Law Firm Profitability in the AI Era: Finding Your Profit Zone (Ep. 183)
What The Profit Zone can teach law firm owners about AI, pricing, and building a business that creates real wealth
A successful business can be surprisingly unprofitable.
That is one of the most important ideas culled from The Profit Zone, the business strategy book written by Adrian J. Slywotzky and David Morrison.
For years, businesses have been taught to chase market share, grow revenue, hire more people, acquire more customers, and become the biggest player in their market.
But market share does not guarantee profit.
Some of the world's most recognizable companies such as IBM, General Motors and Kodak were market leaders when their profitability began to collapse.
The problem wasn't necessarily that they were poorly run.
Their business models had moved into a no-profit zone.
That same risk exists for law firms.
And artificial intelligence may be accelerating the transition.
The Profit Zone vs. the No-Profit Zone
A profit zone is simply the part of the market where a business can sustainably create and capture economic value.
A no-profit zone is the opposite: you can put enormous amounts of time, money, talent, and effort into the business, but very little of that value comes back as profit.
The danger is that a no-profit zone doesn't always look like failure.
You can have:
A full calendar
More clients than ever
More employees
Higher revenue
More cases
More work
…and still be building a business that isn't creating the wealth you expected.
This distinction matters enormously for law firms because lawyers have traditionally been rewarded for selling expertise and time.
But what happens when technology begins making some of that expertise and time dramatically less expensive?
AI Is Changing What Clients Value
Artificial intelligence is already being used across the legal profession for activities such as document review, legal research, summarization, and contract drafting.
According to statistics discussed in the episode, among legal professionals using AI in 2025:
77% used it for document review
74% used it for legal research
74% used it for summarization
58% used it for contract drafting
That creates an uncomfortable question for traditional law firms:
If AI can increasingly perform the work that clients have historically paid lawyers to perform, what exactly are clients going to pay you for?
The answer may not be more legal work.
It may be something much more valuable.
The Problem With Selling Hours
Imagine AI saves a lawyer 240 hours a year.
At an hourly rate of $350, that's $84,000 worth of billable time.
For a three-lawyer firm, that's more than $250,000 of potential billable revenue.
Under a traditional hourly billing model, efficiency can therefore create an economic problem.
The faster you become, the fewer hours you have available to sell.
But change the pricing model and the equation changes completely.
If the client is paying for an outcome rather than the number of hours required to produce it, efficiency becomes an advantage.
The lawyer gets the work done faster.
The client receives value faster.
And the firm can potentially retain more of the economic value it creates.
The goal isn't simply to use AI to do more work.
The goal is to use AI to rethink what you're selling.
Stop Asking, "What Do We Do?"
Start Asking, "What Does the Client Really Want?"
This is one of the most powerful ideas from The Profit Zone.
Many businesses begin with their existing capabilities:
What are we good at?
Then they build products and services around those capabilities.
Slywotzky suggests reversing the process.
Start with the customer.
Ask:
What are the client's priorities?
Then work backward:
What does the client actually value?
How does the client want to receive it?
What offering will satisfy that need?
What capabilities and resources are required to deliver it?
This is what the episode describes as reversing the value chain.
For a law firm, that shift can be transformational.
Instead of asking:
"How can we sell more legal services?"
ask:
"What problem is the client actually trying to solve?"
Those aren't necessarily the same question.
Clients Don't Just Pay Your Fee
Another important concept from the episode is customer systems economics.
A client's cost isn't simply your legal fee.
Their real cost can include:
Time spent waiting
Repeated follow-ups
Uncertainty
Administrative hassle
Explaining the same information multiple times
Coordinating multiple professionals
Delays
Confusion about what happens next
A law firm that eliminates those hidden costs may create enormous value—even if the legal work itself isn't radically different.
Think about a client who doesn't simply want "a contract."
They may want:
certainty that the deal can close without unexpected problems.
A business owner may not simply want "tax advice."
They may want:
confidence that the business, taxes, wealth, and succession plan are working together.
The legal document is the deliverable.
But the outcome is the value.
Three Companies That Reinvented Their Business Models
The episode highlights several examples of companies that escaped commoditization by changing what they were really selling.
1. Madden Graphics: From Printing to Communications
Jim Donahugh company began as a printing company.
But instead of defining itself by the physical act of printing, Madden Graphics repositioned itself as a communications management company.
The printing didn't necessarily disappear.
The value proposition changed.
That's a useful distinction for law firms.
You don't necessarily have to abandon legal expertise.
You may need to stop making the expertise itself the product.
