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The Law Firm Marketing Minute
What Law School Didn’t Teach Me About Scaling a Firm (But I Had to Learn Fast) feat. Brett Trembly
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🎙️ What happens when you’re doing everything “right” but still stuck in survival mode? Brett Trembly opens up about his early struggles as a solo attorney, the mindset shift that changed everything, and the single hire that doubled his income and unlocked real growth. From sleepless nights to leading two thriving businesses, Brett shares the raw truth about what it really takes to scale a law firm—none of which was covered in law school.
📌 Key Takeaways:
- Hiring before you feel “ready” is often the only path to real growth.
- Most solos hit a ceiling not because of lack of work—but because they refuse to delegate.
- Building a real business means installing systems and people that keep things running when you’re not in the room.
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Have you ever felt like you're on the hamster wheel at your law firm and you just can't get off? There's so many tasks, your emails, your billing, whatever it is you just can't seem to find the time to actually grow your firm. Well, this week is part one of two, where we interviewed Brett Trembley, a very successful law firm owner and a very successful entrepreneur, who has also started to get staffed up, and he explains how he goes about hiring, how he goes about making sure he gets the right people into his system. So sit back, relax, take some notes and enjoy.
Speaker 2:Welcome. Welcome to the Meet the Expert interview series. For those of you who don't know me, my name is Danny Decker. I'm a founding partner here at Spotlight Marketing and Branding. Many of you probably are familiar with us it's probably how most of you got here. We do marketing that helps law firms get more clients and better clients, but today we are actually not here to talk about marketing, which is rare for me. I spend about 95% of my time living and breathing and talking about marketing, but today we are talking to Brett Tremblay. Brett Tremblay is the founding partner of the Tremblay Law Firm. He is the co-founder of Get Staffed Up. He's the author of a book called 24 Months to Freedom, which, brett, I think is still available on Amazon. And all that good stuff, correct, brett, I think, is still available on Amazon. And all that good stuff, correct?
Speaker 2:Yep absolutely yeah. So, brett, super excited to have you here For those of you kind of in the audience, thanks for being with us. I've got some questions and Brett's going to maybe share a little bit about his background and kind of what he's up to. We did get some questions submitted in advance, but also would love to take your questions kind of as we go. So if you've got questions, feel free to drop them in the chat. I will be keeping an eye on that and I will bring them to Brett. But with that said, brett, let's honestly kind of go back to the beginning. Let's talk about the early days of your law firm. We obviously met pretty close to way back then. So just kind of tell everybody about Tremblay Law Firm and let's start there. Tell them about the early days.
Speaker 3:Sure, I mean, first of all, thanks for having me on. Second of all, it's always nice to be called an expert. Within the legal field. We can't actually call ourselves experts unless we're something called board certified. So you know, just kind of joking, but it's fun when other people think you're an expert in something. So I'll do my best. Hopefully we get some good questions today. But I graduated law school in 2008 from University of Miami.
Speaker 3:I worked at a very small law firm for two and a half to three years and I've kind of been an entrepreneur my whole life and so I always wanted to work for myself and when I kind of saw that that law firm was, you know, frankly, it wasn't gonna be a long term solution. You know, I cut out on my own. Looking back, I was 29. So that's pretty young in the legal space and I think it's funny. You know, now I'd be like, oh wow, that's young.
Speaker 3:But at the time I didn't feel that it was young. I just felt you know like kind of who I was. So I hustled like crazy and I was able to get enough work to like just barely scrape by and pay the bills, but I was always worried where the next sort of paycheck was going to come from, which is a small business sort of journey for a lot of people that are entrepreneurs, you know, outside of the legal field, inside the legal field, and I had a rough two and a half years. You know just just hit a wall, sorry, a ceiling, I would say that I couldn't get past, which really wasn't enough for me to just have breathing room, and it was rough. So I would think I was doing good work and I was hustling like crazy From 2011, when I started, until about 2014, when things took off. So that was kind of my early years. It was like put on a good face publicly, but privately, you know, I was very stressed out and just always, you know, worried.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, I think most of us who have started businesses can definitely identify with that.
