The Law Firm Marketing Minute
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The Law Firm Marketing Minute
Become the Leader Your Law Firm Needs feat. Steph Tuss
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💥 You don’t scale a law firm by billing more hours—you scale it by becoming the kind of leader people want to follow. In this episode, Steph Tuss breaks down what real leadership looks like inside a small firm, why psychological safety drives performance, and how to stop reacting and start leading with clarity. Whether you’re burned out or just stuck in the weeds, this conversation is your roadmap to building a team that thrives.
📌 Key Takeaways:
- Why law firm leadership isn’t about authority—it’s about service.
- How to build trust with your team and stop micromanaging.
- The role of vision, vulnerability, and proactive planning in firm growth.
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A nurse's fear of a doctor costs lives in a hospital. Someone ends up getting hurt when you don't have psychological safety in your organization.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Law Firm Marketing Minute, the go-to podcast for solo and small law firms who want to level up. I'm your host, Mike, and I'm excited for you to join me this episode. All right, without further ado, let's dive in.
Speaker 3:This is like the one time each month when I get to have a conversation that's not all about marketing, and so we have a really great guest with us here today Steph Tuss. Steph is a business strategist, speaker and coach known for helping small business owners unlock massive growth, and coach known for helping small business owners unlock massive growth. I've had the opportunity to work with Steph and her team a couple of times over the years and always enjoy the conversation, and so, steph, really happy to have you here, thanks for being here. We are going to go ahead and kind of jump into this and for our live audience, because some of you know this is kind of a live podcast experience, right, where we've got a live audience and excited to have you all here.
Speaker 3:And so, guys, as we're going, if you have questions for Steph, feel free to drop them in the chat. I will keep an eye on the chat and bring those questions to her attention. Also, you know several of you submitted questions in advance, so if you submitted a question in advance, I've got it, don't worry. But with that said, steph, thank you so much for being here. It's really great to have you here. Why don't you start by just for those, the few people who maybe don't know who you are in this industry, just give the quick introduction kind of who you are and what you're up to.
Speaker 1:Sure, well, first of all, thanks for having me. This is a whole lot of fun. Who I am? So I'm currently founder of Steph Tess Consulting, where I work with small business owners to help them build their business.
Speaker 1:But I actually started teaching. I was an elementary school teacher. I taught elementary school for 10 years in music and then gave birth to a very sick little girl, dove deep into fact finding, fell in love with nutrition, found out that that was what was causing her to be sick, went back to school, got my master's degree in holistic nutrition and then decided to open a nutrition practice, my first business. No one in my family is an entrepreneur. Nobody's ever owned a business before.
Speaker 1:I had no idea what I was doing and the benefit was is I didn't know what I couldn't do, so I didn't have any negative voices in my head saying you're stupid, you can't do this. So I opened up my practice, grew it really really quickly. There was a real need for it in the area where I lived and then three years later, sold it, went to work for Life Is Now and David Nagel and then worked my way up through his organization and was CEO for six years before I left a couple of years ago, just to do my own thing. My kids are grown and flown and I wanted a little bit more flexibility. So now I spend my time really kind of partnering and digging into small businesses, especially law firms. Honestly, I work with a lot of law firms, helping them kind of remove the resistance to their own growth. In my spare time I'm traveling I have a dog, jack, who's completely and totally emotionally unavailable. He is a cattle dog and a healer, but we love him anyway.
Speaker 3:So that's me. Had the opportunity to have conversations with you and your team over the years and really always love those conversations and you know leadership is such, a obviously such an important topic and so really excited to have you on here to kind of talk leadership and team building. But I want to start here, right. Like what does leadership, like even mean, right when? Like what does leadership mean to you, steph, what? What does it mean to be a good leader?
Speaker 1:So I'll tell you what it doesn't mean to me. Leadership doesn't mean authority. What I found out real quickly in in working as CEO of of a rather large organization, also in helping others build out their teams, is that I actually worked for my team. They didn't. They didn't work for me. It's my job as a leader to give them everything that they would need to be a success, because if my team is a success, then the company is going to be a success overall.