2. Swatch: From Watches to Fashion
Nicolas Hayek helped transform Swatch by changing the way the company positioned watches.
Instead of competing purely as another timepiece manufacturer, Swatch became much more connected to fashion, accessories, and identity.
The product was still a watch.
But the customer was buying something bigger than the mechanism inside it.
Law firms can learn the same lesson.
The legal work may remain.
But what the client buys can be much bigger than the legal work.
3. Charles Schwab: Keep Reinventing
Charles Schwab repeatedly redesigned its business as customer priorities changed.
It moved through different business models from discount brokerage to serving fee-based financial planners and eventually innovations such as OneSource.
The lesson isn't that there is one perfect business model.
The lesson is that successful businesses keep redesigning themselves.
That's particularly relevant to law firms in an era of AI.
The business model that worked five years ago may not be the model that works five years from now.
Build a Strategic Control Point
If you create value, you also need a way to protect and capture that value.
The Profit Zone calls this a strategic control point.
Depending on the business, that might be:
A powerful brand
A patent or copyright
A cost advantage
Distribution
Unique customer information
Control of part of the value chain
A specialized organizational structure
For a smaller law firm, a strategic control point might look different.
It could be:
A deep niche.
If you're the firm that understands one particular type of client better than anyone else, that expertise can become a competitive advantage.
It could be:
Owning the client information flow.
If you become the central point through which a client's legal, financial, tax, business, and planning decisions are coordinated, you become much harder to replace.
Or it could be:
Becoming the referral switchboard.
If you build a network of trusted professionals and become the person clients rely on to connect the right people to the right problem, your value extends far beyond billable legal work.
Your Competitive Advantage Has an Expiration Date
One of the most important warnings in the episode is that strategic control points decay.
What makes you valuable today may become commonplace tomorrow.
Technology changes.
Competitors copy.
Clients' expectations evolve.
New business models emerge.
That means business owners can't assume that today's advantage will protect tomorrow's profits.
The episode suggests that businesses may need to rebuild their business designs roughly every five years.
For law firm owners, that should be a wake-up call.
Building a successful firm isn't necessarily the finish line.
It's the platform from which you build the next version of the firm.
The Two Questions Every Law Firm Owner Should Ask
The episode highlights two powerful questions from Slywotzky.
Question #1: What Are Clients Really Buying?
Ask yourself:
What is the client really buying from you—and what will they want five years from now that they aren't asking for today?
That second part is crucial.
Clients may not be asking for something because they don't yet know it's possible.
The best businesses don't simply respond to today's stated demands.
They anticipate tomorrow's expectations.
Question #2: What Are You Afraid to Find Out?
Don't only ask your happiest clients how you're doing.
Ask your most demanding critic:
What am I afraid to find out?
That question can uncover problems that satisfaction surveys never reveal.
Maybe clients think your process is too complicated.
Maybe they don't understand your pricing.
Maybe they don't feel you're proactive enough.
Maybe they could get the same basic service somewhere else.
Or maybe the thing you believe makes your firm special isn't actually what clients value most.
You won't know until you ask.
What Should Your Law Firm Stop Selling?
Here's a practical exercise from the episode:
Identify one service or task your firm currently sells that AI will probably be able to perform adequately within the next three years.
Then ask:
What will we sell instead?
Don't wait until AI has already commoditized the service.
Start designing the replacement now.
Perhaps the answer is strategy.
Perhaps it's coordination.
Perhaps it's speed.
Perhaps it's certainty.
Perhaps it's business advice.
Perhaps it's a broader relationship with the client.
The answer will depend on your clients and your market.
But the question is universal.
The Real Goal Isn't a Bigger Law Firm
There is a temptation to measure success by the size of the firm.
More lawyers.
More revenue.
More clients.
More cases.
More offices.
But none of those metrics necessarily answer the most important question:
Is the business creating wealth and freedom for the owner?
A law firm can become extremely good at generating revenue while remaining mediocre at generating wealth.
And if the business consumes all of your time, it may not even be creating freedom.
That's why the profit-zone concept matters.
The objective isn't simply to build a bigger law firm.
It's to build a better economic model. one that creates increasing value for clients while allowing the owners to capture enough of that value to create wealth and freedom.
The Bottom Line
The future of professional services may not belong to the firms that produce the most work.
It may belong to the firms that understand what clients actually value and redesign their businesses around it.
AI is forcing lawyers to confront a question that successful businesses have faced repeatedly:
When the old source of value becomes cheaper, where does the new value come from?
The answer starts with the client.
What are they really buying?
What costs them the most?
