You Didn’t Build a Business—You Bought Yourself a Job

🚨 If your law firm shuts down when you take a vacation, you haven’t built a business—you’ve built a job. In this episode, Brett Trembly joins Danny Decker to unpack the mindset shift that took him from burnout to building a firm that runs without him. They explore how hustle culture traps lawyers into glorifying overwork, why “doing it all” is a path to nowhere, and what it really takes to create a law firm that grows beyond the founder. This is your wake-up call.

📌 Key Takeaways:

• Why most “solo firms” aren’t real businesses.
• How hustle culture is silently wrecking your health (and practice).
• What to build first if you want your firm to run without you.

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Chapters

• 0:00 The Hot Dog Stand Analogy
• 0:35 The Problem With Hustle Mentality
• 1:07 Creating a Real Business vs. Buying a Job
• 2:29 Episode Wrap and Call to Action

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

The only, the only like true solo and even this is dangerous is think about the hot dog stand. Like there's a guy usually could be a girl right has a car and buys a little hot dog stand with a hitch, drives a little hot dog stand to a corner where there's a lot of people, right, that's a business decision, where you take your little hot dog stand, you buy the hot dogs, you buy the buns, you buy the ketchup, you buy the propane or whatever. You're cooking the hot dogs. You buy the buns, you buy the ketchup, you buy the propane or whatever. You're cooking the hot dogs. But like it's all you, most people aren't like well, let me hire someone to run my hot dog stand and then let me go get four or five and put them on different corners Because they're just like they're. They have a hustle mentality and a lot of people, you know, have that like. You know, get like like the the hustle, hustle. I forget what Damon John calls it, but but for a while it was like this. You know you were gonna brag about how miserable you were and brag about how much you were working and like that's, that's that's just leaves you in such a poor place mentally at least, it did for me.

Speaker 1: 1:01

Not everybody's the same. But when I start to say like well, not everybody's the same, people like, oh yeah, that's not me, that's not me, most people it is, though there's very few of us who can just, you know, not know where of like years later it's piled up and it's really, really bad for you and it's negative. So then one of two things happen either you realize it and you're like, okay, I'm going to give up on my dreams and I'm going to resign to just not not having a goal other than have my one assistant and like that's what my, my law firm is going to look like forever. You know, do I know? Do I know some people that have law firms and it's like one assistant and they have enough business over the years where they're fine, sure, but like when you leave town or you go do something, the work stops, the business stops, the money stops, like it's not. It's not a real business. Like you, you just bought yourself a job and hopefully your job pays the bills, but you know it shuts down without you. And what's just really nice is getting to the point where things happen without you because you put people in, systems in place and you have built a real business which has marketing, sales and gets work done without you having to have your hands in every little part of the business.

Speaker 1: 2:29

Yeah, thanks for listening to today's preview from this week's episode. If you had any thoughts on it, please leave us a review. We would greatly appreciate it. Don't forget, if you love your lawyer friends, let them know about the Law Firm Marketing Minute. We'll see you tomorrow.