solos here tuning in today. What’s some things you’d like to leave behind?

Darren Wurz (26:11)
Yeah.

you know, I think one of the, well, right now it’s the end of the year. don’t know when necessarily this will air for you, but, we’re doing a lot of end of year planning, end of year tax planning. And it’s so powerful. We, one of the things that we do, part of our services is that we review a client’s tax return. You should be reviewing your own tax return if no one else is making sure that it is been filed correctly.

There is so often miscommunication between the investment people, the financial people, the tax person, and then things are not getting reported correctly. mean, collectively we have saved clients over $100,000 this year or in the past few months in tax return reviews from things that we’ve uncovered. A $25,000 mistake on one tax return with a client recently, a $6,000

deduction that was missed because an HSA wasn’t reported properly. It’s just really, really powerful. So I want to mention that real quickly. You know, tax planning and everybody thinks, tax planning. I have a CPA. Well, yes, but tax planning is proactive, right? And you know, CPA still does what they do. We just come in and we want to help your CPA be that much more successful. But what I really want to leave your audience with.

are three things that you can do for the three value generators, the top three value drivers. If you wanna build a business that has lasting value that you could potentially sell and law firms do sell by the way, you can sell your practice and it doesn’t have to be selling all of it, right? You could sell a piece of it or part of it and that could happen in the future. It could happen over time.

It could be part of your slow exit strategy, something that you should be thinking about long-term. But here it is. The top three value drivers that will really drive value in your business. Number one, commanding a niche.

was what we’ve already talked about here, right? If you really hone in on a niche and not just hone in, but command the hell out of it, you become the top go-to leader, right? I was just interviewing someone for our podcast who is a law firm owner in immigration and they have focused down to Spanish speakers so much so that their entire website’s in Spanish. You go to the website, it’s in Spanish. we work with Spanish speakers, period.

Kevin Daisey (28:41)
admit.

Darren Wurz (29:00)
And so they’ll become the go-to place for Spanish speakers. Like that’s how you command a niche. And then you build everything around, you build your service model around focusing on and serving that niche. Number two, recurring revenue.

How can you build recurring revenue in your law firm? And think creatively. So often law firm owners are tied to a box. I do this service, I get paid by the hour, this is just how I make money. I just had you to do more of this and make more money. What could you do in addition to that? If you are a business, and the easy example is business law. If you do business law, transaction law, maybe there’s a subscription service for business advice, business advisory that you could offer in addition.

It could be a supplement, right? How can you build a subscription service, not maybe with all of your revenue, but within your business somehow, and it doesn’t have to be legal service specific, it could be something adjacent, right? Build some recurring revenue. Your cashflow is gonna thank you, right? And third is owner independence. That’s the real kicker. When you’ve solved the owner independence question,

When you have made your firm able to operate without you, that’s how you know you’ve done it. When you can go and take a month off vacation and things do not fall apart because you have effectively delegated and scaled your systems and processes and everything, that’s the final piece of the pie owner independence. So there you go. Command a niche, recurring revenue, figure out how to get to that owner independence level.

Kevin Daisey (30:37)
Yeah, that’s awesome. love that. Very interesting. we kind of, did a recurring revenue. Like, all right, we got to do, we used to be a project based company. the websites and project based and we didn’t really do like ongoing marketing stuff. And we were like, we got to get out of this. We have to get recurring revenue. That was our first thought. And that’s before we niche. Then we niche. And now we’re working on the inter independence part, but no, love that.

Darren Wurz (30:58)
Yep.

Yeah.

Kevin Daisey (31:05)
Three powerful things to take home today, for sure.

Darren Wurz (31:09)
Absolutely. Focus on that and you’re gonna build not just a valuable business, but the most wildly profitable business that you can imagine. And you’re gonna set yourself up for having a very successful exit in the future.