Speaker 4:Hey there, jana, here. I hope you're enjoying this episode and we will get right back to it in a minute. Listen, out of all the things Danny has taught me about marketing, one of his best lessons is that the hammer is a great tool, but it's pretty much useless if you need to get a screw in the wall. Marketing is the same way. There are so many tools, but the ones that make sense for your law firm depend on your goals. So when you have 30 minutes to talk about strategy and tools, I'd love to share proven tactics, some free resources and possible courses of action. Check the podcast description to reserve the best time for you, and I look forward to talking more. Now let's get back to the episode.
Speaker 2:You know and I am spending a little bit of time here focusing on the law firm for obvious reasons most of the people in the audience today either own or manage a law firm and obviously it's pretty integral to your story. So I want to stick there for a minute and think about sort of you know again the early days and let's talk a little bit about hiring and like what was your mindset around you know, at what point did you start saying to yourself I need to get some help? And like what was your thought process around actually building your team, because you started as a true solo, correct?
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, up until that 2014. So my thought process around hiring was it was an expense that I wouldn't know how to pay for and I, I couldn't afford it. So it was like I, I, I'm only making this much, it's barely paying the bills. How can I afford to hire somebody, which now I know, and hopefully most people now know, but for anyone that's in that situation, the right person doesn't cost you money. They make you money. So I was like finally convinced to hire someone, and the only reason I did is because it was a law student, 30 hours a week, for a very cheap amount, like $10 an hour. And I'm like, okay, I got to try this, you know, and I doubled my, my income, my top line revenue, probably triple my take home immediately. And I was like, wow, I, you know, I guess this works, and so I will give myself credit.
Speaker 3:At that point I didn't do it.
Speaker 3:A lot of people do, which is like, hey, I was able to ride a bicycle and I got from point A to B faster, but it was just luck, it's just something that happened one time.
Speaker 3:Clearly, I can't replicate that and get a faster bike or get people to ride with me, so I'm just going to stay where I am.
Speaker 3:You know most people and I talk a lot about this in my book because I think when we're speaking we're projecting on our past selves, because we're pulling on our experience and I'm almost like trying to convince my past self to to get with it, to say that nicely. But you know, most people are like well, when I get X amount of dollars in my bank account, then I will be able to hire somebody, which is backwards, because you'll never really get that money unless you get a windfall or you just suffer, suffer, suffer. Maybe you're in the PI world and then you finally get like a decent settlement. But you will get that money if you hire someone because you will then free up your time to do more of the thing that pays you three, four $500 an hour, not do more of the thing that pays you 10, $15 an hour. And when you're working by yourself, like 95% of your day is all of the little things a business needs that is only going to yield you 10 to $15 an hour.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, that makes so much sense. So so, looking back at it, if you could go back and speak to yourself back in 2011, 2012,. Would you, would you tell yourself to hire sooner? Like, do you think in retrospect, did you wait too long to hire?
Speaker 3:Day one like like 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. 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, cause they're just like they're.
Speaker 3: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 going to 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. 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.
Speaker 3:Though there's very few of us who can just, you know, not know where our next paycheck is going to come from and actually not have the stress that comes along with that, because the what the stress does over time is it deteriorates your health, both mentally and physically, and you don't see it until kind 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 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?
Speaker 3: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. And what's just really nice is getting to the point where things happen without you because you put people and 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 2:Yeah, love it man, all right, so so now let's fast forward a little bit. So this was like 2014. Tell us now you know present day. Tell us about Trembly Law Firm today, like, what does your team look like? You know where are you now?
Speaker 3:By the way I'm. So there is a question and I was like roundabout answered your question about the hot dog stand. But for everyone else that doesn't have a hot dog stand or that doesn't want to just show up on a corner and make money and go home and then you don't have a business because you only work for those hours, it's day one you can get a personal or executive assistant. Ever, ever and that's an absolute that I'm not backing down from run another business or anything without a personal assistant or executive assistant to just delegate a lot of the little things to. There's just so many little things that get in the way of our day, and it usually shows up in the form of email, and so we spend all our day just like little things, little things, communication, answering email, email, email and we feel like we're working hard, but we're just on the hamster wheel.
