Increasing Case Volume in Your Dream Practice

From Process and Magic Statements to Running a Dream Practice With Todd Villarubia

Last weeks episode we posted a series of viral quotes from our most recent guests

Todd Villarrubia: Now we got it down to where I'm literally putting out about five days a month with my law firm, yet we're still maintaining our top and bottom line numbers.

Narrator: Welcome to the Law Firm Growth Podcast, where we share the latest tips, tactics, and strategies for scaling your practice from the top experts in the world of growing law firms.

Narrator: Are you ready to take your practice to the next level? Let's get started.

Jan Roos: Hi there. Welcome back to the case school podcast. This is your host Jan Roos. And we're interviewing the law firm top 500. I'm here with Todd Villarubia of Louisiana wealth plan. And Todd posted some really impressive growth last year, 43%. And we're going to talk to him today about how he was able to accomplish that.

Jan Roos: So thanks for being on the show, Todd.

Todd Villarrubia: Hey, I appreciate the invite.

Jan Roos: All right. So getting started. So we kind of have a high level view of what you do today, Todd, but would you mind telling us a little bit of the origin story about how you got to where you are today?

Todd Villarrubia: I had always been entrepreneurial and after I got my law degree, I went and got my master's back.

Todd Villarrubia: law, [00:01:00] went and worked for a local New Orleans based law firm. And after a couple of years, just realized that I just, frankly, wasn't cut out for that. So I started my own firm. And at first it was just me, you know, my first year, I'll never forget. I, I grossed 19, 000. That was top line revenue. And but you know, I was, I was dirt poor, didn't know any better.

Todd Villarrubia: And it was a start. And every year for, I believe, I don't know, good Lord, probably 18 straight years, we had both top line and bottom line growth. So it's definitely been an evolution. There is no easy magic pill. I think anybody that tells you differently is, you know, just lying to you. But I do think that there are ways to take quantum leaps to grow your firm.

Jan Roos: So that's really interesting Todd. So as far as kind of the big moves that have happened, can you think about any of the, the big inflection points along your path that led to those quantum leaps?

Todd Villarrubia: Frankly, there's, there's three things, I guess I would point to it. The first is hiring my first full time employee.

Todd Villarrubia: If you're familiar with the E Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber, you know, he talks [00:02:00] about, you know, the problem, you really don't own a business when you're just a solo. I mean, you really are just self employed, even if you may have an SQL. Corporate LLC. And it's always, I think a big jump for somebody to hire that first employee because a little terrifying, you know, I mean, I, I think, like I said, we wound up doubling our top line revenue for several years, you know, with that first year, like I said, I think we did 17 or 19, 000 next year, we were.

Todd Villarrubia: Right under 40, you know, and then the next year we're right under 80. I think it was by that third year that I said, you know what, you know, me taking out the garbage and writing up all my own stuff. I mean, I need to hire somebody, but it was pretty terrifying because, you know, you start looking at, well, if I pay somebody back, back then, you know, I've been in this for 23 years, you can get a decent, you know, employee for, you know, 40 grand or so they could do a little bit, everything, you know, that was a big chunk, you know, but what.

Todd Villarrubia: Come to realize pretty quickly is that while, you know, once I get that person to be doing stuff that I was doing that I don't really need to be doing as a lawyer, I don't need to be answering the phones. I don't need to be handling [00:03:00] my books. I don't need to be necessarily even doing drafting. It's a way to then leverage your time, which really started then growing my business pretty rapidly.

Todd Villarrubia: You know? So that was, I think the first inflection point, the second inflection point was making the move to not only get, you know, paralegals, but then ultimately to get another tax attorney. And frankly, I wouldn't have had the guts to do that. do that. I mean, I, I'd been at one point in private practice for maybe 10 years or so I was recruited to head up the estate business planning section for the largest firm in my area.

Todd Villarrubia: And I decided to go because I knew I already had my own book of business. The worst thing that happens is it doesn't work out and I go back out on my own. And I guess that's a side note for everybody that's listening, you know, until you know how to rain make. I think it will always be under someone's arm.

Todd Villarrubia: I would submit to people that it is actually more important for you to learn how to generate revenue than even being a great technical lawyer, you know you can always hire better technicians. And if you don't think there's somebody that's a better technician than you, then I think you're being a little foolish and a little, you know, maybe need to be humbled.[00:04:00]

Todd Villarrubia: You know, I'm not. That's right. It's tax earning world. But I think I know how business owners think, and I think that helps me to help them get to a better place. So, you know, for me, that was another big jump when I went to that big law firm was hiring the first LLM that worked for me and I was like, my goodness, you know, how are we going to do this?

Todd Villarrubia: I think at the time we were up to maybe 360, 000 just back in maybe 2002 or so. We were doing like high 300, 000, I think at that point. And I was terrified this guy was going to cost like 120, 000. And I'm like, how in the hell are we going to afford this, you know? And lo and behold, we wound up, you know, The firm says, look, you don't worry about that.