Speaker 1:So first off it's I really saw myself not at the top of this sort of hierarchical triangle but more as kind of the wind beneath everybody's sails, making sure that they had the training that they needed to be successful, making sure I'm having conversations with them, but weekly, daily how's, how are things at home? How are things with your family? How are you feeling about what you're doing here? Like really making sure that I'm setting them up for success, just like a. You know, a coach on a pro sports team would take a really active role in all their team members, because it takes those team members to win that championship and if they're not working at max efficiency, capacity, happiness, then you're not going to achieve that championship. So for me, leadership is really about mentoring and supporting the people that work with me.
Speaker 2:Here's a quick question what if your marketing brought in more clients who actually respect you, pay on time and don't nickel and dime you? That's exactly what we help solo and small law firms do at Spotlight Marketing and Branding. We focus on what we help solo and small law firms do at Spotlight Marketing and Branding. We focus on keeping you top of mind with the people who already trust you, so you get better clients more often. Let's talk about what that could look like for your firm. When you book a discovery call, you can check the podcast description for a link or you can go to growmylawfirmfastcom. That's growmylawfirmfastcom. All right, let's get right back to the episode.
Speaker 3:So you work with a lot of law firms. We work with a lot of law firms, probably primarily law firm owners, you know, listening to this and here with us today, and so tell me if you see this differently. But I feel like leadership is almost uniquely challenging for a lot of law firm owners just because there's, you know, a very real pressure to also be doing the legal work so that you can, you know, bill out at $400 an hour or $450 an hour, right, and I feel like it's tough for a lot of law firm owners that I have conversations with to really, I don't know, feel the return on investment for that time that is spent doing what you just described setting other people up for success and helping them succeed when you know the law firm owner might be the highest hourly biller in their firm. So, like, do you ever see that challenge? Like, how do you like, what do you think about that?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I think the challenge is prevalent with law firm owners. I think one's because, like they go to you know, a law firm owner goes to school to learn law, right, they don't go to school to learn business and how to manage people, and so they start their business and they're in the doing and they're passionate about the thing that they're doing. Well, a large portion of them are anyway. And then you hit a point where you can't grow anymore unless you begin to delegate and you step out of that role. But because no one's ever taught you how to do this, because you lack the skills, you make a lot of mistakes and you get burned. And then you say things to yourself like well, no one can do it as good as I can, or I don't trust anybody to do the things that need to be done. And the whole problem in the beginning is because you just didn't know what you didn't know and you needed to learn lessons along the way in order to grow into the person that you needed to come to have a multi you know a multi seven or eight figure law firm. And I also think that there's something to be said about law firm owners that still want to practice law that don't actually want to be the leader of their firm, because you can be a firm owner and not be the primary leader, right, like that is a thing you can still maintain those, those cases that you want to, that you want to maintain, but then you need to do a really good job of hiring the right person who is the leader, who is passionate about building people, and hire them to manage and not even manage to lead your, your organization with you.
Speaker 1:I mean, when I was CEO of Life is Now. You know, david the founder didn't want to be the leader. That wasn't where his genius was. His genius was in actually teaching and creating content and coaching. My genius is in leadership and systems and operations and sales and marketing. So we made a really great partnership because he had his strengths in specific areas and I had my strengths in specific areas. So I don't think that there is a tried and fast rule that says if you want to go to your law firm, you have to grow into being a leader. If you don't want to be the leader of your organization, you have to be a leader enough to know that you need to hire a leader of your organization.
Speaker 3:That makes a lot of sense. And are you, you know, just from like a title perspective, does that usually look like, you know, a professional legal administrator or like a director of operations type, like what have you seen law firms do when they kind of go that route?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so that's a big area of gray for law firm owners, right? I've seen EAs that are incredible leaders within a law firm. I've seen PLAs that are incredible leaders within a law firm. I've seen COOs. I've seen chiefs of staff Whatever name that you give to it. The person has to have a passion and a level of emotional intelligence to be able to lead the organization and the people in the organization. So, whatever title you put on it, the whole thing is that they're skilled in communication, they're non-reactive, they have high emotional intelligence, they understand conflict and both how to diffuse it and how to step into it. So like there is a personality profile of good leaders in organizations and that person has to have that profile, whatever the title it is that you give them.