Speaker 3:That's going back to the hustle thing, like, oh, I'm working hard, yeah, but you're not. You're not even an inch ahead of where you were yesterday. You're just exhausted from the hamster wheel, so you've earned your sleep. You probably feel good, but when you, when you actually step back and analyze it, you're, you're stuck in the same place? Yeah, that makes so much sense. Yeah, do you want to? Before the question, do you? I thought the question, the webinar chat, was going to be kind of related to that first hire, but you tell me you want to come back.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we're going to circle back to that, and so anybody that's listening and Leonard, thanks for the question Go ahead and drop your questions in the chat and we will get to as many of them as we can. I want to spend a little more time on your story, brett, and then, and then talk a little bit about Get Staffed Up to sort of set the context. So so go ahead and let's give us kind of the overview of where the Tremblay Law Firm is today, cause you've come quite a long way from 2011. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:So we started hiring and then started growing like crazy and you know, we hit the Inc 5,000 three times. We've got eight attorneys right now, close to like 35 staff, not in like total with the eight attorneys, like I think our team's about 35. And you know, a nice little reputation. We do great work for people and we have set ourselves up so if we ever find the right person to add another pod, as we call it, you know, that's kind of how we see our growth in the future. But, um, you know, I spend one day per week now on the law firm, just just for context, right. So I have a business that's pretty substantial, pretty healthy, that I spend 20% of my week on, and that's awesome and that was actually give you.
Speaker 2:one of my questions here is like okay, so you're spending one day a week on the law firm. What are you doing in that day? Like, what do you spend your time on in the law firm?
Speaker 3:I meet with our CFO, primarily I'm reviewing numbers, numbers, numbers, what. How are the? Are the pods profitable? Are people getting their work done? You know how many leads did we get last week and last month? How many consoles did we have last week, last month, what? What types of consoles? Where do they come from? How many signed up? You know, just like numbers, numbers, numbers signed up. You know just like numbers, numbers, numbers, numbers, numbers.
Speaker 3:Because you know, like you, numbers rule the game and you and you gotta, like they say you gotta know your numbers, but you also then have to mind them and you have to pay attention.
Speaker 3:You have to make decisions based on the numbers, not on emotions, and that becomes increasingly important as you grow. And somebody like me, like if you did my culture index or my I don't know name, one of the 1500 like personality assessments, right, I'm, I'm an excitable guy, so I can just like let's get fired up and let's do something. I can run on emotion, I can galvanize the team, but that only lasts so long, and so I've had to, over the years, learn how to become more, more of a numbers person and so I just really like we, still we we implemented EOS, which is an operating system for any business, and I highly recommend something like EOS, because I, I, I just I think it's night and day when you run a business, with and without it, and we have our leadership team meetings Friday mornings and then all day. Thursdays I'm just meeting with our fractional chief marketing officer, our CFO, who's full time, our office manager, our intake team, just again checking numbers, making decisions, basically all day long.
Speaker 2:Love it, man, very, very cool. All right, so that's the law firm, and so now let's transition to Get Staffed Up. Tell us about, kind of, the origin story Get Staffed Up. When did you start, kind of? I actually have a little behind the scenes into this because I actually think I was part of a WhatsApp group with you guys when this conversation started, but talk a little bit about the origin story of Get Staffed Up.
Speaker 3:I can't believe it's been so long ago now Still feels like we're a brand new company. But early 2018, my business partner, who's an attorney, used to have a law firm, but he has since sold his law firm basically figured out how to hire offshore. I told him I needed a marketing assistant offshore. You know just, the talent is very similar to what you find here, but the cost is so much cheaper. So when you're, when you, when you're like making the hiring decision and you're like shit, you know it's gonna cost me $4,000 a month because I'm going to pay them 50 grand. But then there's the 20% extra. So now it's like 60 grand. I got to make 5000. Like, how am I going to justify that? Where's the money going to come from? So if you make another five grand per month, you're paying for that person, but your bottom line is the same.