Todd Villarrubia: What do you think you can fill them up with? I said, I don't know. I guess I can fill up a third of time. That's just a rough guess. Well, within two months, I had him a hundred percent full because what happens is, is as you give that work to a competent person, it then again, frees you up to even give better service to your best customers, go out there, look at your referral sources and really treat them well, so that [00:05:00] was a second kind of big, you know, thing within three years of that, two, three years of that.

Todd Villarrubia: We jumped from high three. like mid six hundreds of top line revenue. And then really the last piece, which really started about five years ago was when I finally, you know, and my stupidity finally came to realize that, well, you know, the very best apps have coaches. There's a lot of CEOs that have coaches.

Todd Villarrubia: Why in the world would I not have coaches? And I had heard about this guy, Patrick Wilson with Atticus, which was one of the larger practice management groups out there that are devoted to lawyers and that really became. came my entrepreneurial launching pad because, you know, he was the one who introduced me to e myth, which is all about getting written systems and processes in place.

Todd Villarrubia: And he helped me understand, you know, time management, time blocks that we implemented in our firm. He helped us understand the 80 20 rule that most people don't know about and how 80 percent of your revenue will often come 20 percent of your files. And actually it's called the Pareto principle. I mean, I really owe a [00:06:00] lot of success.

Todd Villarrubia: You know, it's like they say, you kind of stand on the shoulders of others. And that was really the. Coaching, I think was the third piece of, you know, after I felt like I learned a lot from him. I want to eventually move into a group called how to manage a small law firm with our John Robin and our John is just brilliant and they kind of talk in terms of like seven different working parts of every law firm, but it's also for business.

Todd Villarrubia: And I've gotten much clearer now on like, you know, what kind of financial reporting I should be doing, how to market better, how to sell, sell better. Now he was the one who kind of explained very simply to me that all of sales, for example, is really, it's something we do for sale. Someone not to someone.

Todd Villarrubia: And I think that's a huge mindset shift for a lot of people. They think of sales being an awful thing, but the reality is that the clients that come into my office are facing some pretty treacherous issues, you know, facing their own mortality, facing what happens if I, if I get divorced, facing what happens with my disabled child, they're facing, you know, what happens if I become a, they've got estate tax issues, they've got what happened.

Todd Villarrubia: My kids get divorced or lawsuits, all [00:07:00] of these major issues. So are we selling, you know, to them or are we selling for them when they're We're experts in this area. I would submit that we're selling for them. And all we're doing is we're helping them. All sales is about movement. They are currently in a spot that they have pain about, and we're going to help them get to a higher level and, you know, to where they want to be.

Todd Villarrubia: So all of a sudden, Oh, I sleep well at night. Cause I know if I die, I've got enough insurance to make sure my wife is protected. I know if I die that my kids aren't going to waste this money at age 18. As we set up testimony trust. I know if I die, you know, I no longer have 10 million estate tax problem that I used to have.

Todd Villarrubia: So. We can address all those to get the clients to where they'd be. So they stopped worrying about all this. Cause ultimately everybody worries about death and disability and divorce and all these things. There's a reason they call it the three D's, you know, and we help people do that. And I would submit at everybody on call, regardless of criteria has the same thing.

Todd Villarrubia: And that's a whole nother thing. I don't tell people, you know, people say, what do you do, Todd? Well, I don't say I'm a tax attorney. I don't say, well, I'm a board certified expert in estate planning. I don't say, you [00:08:00] know, I was recognized as one of the top 100 attorneys by work magazine in the entire country.

Todd Villarrubia: What I say is we help highly successful business owners protect their life's work from the government creditors and tax, because they don't give a shit, frankly, about me. They care about them. So, you know, by defining who I help, highly successful business owners, what do I help them with protecting their life's work, which is basically everything that they've saved and built and where am I protecting them from some of the biggest threats that are out there, taxes, the government and lawsuits and creditors.

Todd Villarrubia: Right. So it, boy, I tell you when I tell people that, you know, some people refer to it as a magic statement, whatever, it amazes me. And that's again, I learned that through good coaching. So the third real, you know, taking off point for me was the coaching that I've gotten through the last five or six years that have just taken us to a whole new level.

Jan Roos: Yeah. Todd, well that's a lot of awesome stuff and we got a lot to dig into there, but I'll be at, I was actually my next question and you know, the whole point of differentiating a lot of practice is something that a lot of people are afraid to do. And you'll see a lot of solos get stuck in sort of the, the general practice mode because they're [00:09:00] afraid to turn away work, especially when they have those.

Jan Roos: You know, those hungry leaner times, what a lot of us face when we're starting out to that magic statement point, it's, I couldn't agree more. Cause it's the kind of thing that's going to sound really, really good to the clients that you want to deal with. And it's not going to sound good to the people you don't want to deal with.

Jan Roos: But at the end of the day, you know, you're saving yourself time and being able to find work for the attorneys that you've trained in the stuff that you guys are really good at. And you're also doing them a favor to your previous point about, you know, getting the wholesales and really Kind of coming from the service mentality, you guys have developed this deep expertise in Louisiana tax law and a state law, then, you know, you'd be doing them a disservice if it wasn't for the fact that they would hire you.