Speaker 3:Love it. That makes so much sense. All right, so for those of you who have just joined us in the last few minutes, we're here with Steph Tusk. Steph is a business strategist and coach and has spent a lot of time working with small businesses and particularly small law firms. So if you have questions for Steph, feel free to drop them in the chat. I also have some questions that have been submitted and so we will get to them. But just know is this is interactive, so feel free to sort of chime in and in the earlier stages of growth. Here is like that transition from like kind of trapped in the day-to-day grind right of being the person you know doing the work, doing the legal work, into really starting to build a team and and and step into sort of being a leader. Like how do you help early stage or what advice do you give to early stage law firm owners or small business owners as they just start making that transition out of kind of doing it all themselves?
Speaker 1:So I think when you're just a solo, you're a solo firm, you're a solo owner, you don't have a lot of support, you're doing all the work yourself. You need to take off of your plate first the lowest dollar tasks. So, for example, if you're an attorney that could be billing $400 or $450 an hour and you're doing admin tasks, you're doing tasks that you would pay someone $20 to $30 an hour to do, or maybe potentially even less, depending on where in the US you live now. So it becomes a mathematical equation and it really is non-emotional right, and that's what I love about. It's kind of. Also, what I love about working with attorneys is because you can appeal to their intellect and say look, I know this feels scary, but let's look at the math. If you're spending two hours doing a $30 task, that's $60. You could have been spending two hours doing a $400 an hour task, that's $800. You're actually stealing from your business by not hiring someone to take some of these things off your plate and you're throttling your own ability to make money. So it really becomes kind of a mathematical equation.
Speaker 1:My recommendation is generally to hire an executive assistant first, which is usually met with resistance because I hear excuses like well, I don't have. Can I swear on this, I don't have my shit together, right, I don't have my shit together. What do I tell them to do? I'm like you don't think of those crazy people that go in and clean out people's closets, right? You don't hire them because your closet's already clean. You hire them because you need someone to come in and clean up this mess, because that's not what you're brilliant at. An EA or a PA are the exact person you need to be able to start cleaning up the messes that you've created because you haven't had the time to do things properly or it's just not in your level of genius. So that's, in my experience, that's first hire. Take those lowest dollar tasks off your plate to free you up, to be able to sell more, to build capital so that you can afford the next hire and you build from there.
Speaker 3:Love that, you know, that sort of reminds me. So my co-founder and I, mark, who I think Mark is maybe here with us. So hey, mark, but you know, years ago, when we were kind of in the early stages of growing our business, we read E-Myth, right, the book that you know. I highly recommend anybody that hasn't read E-Myth and really wants to grow their business. I highly recommend you check out E-Myth by Michael Gerber. But there's a specific exercise in that book.
Speaker 3:He calls it making a task hierarchy and literally what you're supposed to do is just sit down and just document everything you spend your time doing over the course of like a week or two, right, and so in my case that was everything from, like you know, creating sales copy for webinars and you know email campaigns, and then it was little things like taking the trash out, right, and like answering the phone.
Speaker 3:And then the idea is you sort it from like highest value down to like lowest lowest value from like a dollar perspective, right. So, like you know, when I'm to your point, steph, when I'm taking, you know, the trash out, that's like a $12 an hour job versus, you know, creating a marketing campaign for the next quarter is, you know a thousand dollars an hour, job Right. And you literally just it's as simple as okay. How do we get the lowest value? You know tasks off of our plate and often that basically becomes your job description for your first hire. It's like, okay, I'm looking for an executive assistant to do these nine things, to then free me up to spend my time doing the more not more important, but more like revenue producing. You know higher level. You know tasks within a business. Does that make sense?
Speaker 1:Yeah, 100%. Another great resource I really like Emeth. I read it when I was very first starting out God 20 some years ago. But another great book that's just come out in the last couple of years that that really speaks to this and has a system for taking things off your plate is Buy Back your Time by Dan Martell. It's a fantastic book about how to delegate and actually literally buy back your time using those formulas.