Speaker 3:So you're basically just your costs are rising with your revenue and a lot of people find themselves like, well, what's the point of all this? I'm working harder. Maybe not working harder, I'm less happy. I've got more people that rely on me. So, just to make payroll stressful, and I'm not making any more money than I was, and what we figured out was, like, man, I think we're onto something big. I mean, we knew from like early on this is. This thing is going to be big If we can help lawyers realize and learn and then help them find somebody great who speaks wonderful English, who works very hard, who's reliable, who's loyal and who you've got to train, of course, like you do anyone. But it's going to cost a fourth to maybe a third of what you pay here. You can either get three people and get three times as much done, or get one person and save two thirds of that money.
Speaker 3:And that's when you start to see the revenue grow, but in your expenses don't quite grow as much with them. And then you get that breathing room and then you start to like, okay, I've got more resources now, which means I can either hire more people or have a better life for me and my family. I can buy cars that don't break down every month and I'm exaggerating, right, I can send my kids to the day school that I can, and I'm not. I'm exaggerating, right. Um, I, I can, you know, send my kids to the day school that I want to, and those things, and so, um, you know, we just that was the origin story.
Speaker 3:We got together and we were already in a mastermind together and and we were having monthly breakfast and we talked about doing this business and and we went for it. And then, over time, he ramped up more quickly to be full-time and sell his law firm. And I think that happened like 2019 or 2020, the pandemic hit and we were like gangbusters. We just grew like crazy and then over time, I would go like half a day and then a day, and then two days, three days. I shifted my focus over to the staffing company because it was growing so much faster than the law firm. I mean, it's five or six times bigger than the law firm at this point.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's awesome, man. Okay, so talk a little bit about because my understanding and you know I've been a client of get staffed up and so have the opportunity to work with you guys. You know, one of the things I think is really cool is you've kind of defined I think it's your like seven, you know seven roles that you guys help law firms build. Do you want to just give a quick overview, kind of of kind of your the core offer and and and you know how you guys help law firms.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely so. I'm just sorry to peek off screen right, I wasn't sure if I had a copy of my book right here, but we play seven positions, and these are the positions. I mean six primarily, and then one's a little bit of a bonus, but that I argue in my experience and now working with well over a thousand lawyers, of what you need to hire in order to get yourself to a place where you can come up for air and really have the freedom to say all right, my business is running and I can leave a week and things don't crash and burn or just stop. You may not leave for a year and have this thing run without you. That's not realistic yet. But the first is an executive assistant, like that is just that's you. You have to have somebody that is kind of your do all early. And, by the way, I want to acknowledge Rachel Alexander has a question. Um, we'll definitely get to it, yep. Um, good question she put in there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Keep the questions coming, guys. We are going to get. We're going to get to them. Uh, we got. We got plenty of time with Brett here, so keep dropping them in the chat. We will get to them.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so. So I'm like I said I would not run another business without a really good executive assistant. I mean like just a life changer. I have argued many times that if I only had two hires as a small law firm owner, my second one would be a billing assistant.
Speaker 3:One of the just consistently tragic failures and I don't mean failure as in a fatal failure, because we can fail every day and just learn from them but if we're honest with ourselves, that the failure is getting our invoices out on time, asking our clients to pay us what we've actually billed, asking in a timely fashion, and doing it with transparency and honesty, not like, oh crap, I need money. I got to get my bills out out, which is what the first, the only place I work that's how it was. It was like a bill this person and bill this person and like what the heck? It's not. Like there's no actual record of the time, which was, I felt, was just, you know, dishonest. But like the studies that cleo does, they show that lawyers, we lose like 30% of our time when we like, retroactively, try to remember what we did and then when we don't get the bills out on time, we feel bad. So we give big discounts and the number is usually higher. So instead of billing someone every month or every two weeks, you send an invoice like three months later and you're like that's a big chunk of money. So then maybe you delay more or you just like, screw it, that's a big chunk of money. So then maybe you delay more or you just like screw it, pay me like 75% of this. So then we truly only collect like the true solo attorney, only like collects 1.2 hours per day of legal work or something like that, which is just insanely low. And that is like my direct experience.