Kevin Daisey (31:23)
And that exit can be different ways, right? It could be to the employees, the staff, family, you know, or it could be sold. So, yeah, definitely a lot of options there, but you want to make your company as valuable as possible. And you, you gotta be planning for that for years in advance to have the best exit. It’s not like, I want to sell next year. Well, you you might want to pull as much profit as you can out right now. But then when you want to go sell it, you probably don’t want to necessarily do that. So you got to really.

Darren Wurz (31:41)
Yes.

Kevin Daisey (31:53)
Think about what you want. What is the exit and plan for that? I’ll say too, if you’re whatever you’ve done to this day, this episode will probably be live in December of 2024. If I had to guess, whatever you did this year is done. So you’re planning for next year’s taxes at this point. So if you get a big tax bill for what you did this year, that is what it is. So now it’s how do we change that?

Darren Wurz (31:55)
Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

Kevin Daisey (32:21)
I just met with my CPA a few months ago and major things to change, to track. And as, as you grow and do more things, there’s more things to do. Like I own real estate and have a home office and an office office. And there’s so many like, but it requires you to do things different and log things different, track things differently. and so if you don’t, you’re done, you know, you can’t take advantage of it.

Darren Wurz (32:45)
Yeah.

Yeah, it’s a constant evolution. If you’re growing, it’s a constant evolution and you have to be comfortable with that change. What got you here to this level isn’t necessarily what’s gonna get you to the next level. Software systems might need to change, the people who are around you might need to change. Change is part of the deal to continue scaling. Yeah.

Kevin Daisey (33:11)
Yeah, I think that’s the hardest part. You know, I

think it’s the hardest part. Change is going to happen constantly and you should just embrace it and go, you know what? Big change coming. That’s a good thing. You know, and even with like the best staff you might have, it’s going to happen. They’re going to leave for whatever reasons you’re going to lose people. And it’s just gotta be part of, you know, I hate it even for like, I talked to a younger attorney owner owner the other day. He’s like, I’ve had the same people for like three years since I started.

Darren Wurz (33:25)
Yeah, that’s true.

Kevin Daisey (33:41)
No one’s You know, he’s got a, he’s got an awakening coming, but, but it’s fine. It’s going to happen and you just embrace it and help them out transition, you know, and, root them on for whatever they’re going to go to do. And, you’ll be better for it. So, well, Darren, I really appreciate you sharing, all the tips today and kind of what you guys do and how you help a lot of lawyers out there listening probably need this help. So.

Darren Wurz (33:43)
Yeah.

Right, right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Kevin Daisey (34:11)
You got any questions for Darren or if you want to connect with Darren, obviously you can reach out to me and I’ll connect you all. But you can also drop a comment if you’re watching this on LinkedIn or YouTube and we’ll connect you. Or Darren, what’s the best way for them to connect with you directly?

Darren Wurz (34:28)
Yeah, if you go to our website, thelawyermillionaire.com, my calendar link is right there. You wanna schedule some time with me, be happy to workshop with you in terms of your own business and financial ideas or share more about some of the stuff we do. And I’ll just add this additionally, we are launching a book club for our members and anyone else who would like to join.

It’s gonna be starting here in 2025. So if you’d like to join in, we’re gonna meet once a quarter. There’ll be a book once a quarter we’re gonna read and then get on a Zoom call to discuss with other ambitious law firm owners around the country. If you wanna be a part of that, just reach out to me and I’ll get you connected.

Kevin Daisey (35:11)
I love that. We’re doing an internal book club right now with all my companies. So we just finished up Extreme Leadership, which I’ve read before. And then we’re doing Dale Carnegie’s, how to win and influence people, win friends and influence people. So yeah, it’s just an internal thing, but it’s kind of been fun and we do the same thing. So awesome. Appreciate the, the opportunity there, Darren and everyone take him up on that. Reach out, connect, please. And.

Darren Wurz (35:25)
Nice. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Kevin Daisey (35:40)
Have a great day. Get out there and get after it. And we’re looking for some great numbers for 2025 everyone. So we’ll see you soon. Darren, thank you.

Darren Wurz (35:41)
you, Kevin.

Thank you.

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