Speaker 3:That makes a lot of sense. We will, Mike. Just mental note here in the show notes let's link to E-Myth, and it was Buy Back your Time by Dan Martell, by Dan Martell. Mike, let's link that out and share it with folks that were here today as well, because that sounds like a great read. Okay, so that's great, Steph. So transitioning just slightly, you know you do a lot in the realm of team development. I saw a phrase on your website that kind of jumped out at me. You talked about establishing psychological safety and how that's sort of just foundational to building a team. I hadn't heard that phrase before and it really did kind of jump out at me. Can you talk a little bit about what? What does that even mean? First off, yeah.
Speaker 1:So, um, psychological safety was actually coined by an author by the name. Well, actually she's a researcher by the name of amy edmondson. She wrote a really great book called the fearless, the fearless organization. So there's another book you can link to, um, fascinating book, and the importance of psychological safety in an organization is well, it's like tenfold. But let me put it to you this way If someone's afraid in your organization, they're going to cover up mistakes, they're going to not tell the truth, they're going to leave unexpectedly.
Speaker 1:You want them to feel 100 percent comfortable and at home in your organization. Not that there's not expectations, because of course there are always expectations. There's, you know, measures of success, kpis, all of that. Like you still have to, you know, do a good job to keep your job. But psychological safety really comes, really is based on building trust with your team members, and there's lots of different ways that you do that.
Speaker 1:The key thing that I see cripple law firms the most is this fear of their team of making a mistake. Because if they're afraid of making a mistake, guess what will happen. They will make a mistake and then they'll hide that mistake and then you'll find that mistake six months later and it'll cost you a whole lot of money and probably a bar complaint. So in the book the Fearless Organization, amy Edmonds goes actually into hospitals and showcases how a nurse's fear of a doctor actually costs lives. In a hospital, they see a doctor make a mistake, they don't say anything because the doctor has humiliated them previously and someone ends up getting hurt right. So that's like an extreme case of what happens when you don't have psychological safety in your organization.
Speaker 1:From a small business perspective or a law firm perspective, what it really looks like is a lack of innovation. People don't speak up, people hide mistakes. Your innovation goes down the toilet. You're that you have to be the chief problem solver. People aren't going to, aren't going to speak up and help solve problems. And there are really easy ways to build psychological safety. And the number one way to build psychological safety is admit it when you make a mistake in front of everybody, like that's the easiest way to do it and it's the hardest for most people to do, because in your past mistakes have equaled humiliation and mistakes were bad, but you really have to be a representation of mistakes being a good thing. So it would go something like wow, I really messed that up. Here's what happened, here's what I learned and here's what I'm gonna do to make sure that doesn't happen again. So you normalize the fact that mistakes are being made and you also ask people those three questions why did it happen, what did you learn and what are you gonna put in place to make sure this mistake doesn't happen again? And then, all of a sudden, everybody starts becoming okay with oh, this, this mistake happened. You take ownership of it. You don't go into berating yourself. There is no emotional, there's no anger.
Speaker 1:Another thing I see in small businesses is that the owner gets visibly upset about something and angry, which then immediately causes everybody to shut down. Because, guys, 70% of your team is conflict diverse Across the board. Research shows it. 70% of your team has a difficult time with conflict. So if you're angry, they feel uncomfortable, they begin to feel afraid, they begin to worry for their job, they shut down and you actually hurt psychological safety. So it really is not about saying, oh, mistakes are not a big deal Like, go ahead and make as many mistakes as you want. It's really about saying I've made a mistake, here's what happened, here's what I've learned and here's what we're going to do to make sure it doesn't happen again. And here's what we're going to do to make sure it doesn't happen again. And that strategy right there will build psychological safety so quickly when people realize that you're okay and you admit your own mistakes and then provide a format for them to feel safe doing the same thing.
Speaker 3:That's awesome. Love. That Very cool. Okay, so one of the sort of like I don't know, interesting conversations. I feel like this is kind of an ongoing conversation still in the realm of team development. You know, I hear this spectrum right of how people, how business owners, talk about their team and think about their team, and I would describe the spectrum as like, on one end you have the people that kind of feel like we're one big family, right, and they use the word family and they, you know, they talk about, you know we're a family here, and then maybe on the far other end of the spectrum is, I would just say, completely performance oriented. Nothing matters besides performance, right, and this isn't a place to be friends. And I've seen business owners make, you know, compelling arguments for being different in different points on that spectrum. But I'm really curious your take on that dichotomy between, on one end, yes, you obviously want to like the people you work with, but where do you fall on that? How do you think about that?