Todd Villarrubia: Yeah. I mean, I'll give you a great example there. You know, one of the, you know, I know one of the questions you want to talk with me about is some of the trends I'm seeing and what I'm seeing in a state law. You know, when I first started 23 years ago, so much of this was driven by death taxes. You know, the exemption was 600, 000 and people didn't realize, for example, that, you know, benefit of an insurance policy was factored in.

Todd Villarrubia: So, you know, I could have a, back then a million dollar term policy with no cash value and having a [00:10:00] state tax problem. And a lot of attorneys didn't understand that a lot of clients didn't understand it. But my point was, was that if you owned a business and I had iOS, you probably have an estate tax problem, right?

Todd Villarrubia: And so there were so many people that were being driven by tax reasons. And even when the exemption went from 600 to a million and then to 2 million, three and a half million, there were still a lot of people. Well, now it's up to 11 million. So what I'm finding is you have what I would call. Almost call a commodification on a state planning practice.

Todd Villarrubia: And what people are doing is that they're sitting, you know, they've got people advertised newspapers everywhere and on radio. And I heard one guy literally on Groupon the other day saying we'll do a will for 75. Wow. Yeah, you know, and our take on that is, you know what, if price is your number one goal and not quality, then there are so, there are many, many, and I truly mean this.

Todd Villarrubia: There are many attorneys I will, I, my, me and my team can refer you to who are less qualified and less competent, but who will absolutely do it for cheaper. And if that's all you want, then you know what, we are not the firm for [00:11:00] you. And you know, it all gets down to, if you ever, boy, I'd highly encourage those of you that haven't heard of this, go to ted.

Todd Villarrubia: com, look at Simon Senex, why. It's a 15 minute program that literally changed how I communicate. I literally have to watch and I blew up this whole detailed website I had. And instead of talking about what we do wills, we do trust, we do family limited partnerships, we do private foundations, all the what, what, what, what, what I started talking about what we believe that we believe that you should decide where your assets go without government taking 40%.

Todd Villarrubia: We believe you should decide, you know, who's going to raise your children. If you unfortunately die too young, not some judge that you've never met. We believe that you should protect your kids from, you know, the threats that are out there with divorce and creditors. And boy, I tell you, it's a whole different way of communicating because it gets to the why of why we do what we do.

Todd Villarrubia: And you're right. I mean, at that point, most of my business owner clients, it's like it immediately catches with them. That's why our close rate is so high. We track all of this stuff, but I can tell you, we had one client that I'll never forget, they came. I started [00:12:00] talking about how we could eliminate about 10 million of death taxes and the finance advisor pulls me outside and she says, Todd, you know, just, you may want to ease up on this talk about trying to take the government out of the equation with, you know, 10 million.

Todd Villarrubia: And I'm like, you know, if they, because the clients are liberal, she said, you know, I said, you know what, that's fine. But you know, I don't think I'm the right attorney, you know, And they were going to arguably pay as a big fee. But I was like, you know, if we aren't on the same level here and we're not doing it for the same reasons, I don't know if I'm your guy, you want to go write a big check to the government.

Todd Villarrubia: Great. That's just not who I am. And it's all the people, you know, there's other ways you can write checks to the government, but you know, I'm just not your guy. So yeah, I think when you develop. It's a pure magic statement. It's really well done. And I think when you, you know, it immediately connects with people.

Todd Villarrubia: I think when you get real clear what niche you are in and the best example I can tell you there, Jan, is, you know, in how to manage a small law firm, there's one of the most successful firms there, a guy by the name of Eric Broll. And Eric, I'll never forget the first time I met with him. I'm like, so you're an estate planner, Eric, you know, how [00:13:00] you build this, you know, million dollar plus law firm I want to learn from course.

Todd Villarrubia: And he says, well, first of all, I wouldn't really call myself an estate planner. I said, well, I thought you did successions. He says. Yes, we do, but I don't really do estate planning. I said, wait, you don't do wills? He said, no. I said, you don't do LLCs? Nope. I said, so you're telling me like somebody comes in for a succession and you know that they need to do a will, you don't do that.

Todd Villarrubia: He said, no. And that's a great example of how people get nervous about going niche. But here's a guy that because only did succession, everybody in his city, everybody in the surrounding area, all the attorneys, even estate planning attorneys, they know when you have a succession, he's one of the top guys.

Todd Villarrubia: So it's almost like a niche within a niche. If you think about it, I'm kind of doing the same thing, frankly, where our firm is really starting to gravitate towards a national presence and really just going after, you know, two main practice areas, one for those clients that do have a state tax problems.

Todd Villarrubia: In other words, people that are above the 20 million limit, because we can, through a bunch of tools that we have, I can make 200 million literally disappear from debt access forever, [00:14:00] multiple generations, right? And then the second practice area we're doing is with asset protection, As you grow, your wealth becomes a major issue.