Speaker 3:When I said I worked for myself and I just hit the ceiling, I couldn't get over about $9,000 a month. And when you do the math, you know, I said it's just goes back to the numbers. It just makes so much sense because it's about one to 1.2 hours per day and like that's all I had time to do. And, by the way, a lot of that legal work was nights and weekends, because you're miserable, because all day long fires happen and you're constantly putting fires. So yeah, um, you know, but anyway, again, I, I, I apparently I refuse to directly answer you. I'm a terrible deponent today. Um so, but billing assistant, marketing assistant, intake specialist receptionist, legal assistant, and then those are like the main six and the bonus one is something called the client happiness coordinator. I'm not going to die on the hill of the order, like if someone's like no, no, no, I have to have this person. Okay, fine, I'm not, that's not a hill I'm going to die on, but I do have like a recommended order in the book that I think makes the most sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that's awesome. All right, so let's jump into some of these questions. We have some questions that were submitted by email in advance, but I'm going to start with the questions as they're coming in on the chat. So Leonard asks how can you determine how much you have to be earning before you hire an associate or a second paralegal? So let's start there Brett, how much do you have to be earning before you hire an associate or a second?
Speaker 3:paralegal, I guess for Leonard. My question is is this contingency-based firm or is it hourly or flat fee? I don't know if Leonard can pop that in real quick, but I will say that there's no definitive, definitive answer, numbers wise, because it depends on the rest of your staff and it depends on you and your time. So if you have sufficiently guarded your time, if you're not spending your time emailing someone 10 times back and forth just trying to set up a lunch meeting, right, which I mean just adds up and takes, you know, if you're not doing a motion, for example, and then hear a ding, and then stopping and going and doing your email, someone's answering your phones. If someone is, is is like doing your intake, meaning they're setting up consultations for you and you have time and you like to do the legal work. It's probably higher than if you can't stand the legal work and you have time and you like to do the legal work. It's probably higher than if you can't stand the legal work and you want to get out of it faster. So it's a combination of both monetarily and then your energy. Managing your energy is super important. So if, like I'll tell you my experience I was doing about $30,000 a month in revenue, and I was the only attorney and one of my advisors at the time was like you're about to malpractice Cause, like there was a federal deadline I had to stay up all night and try to meet.
Speaker 3:But you know, like you can't miss federal deadlines, right? So I was filing at like 1155 and and I was like, fine, like I, I hate this, I don't think I'm ready, but I'm going to hire an attorney anyway. So I hired an attorney who had more experience than me, and not only did I have enough work for that attorney, because I just went like here.
Speaker 3:You actually have more experience than me. I think you're better than me At least that was my hope Right, and, like you're going to take the legal work, I'm going to make sure we're not doing a horrible job and we're not, you know, you know, you know have a bad work product. I'm still going to oversee the relationships and all that, but, like I the litigation anyway, because I held on to the transactional work but we had so much more revenue now that we had one person focusing solely on that Because, again, when you're running a business and you're wearing all these different hats, you only have so much time to legal work and you're wearing all these different hats, you only have so much time for legal work. That was in like May of 2015. Three months later, I had to hire my second attorney because we had already hit 60,000 a month in revenue, right, and it was like holy crap and there was plenty of work for both of them. That's awesome.
Speaker 3:Most firms have enough relationships and enough business that they're just not getting to right Like there's way more juice in the squeeze that they're just not getting to right. Like there's way more juice in the squeeze that they're just not squeezing to have a paralegal and an attorney. Yeah, and, and and you also don't need to make like if you're going to hire an attorney for a hundred thousand. You're, like you just need to be able to figure out how to make an extra 10 grand per month and, when you do the math, that attorney is going to pay for themselves easily. Yeah, Just by taking over the legal work for you. Now, is it that easy to snap your fingers and you have this amazing associate? No, of course not, and that's part, that's part of Rachel's question. But like, yeah, there's training and there's time, but it's an investment. Yeah, If you have the attitude like it's too much time to train, then your law firm is going to look the same 10 years from now. Yeah, Wouldn't like take the time we call it too busy to be less busy.