Speaker 1:So I absolutely believe that your team is not your family. I mean, let's be honest, most of us have incredibly dysfunctional families that we can't get away from. We don't want to recreate that in our organization. So I like to think of it again as an analogy of the sports team, right? So each person in the organization is responsible for being the very best at their role. That's their responsibility and it's your responsibility as a leader to help grow those people into being the very best at their role, because if there's someone that's not the very best in their role, then they're going to bring. That's going to affect the entire, the entire organization, right? So you can't fire your family Like you can. You can ignore them, you can tiptoe around them, you can walk on eggshells around them, but you can't fire your family.
Speaker 1:An organization is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a family. You're a team. You are working together for a common goal, and this brings up the importance of vision in the overall organization. If you have a group of people and they don't know what they're working toward and they don't know why they're important in that vision, then you just have a bunch of people checking things off their list, right? So the idea is that you are a team, you are a group of individuals, you are all aligned and passionate about this one vision where you want to go, how you help people, whatever that vision is, and that creates accountability, because people are like well, this vision is why I'm doing what I'm doing, right? And if someone's going to get in the way of us doing, of us hitting this vision, then that person needs to go.
Speaker 1:And again, you can't just kick people out of the family, right? So it's very much team being completely detached from your team does not a good leader make Like? If you look at and study some of the best leaders over history, whether it's military leaders, sports leaders, they're highly involved in the lives of their followers or their team members. They know if they're going through something at home not that that's going to affect whether or not they keep them or let them go, but they're there as they actually care about the individual. But that caring doesn't cancel out the fact that everybody's there to perform at a certain level. Does that make sense?
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. I love that, Okay so, Steph, so taking a few questions from chat, and then also I'm going to pull up a few questions that were kind of submitted in advance here. So Fannie asked what are some easy, actionable items a law firm leader can take to set a clear vision and communicate it to their team.
Speaker 1:I love that question. So first, I have a great resource to recommend. It's called Vivid Vision and it's written by Cameron Herold. Cameron used to be the COO of 1-800-GOT-JUNK right Like he grew that. He was COO and grew that organization I don't know like 10 times or something. And the key reason that that organization grew was because of the vision.
Speaker 1:And let me get something really clear A vision is not a mission statement. A vision is not a financial goal. Your team members don't care how much money you want to make, they don't. That's not a vision. A vision is something they can feel, something that they can listen to and see themselves being a part of, something that's highly visual. And Cameron Herald actually leads you through that process in the book Vivid Vision. Once you've got that written and you've got it all written up and it's highly visual and you feel emotionally attached to it, that's when you share it with your team.
Speaker 1:But what's required for a team to buy into your vision is the ability to have a discussion about it. So whenever I brought in a new idea or whenever we redid our vision, I would always take my team through a list of questions. And that list of questions are what excites you about this vision? What doesn't excite you about this vision? What do you feel like you need to learn or new skill you need to learn in order to help us with this vision? Where do you think this vision could go off the rails, based on past experiences?
Speaker 1:So you create this conversation around the vision where people can actually express what they like about it, what they might not like about it, what questions they have about it. And then you finally ask them where do you see yourself playing a part in this vision? Because you may be really surprised the answers that you get from your team members about where they see themselves playing a part in the vision, because you see them one way but they see something very different. And what happens is you get total buy-in, you get 100% buy-in on that vision. Now then your role switches to talking about the vision constantly. So on your Monday meeting, your weekly meeting, you're reading a piece of the vision and saying guys, how do you think we're doing? You know getting, you know are we on the right path? Are the things that we need to change? You're constantly focused on this is what's going to get us to our vision and this is not what's going to get us to our vision. So you're in charge of the focus of the organization.