Todd Villarrubia: So we feel like both of those are national type issues. So more and more now we're starting to get a national reputation and starting to really focus in on that. And I know it's going to sound weird as an estate planner, but I'm literally looking to, you know, fairly soon get out of doing wills altogether, buy, sell agreements, LLCs, and we're referring that to people because the other people that do wills and stuff a lot, there's a lot of estate plans with wills and trusts that have no idea how to set up a dynasty trust properly or.

Todd Villarrubia: family owned partnerships, some of the high end stuff we do, and they'll arguably refer work to me if I refer, you know, some of the base work to them. So it, it winds up working for everybody, I think, when you, when you become niche. I mean, think about the whole world when I'm 51, you know, and when I was a kid, there was only three stations on the TV, you know, I'm not even gonna get into that, you know, there was no remote back then.

Todd Villarrubia: But, you know, now we've got a thousand stations on satellite, you know, I used to DJ, so I used to haul around all these [00:15:00] albums, you know, and if I wanted to switch from one song to another, I had to put a whole nother album on now with my phone, I can literally have an entire DJ set up with two, you know, iPhones, but two iPods and play the exact same song.

Todd Villarrubia: Beats per minute. I don't have to lug all those things around to come in. It's a long tail as a book on this that deals with how we're becoming hyper specialized and very niche. And I think the sooner attorneys start grasping that it's no different if I had a heart attack, which unfortunately I did a few years ago.

Todd Villarrubia: Oh

Jan Roos: geez.

Todd Villarrubia: Yeah. I wouldn't go to a podiatrist. Right. I mean, I'm going to go to the best cardiologist I find in the world, which I did in Cleveland clinic. So it's the same thing. And I think the sooner lawyers grasp that, I think the better off everybody's going to be. Right. And I think it's important to be a specialist.

Todd Villarrubia: I really do. It's a, you know, I think the fact, for example, that I have an LLM and tax really makes a big difference. I mean, you know, with these, these people, you know, there's a lot of people who are state plans that don't have a tax specialty that really they're missing out on some benefits, you know, and the clients are missing out is really the sad part.

Todd Villarrubia: So I do think getting hyper niche is a real [00:16:00] path to growth, but you have to be willing to cut off, you know, the C and D type cases. And that, that might be because you don't like the person or they're not going to pay you. You got to, each person has to find what a C and D is for us. For example, we have now.

Todd Villarrubia: I've twice started to go down the Medicaid route, like a lot of the state planners are with the increased exemption. And quite honestly, we just couldn't do it well. And for the first time in my career, I faced a practice that area that we just, I've tried twice now. And I just said, you know what, we got to stop doing this.

Todd Villarrubia: Let's refer all of the Medicaid longterm, you know, nursing home care type work to other highly qualified attorneys. And in turn, that's all they do there. When they've got a client that has an estate tax or a word about asset protection, hopefully they'll think of us.

Jan Roos: It's actually interesting cause I mean, as far as the referrals come in, that's definitely a really good way to build sources.

Jan Roos: But you know, the other thing too, to people might be listening to it. You know, that guy that you mentioned that, that poor sucker who was offering the 75 world's own Groupon, he probably has to do a half an hour consultation or an hour consultation with everyone that he's doing for that. And when you have that half an hour, there's only so many hours in the week that [00:17:00] you can have.

Jan Roos: And you know, when you're sitting down with somebody like that versus somebody who stands to lose. 20 million from the death tax. You know, you're obviously going to be getting a better billable for that. So, you know, it's, it's super important. And I kind of wanted to dig in a little bit on that Todd.

Jan Roos: So, you know, we have this issue with commoditization kind of switching a little bit into the tactical stuff, how you're getting these higher net worth individuals into the door.

Todd Villarrubia: I've always used that as being kind of a combination of three different things. And those three things I would submit are experience, expertise, and your systems and people is kind of the third thing.

Todd Villarrubia: So when I say experience, you know, I've had attorneys that have, you know, worked for me that frankly have never filed a seven or six, which is like a federal estate tax or gift tax return seven or nine. And even though they've been estate planners their whole life, you know, so I think having the experience of over two decades of working with people, it lends a certain comfort level to both the client and the attorney.

Todd Villarrubia: Advisor that we're a known quantity. You know, they, they're unfortunately, what I found in particular in estate planning is that there's a [00:18:00] lot of litigators that hate litigation and they finally say, I've had enough of this. I'm gonna go get a more genial practice. I'm gonna become an estate planner. And I literally had a conversation not even a year ago with a person.

Todd Villarrubia: I will spare them because, excuse my French, I tend to curse a lot, but , you know, I truly wanna strangle her. I mean, she said she was an estate planner, she was a former litigator. I mentioned something about just like a testamentary. Trust, which, you know, all I can tell the people who don't know what that is.

Todd Villarrubia: It's kind of like a state planning basic one on one, right? And she didn't know what that was. And I was like, how dare you, how dare you call yourself in a state plan when you don't even know the most basic stuff and you're going to advertise to the public that you're in a state planner and you don't even know the basics.