What frustrates them?
What will they need next?
And what can your firm provide that technology alone cannot?
The law firms that ask those questions now will have a much better chance of remaining in the profit zone.
Because building the firm isn't the finish line.
It's buying you the time and resources to build what's next.
And ultimately, if your law firm isn't giving you wealth, the bigger question is:
How will it ever give you freedom?
Resources:
Profit First - Transform Your Business from a Cash-Eating Monster to a Money-Making Machine by Mike Michalowicz (Book)
The Profit Zone: How Strategic Business Design Will Lead You to Tomorrow's Profits by Adrian J. Slywotzky & David J. Morrison with Bob Andelman (Book)
Law Firm Financial Reporting Template Pack (Exclusive content)
Connect with Darren Wurz:
Transcript:
Darren Wurz (00:00.16)
There is one question that will determine your firm's next 10 years, and it's not how do I get more clients? Hey, friend, welcome back to the Lawyer Millionaire Podcast. I'm your host, Darren Wurz. Before we dive in today, I want to let you know about an exciting community that you want to be a part of. It's called the Lawyer Millionaire Community. If you've been a listener to our show for a while, it's time that you joined. We've got a ton of exciting events coming up.
Over a hundred law firm owners in the group and you don't want to miss out. So the link to join is in the show notes and we hope to see you there. Without further ado, let's dive in today. IBM, General Motors, Kodak, Sears, US Steel, and United Airlines were every one of them number one or number two in their industry at the exact moment their profits collapsed.
Market share did not save a single one of them. That is the opening argument of the book that we're reading this month, and the authors put it about as bluntly as a business book ever could. Market share is dead. And they said this a long time ago. This is an old book. Today we're talking about The Profit Zone by Adrian Slywotzky and David Morrison.
It's our book of the month for September, and it's the fifth book that we've read together this year. Here's the definition that the whole book turns on. The profit zone is the area of your economic neighborhood where you are allowed to earn a profit. Hmm, allowed. What does that mean? It's not where you work the hardest, it's not where you're the most skilled. It's where the economics of your industry permit you to keep the most money. And it's the exact
And the opposite concept also will help you understand it. Slywotzky calls this the no profit zone, and here's the definition. The no profit zone, no profit zones are the black holes of the business universe. In a physical black hole, light waves go in but never come back out. In an economic black hole, investment dollars go in and profit dollars never come back out.
Darren Wurz (02:20.458)
Entire industries have become black holes, and you've watched it happen over and over again. The Swiss watch industry became an economic black hole in the 1970s. Airlines have been an economic black hole almost your entire working life. And here's the thing: the single greatest creator of no profit zones in the economy is the devout pursuit of market share. Just as products become technologically obsolete.
Business designs become economically obsolete. Your firm's business design has an expiration date. Nobody prints it on the box, and almost nobody goes looking for it. But in this series, we're gonna look at it. And let's let's put this book in order of the books that we've read so far this year. Our profit our theme this year has been profit on purpose. Book one we read was Profit First.
Changing your behavior about how you think about profit. Books two and three, Simple Numbers and Simple Numbers two point zanged what you measure. And book four, The Great Game of Business, changed how you motivate the team. Each one of those books were focused on helping you run your firm better. But not one of those books was asking a very important question, which is will your firm still be running well and making money in five years?
That's what this book is all about. And it's so relevant for today. And that's what we're talking about today. It's so relevant for today in the age of AI. And be sure to listen to the end today, where I'll give you the two questions Slywotzky says you should ask before anything else. And one of them takes only a couple minutes. Okay. How does this apply to law? Well, as I said, this is so super relevant today because the world
The economy is changing so rapidly in the age of AI. A lot of people think that the legal industry is protected and has a strong moat around it because you're licensed, you're regulated industry, and I get it, it seems that way, but there's a lot of people coming for you. AI is coming for you. private equity is coming for you. The public markets are coming for you, right? there's a lot of interest in the profitability of law, you know.
Darren Wurz (04:47.742)
As if you remember back to Profit First, when we read Profit First, one of the things that they mentioned there is that you know high profit industries don't tend to stay for a long time. You know, private equity is starting to notice that law can be a very profitable, high-margin business. And there is naturally a lot of interest. So the other thing is, you know, value is migrating out of legal work right now. And here is how.
Slywotzky says value moves in three phases inflow when a business design is capturing value faster than anyone else. Stability when it holds, and finally, outflow, when the customer priorities move on and value drains to a design that serves them better. We're already seeing some of these phenomena occur in the legal industry. The dangerous phase is not outflow.