Speaker 3:Yeah, love it. Okay, so you talk so so I love that, and you know my like practical mind is is racing on that, and so it's like okay, because I know you know in the past I don't know if this is still something you currently offer but you and your team have facilitated retreats and things like that, which I assume are in large part around vision building. So, when you think about the process that you just described, is that the type of thing that a law firm should do annually? Is that something that should happen quarterly? Is that something that you know they should leave the office and go somewhere for a day or two, like? Do you have any recommendations on like? Just what's the best sort of context for?
Speaker 1:those types of conversations to happen. So when you're creating the vision, I suggest getting out in like go sit in nature, go go into a different environment where you can be really open and really creative, because that's really the hardest part of this whole thing is pulling out of yourself what it is you actually want to see. And the idea is that you set the vision three years in the future and there's a very good reason for three years. It's far enough that you can actually create change, but it's close enough that it's not too far away that you go into this like, well, five years, god, anything could happen in five years. So you set your vision for three years and then you just really look at every single individual part of your vision and you write down. If you were to take a cup and a time machine and go into the future three years, what are you seeing happening? Like, what are you seeing in three years in each of these businesses, each of these parts of your business? Then you write that all out. Then, once you've got it written out, and you feel really aligned with it and you can actually feel it in your heart when you read it. Right, you should be able, you should be emotionally connected to it, because that's where the power is. That's when you bring it to your team.
Speaker 1:Generally, when you're doing this with your team, you want to read through it, you want to post the conversation. That can take up to three hours, so it might be a half day retreat where you share this with your, with your team or not, and then it becomes like you talk about it all the time. If you hit, if you check something off the off the vision, something happens and you've achieved that. You talk about guys. You talk about guys. Look at this, we were all on board with this vision and look at what just happened. We just did this. Now there are some times where you know you don't think far enough in advance and you achieve your vision in the first eight months. Then you've got to go back to the drawing board and create a new vision. But definitely when you're creating it, you want to be a little bit more isolated. You want to be in a creative space and then, in sharing it with your team, you want to make sure that you allot at least three hours for sharing the vision and also the conversation around the vision.
Speaker 3:Yeah, Makes a lot of sense, okay. So question we got in advance which. I'm pulling this one first, because this is something I relate to, you know. So everyone tells me I need to delegate, but I'm a perfectionist and basically I'm afraid to delegate, right and and again, working with law firms and attorneys you know a lot of attorneys are, you know, we're kind of, you know, trained to be, to be perfectionist, right and so what type of advice you give to somebody who was kind of again in those early stages of, like, needing to let go of the reins a little bit, but it's scary, like where do you, where do you start that process?
Speaker 1:So you know, here's, here's the truth. Owning your own business is the fastest way to personal growth. Like you are, you are up against all of your own internal personal issues all of the time, whether it's you're doing sales, you're doing marketing, you're delegating, you're hiring, you're firing, you're pushing against all of the programming that that you adopted when you were a child. So you want you want a fast path to personal growth own your own business, because you're constantly going to be bumping against, up against your own shit all the time, and delegation is one of those key ones that people really struggle with, especially if you've been raised in a chaotic childhood where control was your safety, where you've learned that you need to be in control, because if you weren't in control, you actually were unsafe, and I see that a lot in law firm owners where they grew up in very chaotic childhood. In a very chaotic childhood, they were either the good boy or good girl, or the savior boy or savior girl, and there was chaos, and the control of their environment and the people around them is actually what kept them safe. Well, that's no longer serving you anymore. So it's time to grow through that, which is a lot easier said than done.
Speaker 1:I would say, with delegation, the idea is that you start small and you trust and verify. Right, do not ever just hire someone and give them everything and say go do this. It is a sequential, step-by-step approach to offload stuff from you onto someone else. You trust them to do the job and then you verify that they've done it and you bring it to them if they haven't. So it's a system of slowly, trust and verify and you just have to be uncomfortable. You just have to be comfortable being uncomfortable, because it's going to suck really bad at first until you get the hang of it and then, all of a sudden, your life gets easier and delegation becomes easier. Right, it's just something that you have to do if you're going to grow your business.