Todd Villarrubia: You're going to harm someone. It's the same thing with a lot of the state person, in my opinion, who go around selling the living trust in certain state living trust makes sense in other states, not so much. And there's a wide debate among the estate planning community. And I've always viewed it as. Look, I don't, you know, you do whichever you feel in your good conscience is right for the client and your professional [00:19:00] opinion.

Todd Villarrubia: But if you're going to do the damn living trust, then make sure you fund it. And if you got to tell the client that he's got to pay you more money so that it's effectuated, go do it. But I can tell you in my 23 years, I've literally seen hundreds and hundreds of these living trusts. That aren't funded, sometimes not at all.

Todd Villarrubia: So all these promises that they made the client are actually a lie. And I believe it should be grounds for malpractice personally. And so it's stuff like that, where I really think that the experience comes into play. I think the expertise comes into play. So obviously somebody who has been doing nothing.

Todd Villarrubia: Thing, but a state and asset protection and business and tax law, their whole career for, you know, two decades is always gonna know more than somebody who just switched over a year ago. Right? I mean, they haven't been through the rodeos we have, you know, and then finally it's your system. So, you know, starting with reading the E myth and then continuing on with, you know, we, we actually hired a fractional COO at our firm and we started developing literally.

Todd Villarrubia: Processes, policies, procedures, checklists, systems for everything we do at the firm. This is how we answer [00:20:00] the phone. We've developed what we call SKUs, which is like step by step instructions, who needs to do what and what our costs are to, to, to produce a given line of business. Right. And we literally started putting all of this stuff in writing.

Todd Villarrubia: Why? Because once you start hiring people, you quickly learn that it's wonderful until they walk out. And then when they walk out, all hell breaks loose because all that institutional knowledge leaves. I remember my first full time employee, when she left, I was like, Oh my God, my, you know, how am I going to handle this?

Todd Villarrubia: Because she knew all my clients, you know, all of my key advisors, she should advise were horrible, which ones are good. She knew how to run my books. She knew what all my passwords were. I mean, she leaves. I mean, before we had written systems, that was a nightmare, right? And as other people left, same kind of problem.

Todd Villarrubia: And it wasn't until we started developing rent systems. And now when we hired somebody like, okay, for your position, here's the stuff you need to generally know about the firm and for your position, here's the stuff you need to know for your position, and we have literally, we have Videos. We have written systems.

Todd Villarrubia: I mean, we have a 900 page ops manual so that, you know, the whole idea is the systems run our business and our people [00:21:00] run our systems. And that really, like I said, it was kind of with the coaching that we've got kind of the third quantum leap that we saw as a harm.

Jan Roos: Yeah, that's awesome stuff, Todd. So, I mean, this is something that a lot of people, I'm sure this sounds like, you know, the heaven's such scenario for a lot of people having the actual numbers that are running in their system and being able to track that stuff, I would bet if you pulled a hundred law Firms, you might find one or two that actually know what their profit margin and I give them services.

Jan Roos: And you know, that obviously informs what you guys want to do moving forward. I mean, you'd spoken about working in the Medicaid division. I'm sure some part of the decision not to move forward with that was based on the numbers that ended up coming from that you're obviously moving up to higher and higher levels of, of managing this stuff as you build your team to take care of kind of the lower level stuff.

Jan Roos: Now, as far as what you were concerned with, like, what are the key metrics that you look at when you're determining whether the firm's moving in the right direction or not?

Todd Villarrubia: We start developing key performance indicators. And the idea was, it was based on some stuff I learned through entrepreneurs organization and a guy by the name of Vern Harnish, who wrote a wonderful book, Secrets of the Rockefeller Habits, that's [00:22:00] all about strategic planning, which we do.

Todd Villarrubia: And I learned a lot about KPIs, you know, from him and then subsequently read other books and so forth. And one of the things we started doing was literally trying to track, you know, two KPIs, Per, I guess the best way to put this would be two KPIs per section of my firm. So what I mean by that, two KPIs for marketing, two KPIs for sales, two KPIs for our production or factory, two KPIs for finance, two KPIs for the CEO.

Todd Villarrubia: Maybe my mind's at, you know, two KPIs for our physical plan. And literally the whole idea is we then assign people on my team, each one of those divisions, if you will. And then we had a very, very. very clear picture of what we're looking at. So as a simple example on marketing, we knew that for many years, we averaged about 12 new files per month of at least initial conference, I guess I should say.

Todd Villarrubia: So we knew that that was one of the marketing metrics that we had to track. How many initial conferences do we have per month? And then secondly, again, going back to that [00:23:00] Pareto principle, that 80% Of the benefit comes from 20 percent of the effort. That was again, Patrick Wilson from Atticus taught me that.

Todd Villarrubia: And I literally, I went back and looked at our files and I said, you know, let's look at the top 20 files, as far as revenue generation, 20 percent of my files generated a little bit over 80 percent of my revenue. So what we started saying is that we call them 10 K plus files, you know, that when we even got clear on which types of our files generate at least 10, 000.

Todd Villarrubia: And on average of those 12, we had three, you know, initial conference. Whereby it was a potential 10, 000 plus file on average per month. So from a marketing standpoint, those were our two KPIs and the whole idea was, okay, what do we need to do to meet both of those? Well, sometimes we need to follow up with somebody canceled.