We're seeing some outflow today. The dangerous phase really is stability. I think we're past that in many regards. Because stability feels exactly like success right up until it's not. And if you're still doing things the old way that things have always been done, supposedly, you're gonna be left behind as the world economy shifts. So how is value flowing out of in you know, where's where is value flowing out of in the legal industry?
Two big areas, number one, out of document production. Thompson Reuters reports that among legal professionals already using AI in twenty twenty five, seventy-seven percent use it for document review, seventy-four percent for legal research, seventy-four percent for summarization, and eighty f and and fifty-eight percent for contract drafting. Now, a lot of the items on that list were items that the billable hour was meant to capture in times long gone.
Now
Darren Wurz (06:47.106)
Secondly, value is flowing out of raw expertise, which you may have thought was a protected area. The knowledge premium that you spent years in law school and ten years in practice building is the thing that a machine now approximates pretty well in nine seconds. Not perfectly, approximately. However, approximately is what most of your clients are happy with. And where is it flowing towards? Where is the value shifting? Here's the single
Most important number I found. Thompson Reuters 2026 report says 78% of corporate clients now consider AI-enabled quality improvements essential. And there was just news the other day about how corporate clients are demanding pricing go down because law firms are using AI. They're demanding lower prices. Hmm. Very interesting. So
There's a lot of things happening right now. And one more number to leave you with. 32% of clients say they are reconsidering their firm relationship because of lagging AI adoption. So clients want you using AI to improve value and to reduce price. So the outflow has already started. And it's your clients, it's the economy that's shifting it. They're not waiting for you. So what's at stake here? Well,
Thompson Reuters Future Professionals Report estimates that AI can save you roughly 240 hours per legal professional per year. And that's probably going to go up, right? So that's you know six full working weeks handed back to you every year. Wow. Now here's the whole lesson of this book, right? What those 240 hours are worth to you depends entirely on your business design. If you build by the hour, those 240 hours
Are a loss. They're hours you don't get to bill. At a $350 rate, that could be $84,000 of revenue that simply evaporates. You did the work faster. You were paid less as a result. If you charge for the outcome, that same 240 hours of our capacity that you didn't have to buy, that's freed up for you. So that $84,000 drops into your bottom line. Run that across three attorneys in a firm and you're looking at
Darren Wurz (09:13.998)
$250,000 or more in a single year. And we already know which side of the line most of the legal profession is standing on. Cleo's 2025 legal trends report says 71% of solo firms are using artificial intelligence, and 86% of them have not changed their pricing by a single dollar. Only 3% have actually raised prices. Three out of a hundred.
So a lot of people are seeing the hourly model breaking, but very few are doing anything about the pricing. And that is the gap between knowing and moving. That's the gap. That's the zone of profit. That's the gap where billions of dollars of value exists. So how does a business actually move into a new profit zone? Slywotzky studies people he calls the reinventors.
And I want to challenge you today to think more like a reinventor. You're gonna have to think more like a business owner. And everybody says that. Think more like a business owner. What does that mean? Well, one way to think more like a business owner is to think like a re inventor. Three stories. Number one the printer who stopped selling printing. Jim Donahugh was hired as a salesman at Madden Graphics, a commercial printing company in 1975. Printing was on its way to becoming a no profit zone.
A commodity where everyone competes on price per page. Donahugh kept asking two questions. What can I do to add real value to the customer? And what would be more valuable than just selling the customer a printing job? Madden Graphics became Madden Communications. It stopped being a printing company and became a communications management company that designs, manufactures, assembles, and distributes point of sale material for its clients.
Madden's core activity is still printing. But the Madden people don't really care about printing as an end in itself. They care about what it does for their customers. Your core activity is still legal work. The question is whether you are selling legal work as an end in itself or selling what the legal work does for the client. Those are two different businesses. And only one of them still has a profit zone. Number two.
Darren Wurz (11:40.418)
The Watchmaker Who Changed Neighborhoods By the 1970s, the Swiss watch industry had been destroyed by Timex, Citizen, Seiko, and Cassio. It was a no profit zone. Nicolas Hayek's move was not to build a better Swiss watch, it was to cross the threshold out of economy timepiece into an entirely different neighborhood, defined by the words accessory, style, fashion statement.
Hmm. He built a swatch as a cheap plastic firewall at the bottom, which secured the low end and made it profitable, and then protected and expanded the top of the pyramid where Swiss watches sell for a million Swiss francs and up. What's the law firm translation for this? Well, in estate planning, for example, documents are an economy timepiece. Family governance, business succession, and the peace of mind that a family will not tear itself apart.