Speaker 3:Yeah, love it and you know something. Something you know I've heard and probably a lot of folks have heard, but it's helpful for me is you kind of have to just be okay with the idea that, as you're delegating things, it's not going to get done 100% exactly the way you would have wanted it to be done. What comes with that is knowing, you know, maybe knowing what areas, like, it's really critical that it's done 95% as good as you would have done it, and what areas it's okay if it's done 75% as good as you've done it. But just kind of like the theme there is just being okay with the fact that no one's going to do it exactly how you would have done it. Side note, maybe they'll actually do it better, you know you might actually it usually happens, yes, right.
Speaker 3:But like, and it's just, you just can't. You can't grow a business and continually do it all yourself. Right, like you just have to have team help. And like part of that is like they're not carbon copies of you, so they're going to do things differently.
Speaker 1:Right, exactly, and I like they're not carbon copies of you, so they're going to do things differently, right, exactly, and I I'm really a big proponent of videoing yourself while you're doing specific things and then creating a training dashboard so people can, so your, your team, can go in at any time and see what your level of expectation is for us for a particular task, rather than you know your assumption that they understand. Uh, because don't so like as you're, as you're thinking about delegating, just begin taking videos, whether it's a loom, whether it's on scribe, whether it's on on zoom, just take a video of yourself actually completing the task and talking through it, so that you create kind of a training board for any team members that you're going to hire.
Speaker 3:Yeah, love that. We use Loom extensively for exactly that purpose, right Of you know, and it's just, it's just not that hard Like you're doing the task anyways, record it, kind of talk through it and then not only do you have a then a resource that your team can refer back to, but over time as you sort of build that library and then you have, you know, you hire new people or you have turnover like it's pretty great when you've already got all of your sort of key tasks already documented and you don't have to reinvent the wheel each time you hire a new, a new employee, right, cool, okay, couple more questions here, steph, and this one this kind of jumped out at me again. I spent a little time on your website and you talked about sort of the need, as your organization grows, to shift from a reactive decision-making mindset to a more proactive mindset. Can you just talk a little bit about what that looks like?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so when you're first starting out and you're building your small business or your firm, you literally are reacting to everything because it's just you right. Like a client sends an email, you send an email back. You've got work that you need to do. Like you're just reacting to everything around you. When you really want to begin to scale your business, that you need to do Like you're just reacting to everything around you.
Speaker 1:When you really want to begin to scale your business, you want to be proactive, which means you're planning for things six months to a year in advance and reverse engineering what you want to create in your business.
Speaker 1:So you're switching from that constantly reacting to fires and putting out fires to proactively thinking through things and creating systems that will allow you to actually build in the way that you want to build.
Speaker 1:Because you only have so much energy and if you're constantly reacting to things, that's a huge energy suck that energy is now gone that you can't spend on growing because you're constantly reacting.
Speaker 1:So the idea is to pull yourself out of that reaction especially if you're prone to respond emotionally and start looking at the future and start reverse engineering from the future back, getting yourself project management software, making sure you've got tasks all loaded in your project management software, building out a marketing calendar six months to a year in advance, rather than deciding on Monday what your marketing is going to be for that week. So it really is like taking this longer term view of your, of your business, rather than just, okay, what's in front of me today, what needs to get done, what needs to be done so that I can do what I need to do tomorrow. What needs to be done tomorrow, that I, you know, that whole everyone knows what we mean to do tomorrow, what needs to be done tomorrow, that I you know, that whole everyone knows what we mean when we say reactive in business, because they're all like, yeah, that's me, I react to everything, I'm pulled in 10 different directions all at the same time, and that really needs to stop. When you're, when you're growing and scaling, Love it, Awesome.
Speaker 3:All right, Steph, this has been really great. Really really appreciate your time. I've got one more question for you, but for those listening, before we get there for those listening, we did have a handful of people that have kind of joined a few minutes into this, and also, you know people will be listening to this on our podcast. So just give a quick recap of kind of who you are and what you do and also how people can connect with you to learn more.