Todd Villarrubia: Sometimes it means, you know, that really need push these guys that are potentially larger cases because you have to English, you know, when trying to sell, is it, are we going to spend a hundred hours trying to get somebody in for a nominal will, you know, maybe not, but will we [00:24:00] spend a bunch of time trying to get somebody back?

Todd Villarrubia: on a, an 80, 000 succession, you know, that's very complicated, maybe litigate it. Yeah, I mean, we should. So we started developing the KPIs and then developing some simple dashboards, frankly, where I can run the practice based on those metrics and assigning people to each of those. So I knew who was in charge or what.

Todd Villarrubia: And between that and the root systems, believe it or not, I'm down to, I'm actually only meeting with clients like three days a month now. And I've got two other businesses I'm involved with one that is working with the same exact clients, but instead of doing law, we're doing pretty much everything else for them.

Todd Villarrubia: So again, highly successful business owners, it's called Fountainhead Global. And with Fountainhead Global, we're doing. Doing not law, but pretty much everything else where we're helping them with tax mitigation and family governance, mission, vision, values, and pro IPA planning and all this other stuff.

Todd Villarrubia: This, the ability to run my law firm on systems so that I don't have to be working, I literally went from when I was, you know, a few years ago, working 60 hours a week to once those systems started getting developing, [00:25:00] you know, I no longer was working until midnight every Wednesday and on the weekends.

Todd Villarrubia: Then I eventually went to, I was taking every Friday off last year for the first I started taking one week off from the law. Law firm every single month and a second week once per quarter per month. So in other words, one out of every three months I was taking off two weeks and on the other months I was taking off one week.

Todd Villarrubia: Now we got it down to where I'm literally putting in about five days a month with my law firm. Yet we're still maintaining our top and bottom line numbers because we're so systematized now. The law firm is not a dependent upon me and I would submit to y'all, it's not just about my time. It's about that.

Todd Villarrubia: I was putting my, in all of you who are listening, you're putting your client at risk by you not have a system because it. If you go down disability death, I mean, my own father, a stroke was a powerful, that's hard quadriplegic at 47. If you go down, all your clients are going to suffer. If they're so dependent upon you, your poor employees who are depending upon you for their salary so that they can send their kids to better schools and so that they can afford better homes.

Todd Villarrubia: You're literally screwing them all. You [00:26:00] are literally screwing them all by not having risks. You're literally screwing them all by not pricing correctly because when you price correctly, you can build in extra profit, which you can then reimburse faster. into learning and growing your systems and into learning, become a better technician and a better entrepreneur and a better manager, all those things, right?

Todd Villarrubia: And when you undercut raise to the bottom, we've seen what happens with that China, right? I mean, everybody knows, unfortunately, that, you know, if it's made in China nowadays, it's bad. Probably going to be kind of crap. Well, why is that? It's because they're trying to do everything on the cheap. Right? So why is it any different with a law firm?

Todd Villarrubia: So I would just submit that there's a whole different way to look at this. And look, we lose some business because people say, Oh, Villa Ruby, Oh, it's too expensive. And I always say, well, relative to what, if I charge you 50 grand more than the next guy, but I saved 200 grand on something he had no idea about.

Todd Villarrubia: Does not, it doesn't have my experience or expertise, which one does better for the client.

Jan Roos: Absolutely. This is something that's really tough, especially when people are starting out. The, the transition to getting to the point where. Where you have the confidence to do that is obviously [00:27:00] something that takes time, but no, I couldn't agree more.

Jan Roos: And it's like, you know, going back to the poor guy who does all the stuff on Groupon, it's really going to be tough for him to ever scale a business and get himself out of it because he's never going to have the margin to hire people. And that's, you know, kind of the engine for a lot of this growth.

Jan Roos: Speaking about that a little bit. I knew you were running a tight ship, Todd, but I didn't realize it was tight to the point that you're only spending a handful of days of the month working on the actual law firm, which is fantastic. And if anyone finds this something appealing, I would definitely recommend re listening to this episode to see how Todd was speaking about how to get there.

Jan Roos: But obviously something that has to happen when you can take that kind of step back from the firm is hiring good people. So I kind of wanted to ask you, obviously, the systems are a very important part, but can I ask you about sort of your philosophies around hiring and how you've gotten such good people around you to help you run this firm?

Todd Villarrubia: Being an entrepreneur's organization, and I was also in this stage for a while and just the nature of my practice, right? I mean, I'm primarily again, working with highly successful business owners. You start to learn a couple of things. And as I regularly point out people, there's two things I know about just about every business owner, whether you're a [00:28:00] small law lawyer, you know, small firm lawyer, or whether you're a CEO of a 50 million widget company.

Todd Villarrubia: There's two things I find. Pretty rarely. Number one is that the single biggest source of pain for the owner is almost always HR. And I'm clear about why that. And number two is that the biggest thing holding every single person back that's a business owner is that in the world of knowledge, there's a small piece of stuff that we know that we know, and there's certainly a small piece of stuff that we know that we don't know, but the much bigger piece of the pie of knowledge is all about stuff that we don't even know that we don't know.

Todd Villarrubia: So you know, before, before I did, I didn't know about Vernon. And then all of a sudden you'll learn it and you're like, wow, how can I now apply it? How can I execute on it? And we started developing things to then not only learn, but to grow and execute on it. Right? So for me, it poses, you know, with that eight, you don't have a business until you have employees.

Todd Villarrubia: [00:29:00] And unfortunately many of us, it's a huge pain point. And the reason is. Frankly, is that if you think about HR, it's nothing but the headaches of the owner, right? I mean, by and large, you know, I mean, I'm talking, I can remember I spent months with one of my employees, my right hand at the time, trying to figure out what an exempt employee was and what a non exempt employee was under the employment laws, right?

Todd Villarrubia: And it was frankly, just very aggravating as a nice way to put it, because we spent all this time trying to figure out what the rules were, what we could and couldn't do. And guess what? We ain't making any money. We're not helping anybody. Right. All we're doing is we're trying to comply with damn government's regulations and I get why they're there.

Todd Villarrubia: But you know, HR problems, whether it's because somebody's out of sick and we're dealing with this today where a good part of my team, including myself, isn't in Friday, so I had to, you know, figure out a way to get somebody to answer the phone and get so many people out on vacation. Everything. So I would recommend that there's a bunch of resources out there.

Todd Villarrubia: So, you know, there's John Maxwell's five levels of leadership. You know, I do believe that [00:30:00] building an A team is incredibly important to your success. Apple doesn't become Apple without really brilliant people. It's not just jobs and laws. Right. And I've been blessed that quite frankly, we've gotten better and better on how to hire, how to filter out the bad mail, you know, bad resumes.

Todd Villarrubia: So for example, you know, one of the things that I learned from my our job at how to manage was, you know, stop running ads that say, Oh, please, please, won't you come work for me? We're so great. You know, you're going to love working with us. And that it's just the opposite. We're like, if you are going to show up late for work, do not apply for this job.

Todd Villarrubia: If you're going to sit around gossiping about, you know, wasting half the day, instead of helping our clients, you know, complaining about your spouse, don't take this, don't apply for this job. If you aren't going to be good with details, please don't apply for this job because we need people that are good with this and it's all the stuff about what we don't.

Todd Villarrubia: Want, and it's this ridiculously long ad. And we then ask them to do two simple things. Number one, make sure that you attach your resume in a PDF format that has been cleaned of all of the [00:31:00] metadata. And number two is please, in your email response, you know, I'm a big iron ran fan, so I'll use one of the iron ran characters, you know, put Howard Roark in the subject line.

Todd Villarrubia: And I then tell my staff, we create a special, you know, email info ad, whatever, and I tell my staff person who reviews the resumes, if they don't have Howard Roark. in the email. I don't care how the hell how experienced they are, how wonderful they are, whatever. If they can't follow that one instruction, do not even look at it.

Todd Villarrubia: Immediately put it in trash. And that literally, believe it or not, wipes out about 75 percent of the response. Now we've had some people say, you know, they've cursed us out for doing that. Why are you doing this? Who do you think you are? I'm like, well, I'm somebody that cares about my client and I'm somebody that's going to pay you higher than scale.

Todd Villarrubia: And maybe the reason you're don't have a job right now is because you think this is ridiculous.

Jan Roos: That's a great filter for the attention to detail. Cause I mean, God forbid you know, if them. I'm not going to do this on something that's contingent on them getting a job. You know, who would say what's going to happen on some random Tuesday, six months into hiring them when they miss a detail on something that could be really consequential when somebody ends up [00:32:00] passing away.

Jan Roos: Amen, bro. Yeah, man. That's really awesome. And you're like, look, I'll say this Todd. I mean, I've got some books from that, that I'll absolutely be checking out myself. I mean, this has been a really, really good source of stuff for, for management for any company, to be frank. You know, we've got some awesome growth that's happened to this.

Jan Roos: You've obviously carved out quite an awesome lifestyle for yourself. What's next for Louisiana?

Todd Villarrubia: Wealthline Law Group is the name of the firm. L. A. Wealthline is the website. But again, what I'm envisioning, in fact, we're getting ready to host the first event. I haven't even figured out how to market it yet.

Todd Villarrubia: But what we're going to do is we're going to bring some of the nation's top experts in to specifically talk about strategies that really make sense for the high network community that don't really make a lot of sense for the middle or even upper middle class. So we've got Bob Kiebler coming in. We haven't yet.

Todd Villarrubia: We've got to secure all this, but we've already been in discussion. He's agreed to come. He's one of the nation's top, you know, CPAs. And he's going to be talking about all the beautiful things we can do under Trump's new tax law. You know, I've got Doug Lodmill coming in as one of the nation's, you know, [00:33:00] experts on asset protection planning.