Speaker 1:Sure, I'm Steph Tuss. I'm a small business consultant. You can find me at stephtusscom. It's my website, and I work with small business owners to help remove the resistance to growth, whether that's hiring, whether that's operations, whether that's systems, whether that's sales, whether that's who you're being and all the different mindset issues that pop up when you're looking at growing a business. Which is probably the key thing that keeps you stuck in a small business is belief issues and mindset issues, and I just work one on one with with clients and helping them grow to whatever size they want to grow, whether that's they just want to make, you know, a million a year, or maybe they want to make 30 million a year, whether that's they just want to make you know, a million a year or maybe they want to make 30 million a year.
Speaker 3:Love it All right.
Speaker 3:So you know, I'm having conversations kind of every day with with law firm owners, small business owners and, you know, the last, the last couple of months, you know, I've heard a lot of sort of chatter and questions just about kind of we're in like this sort of weird economic time, right, and like you know, tariffs and what's that going to mean and are we going into recession and all of this and just curious, one of the things you know, I've listened to your podcast and David Nagel's podcast and you know I feel like you guys have always done like a really great job of kind of coaching people through like the ups and downs that just like inevitably, you know, are part of like running a business. So, like, what do you, what advice do you have for you know, law firm owners and small business owners that are just like a little concerned right now and kind of not sure what the economy is doing, and like, how do you, how do you process that? What do you share with, with your clients and people that you're speaking with?
Speaker 1:So a everything cycles. So what we're experiencing in our economy right now is is nothing new. If you go back in history, you'll see the cycles. So it's all a part of a cycle. It's all a part part of a correction. So it's nothing to be afraid of. It's something to be aware of.
Speaker 1:And my whole thing is pay attention. Pay attention to what your clients are doing. Pay attention to what your clients are doing. Pay attention to what your clients are saying. Give value.
Speaker 1:I think a big thing right now is that trust is at an all time low in the market because there are so much AI out there.
Speaker 1:People don't know if they're talking to AI or if they're talking to a real person. So making sure that you're doing a great job building your personal brand and showcasing that you are a human being who cares and you back your services up, I think is a great thing. I don't think it's worth it to be afraid of anything. I think that if you're paying attention, you can easily pivot. I mean, so many people were afraid during COVID and so many people made a heck of a lot of money during COVID because they were willing to pivot and change and kind of watch what the markets what the marketplace was doing. So I think you just need to be aware and be curious and really come out from behind the scenes like talk about the things that are important to your clients, give great value, be seen as the go-to source for whatever it is the service, whatever the service is that you offer, and I think you'll be just fine.
Speaker 3:Yeah, love that. And you know, one of the things that that, that that I always try to do and encourage people to do is look, look for the opportunities, right. And one of the things that I always see, like in COVID, and have seen maybe to a lesser extent in the last few months, is, you know, people from a marketing perspective, people pull back, right, and they're like, oh wow, we need to. You know we need to cut costs. We, we don't, we don't want to. You know, we don't want to spend on marketing right now.
Speaker 3:And it's like, man, what a golden opportunity when everyone around you is sort of, you know, pulling back, when everyone around you is sort of, you know, pulling back, and all of a sudden there's this vacuum, right, like, yeah, this is art marketing as much. And meanwhile consumers are still to your point, like they're still looking for help, they're confused. They may be more confused now than ever, and so I really and I don't think this is just being self-serving it's like this is the time to be bold in your marketing and this is the time to get out there and give value, and the fact that your competition is pulling back is all the more reason to go forward.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I 100% agree. This is where you want to be seen all the time everywhere, like this is where you double down on marketing so that people see you kind of as that beacon of light, and especially if you're not afraid and you are confident, because people who are afraid and not confident will immediately be attracted to you.
Speaker 3:Love it. All right, steph, this was an awesome conversation. We could talk all day, but you've got a busy calendar and I will let you get back to it. So, listen, thank you for being here. Thank you to those of you who submitted questions. Thank you for those who were here. Live with us, steph, it was a pleasure having you. Thanks so much for being here and just remind people one more time how to go find more information about you.
Speaker 1:Yeah you can just hop into my website stephtuffscom. I'm also on Instagram, so and yes, it is me that answers my DMs and also there's a link to my booking calendar there, if you ever want to chat.
Speaker 3:Wonderful Steph, thanks so much and have a great afternoon. Thanks you too.