Todd Villarrubia: I'm going to be speaking on, you know, family loan to partnerships and why dynasty trust makes so much sense. And the whole idea is frankly, between that event, and then I'm going to start speaking to EO groups, hopefully around the country, eventually around the world about how the needs of people. So a lot of people don't realize.

Todd Villarrubia: Believe it or not, only 4 percent of businesses and all of the world do a million or more of revenue. And people don't realize how elite they are when they reach that level. And an EO, you have to be a member, you have to own your business and you have to do at least a million. So there are needs that are unique for somebody.

Todd Villarrubia: There are things we do for people that are, you know, in the high income or high net worth area that really, it wouldn't make sense for somebody making a hundred grand to do. And look, I'm not trying to disparage the people that are, that are frankly, if you're making a hundred grand, you're way above middle class.

Todd Villarrubia: I mean, I have a child. So. America only makes 50 grand, believe it or not. And I, that's who I come from, by the way, not even that. I mean, my dad dropped out of high school and my mom just did high school. I think I was the first person to go to college, much less law school. So it's not because I'm an [00:34:00] elitist.

Todd Villarrubia: It's just that, you know, I believe that business owners are the fountainhead of human progress. That's why I love Ayn Rand so much. I mean, you know, we now with the iPhone at more, you know, knowledge and power than a king had 20 years ago. I mean, really think about that. It is democratized knowledge and information.

Todd Villarrubia: And it's all because of the employees. That is who Apple is, please. And it's also because of the bravery and the risk that jobs and wives took, you know, with this brilliant idea that they had. Right. So I'm, I honor them. I'm business owners in my book are heroes. And the whole idea is that I can only spend so much time helping people.

Todd Villarrubia: I'd love to help all the people who have Medicaid problems. They really do. I'm awful. My own aunt got stuck in it and she spent over a million dollars on our longterm care. And I think it's awful. You know, that, that somebody, I think as a country, we should take care of those who can't help themselves.

Todd Villarrubia: Because my time is finite, I choose to work with kind of a highly, highly successful business owners. And that's where I'm looking to do is really kind of start expanding it nationally because the clients that need my help with Well Planned Law Group [00:35:00] frankly also need Fountainhead Global, you know, my other company to do all the other non legal, non law related stuff.

Todd Villarrubia: So that's where I'm looking to do is really, you know, if anybody's listening, of course as a fellow lawyer, we can split fees and stuff like that. But if y'all have anything, obviously we're always interested, you know, for the high network clients. I'll fly anywhere. I'd love to try. So that's kind of what I'm looking to do.

Todd Villarrubia: I love to travel. So if I can combine speaking with, you know, meeting with high network clients that are business owners for both of my companies, then that's kind of where we're looking to go.

Jan Roos: Yeah. And that actually gives us a great segue into the next question, Todd, which is what's the best place to find you online?

Todd Villarrubia: Either www la Wealth plan it's not law. Well plan. Some people get confused LA for Louisiana Wealth Plan that, you know, we had this idea for a while that we were literally much like Edward Jones gonna build out an a high-end estate planning practice throughout the country. That was our BHA, our big hair audacious goal.

Todd Villarrubia: And then, you know, found AG fountainhead came along. It's such a bigger opportunity that I had to kind of put that first dream kind of on the side, you know, and kind of go build that fountainhead. So [00:36:00] that's one way on the legal side, on, you know, it's kind of. called a family office, but very different on Fountainhead side.

Todd Villarrubia: It's just fountainheadglobal.Com once again, there we can, we've got referral fees that we can pay even non attorneys on Fountainhead side because we're not doing legal work. It's all about helping people grow and maximize their business, family, and personal lives with Fountainhead. So we've got VIP healthcare and family governance and growth strategies for the business, HR solutions for all those problems.

Todd Villarrubia: And it's something that's a higher calling even than my own law firm. So please feel free, you know, reach out to me. My direct email address is [email protected] or Todd at townheadglobal. com feel free. I've gotten real clear. The more people I help better my life. It comes, so I'm sincerely saying this.

Todd Villarrubia: If I can help anybody that's listening to this, don't hesitate to reach out to me. It might take a little time for me to get back with you, but I've gotten real clear. The more people I help and the more deeply I help them, the better my life becomes. So I'm committed to help and serve other people.

Jan Roos: Well, thank you so much for that, Todd.

Jan Roos: That sounds like super generous of you to [00:37:00] offer. And anyone who's listening to this podcast, for one, I mean, Thank you so much for all of the detail that you've given and scaling this practice and really getting to what most people would consider a dream outcome as far as where this is going to go when somebody ends up striking out to form their own law firm.

Jan Roos: And again, I would definitely encourage anyone who has heard what kind of stuff Todd's been up to and wants that for their own life to definitely relisten to that. Check out some of those books that he's mentioned. I think this has been a super valuable podcast. So yeah, thanks again, Todd. I really appreciate it.

Jan Roos: Thank you, Jan. I really appreciate the opportunity. So this is another episode of the K School podcast, and we'll see you guys next week.

Narrator: Thank you for listening to the law firm growth podcast for show notes, free resources and more head on over to casefuel. com slash podcast. Looking forward to catching up on the next episode.