Is a different neighborhood entirely. Same craft, different economics. Next story, last story here: the broker who redesigned three times. Charles Schwab is a name that most should be familiar with in professional services. But who is Charles Schwab and how did Charles Schwab evolve? Well, in the early 1970s.
There was exactly one kind of player in the investment business, the full service broker, charging high fees for a bundled package of advice and trading. Schwab's first design was the discount brokerage, trades without the advice at a lower price. Then in the nineteen eighties, he noticed investors were leaving independent leaving four independent fee based planners. So he redesigned again and started treating those planners.
Planners as his customers. Huh. Then in the nineteen nineties, he built OneSource, which was a switchboard between mutual funds and investors, and charged the funds for access to his investor base. And that was the beginning of zero commissions. Three businesses, three business designs in three decades. Slywotzky's observation about reinventors is that they
Darren Wurz (14:01.248)
Rebuilt roughly every five years. Schwab didn't survive by being the best broker. He survived by noticing three separate times that his customers' priorities had moved and rebuilding the business around where they went. How many times has your business's business design changed since the day you opened? Now there's a tool, a methodology.
a philosophy that is underneath all three of these stories, and it's reversing the value chain. The traditional value chain runs like this my assets and core competencies, then my inputs, then my offering, then my channels, and finally my customer. You start with what you're good at and you work your way down to the customer. That's the wrong way to think about a business. The modern value chain runs backwards. Start with the customer.
What are their priorities? Then the channels that reach them, then the offering, then the inputs, then the assets that you need. Your firm is almost certainly built entirely in the first direction for most law firms. You're a litigator, therefore you sell litigation. You're an estate planner, therefore you s you sell estate plans. You started with your own competence and worked outward, and so do most of your competition. And when you run it in reverse.
Slywotzky says to look at something he calls the customer's systems economics, which is not just what they pay you, but all the other prices that are involved in them working with you, right? It's not it's the price plus everything else, plus the cost of using and living with the result, plus the time it consumes, plus the amount of hassle they have to tolerate along the way. Think about how much of what your client actually pays is the hassle chasing you for a status update.
Not knowing what it will cost, waiting three weeks for a document. The firm that removes the hassle is not being nicer. They're capturing that everyone else is leaving on the table. So the downside, and it's real, is this the value chain might tell you, reversing the value chain might tell you that some of what you're currently doing doesn't belong. Ouch. That's a tough message to hear.
Darren Wurz (16:23.374)
But it's an important one to think about. Now let's go a little bit deeper. The thing that might matter the most. It's not enough to find a profit zone. You have to be able to hold it. Slywotzky calls this your strategic control point, the thing that protects your profit stream from competition and from your customer and from customer power. He lists them out. Here's a few ideas: a brand, a patent or copyright, a two-year product development lead.
A 20% cost advantage, control of distribution, control of supply, owning the customer information flow, a unique organizational structure, control of the value chain. He says the one he says the thing that should reorganize how you think about your firm is this. Every good business design has at least one strategic control point. The best businesses have two or more. And
The most valuable businesses that can be sold as assets down the road have several. So the thing is that most solo and small firms have no control points. There's no brand a client would cross town for, no cost advantage, no proprietary process, no owned information flow. And a business design with no strategic control point doesn't get to keep its profit.
Because the moment the work becomes visible and repeatable, someone is going to underprice you. But this means there's a lot of opportunity. Here are three control points that a small firm could realistically build. One, owning the client information flow. You're the only party who sees the client's whole picture: the business, the family, the succession plan, the tax exposure. Nobody can underprice a relationship that they can't see into. Number two,
A defined niche that's deep enough. Not I do business law, but perhaps being the firm, the go-to firm for franchise disputes in your state. Number three, the referral position. Being the firm that every accountant or banker or business broker in your market wants to route through. Slywotzky would call that the switchboard, and it's the hardest position to dislodge.
Darren Wurz (18:43.842)
Now here's the thing about strategic control points. They decay. Slywotzky's whole point is that is that business designs go obsolete on a roughly five year cycle, and that includes yours. Now, maybe law firms have a longer cycle because there's more moat around them, but they do go obsolete. The way of doing business changes. The way law firms do business today is not the way law firms did business twenty years ago.
Building a law firm isn't the finish line. It buys you time to build the next version of your law firm. And this is a message that is so, so important. You know, so many law firm owners that I speak with say they never want to retire. Okay. Now I get this, I get the sentiment. You have a great business that's generating great cash flow. But you might be in the stability zone, and the zone just above the just beyond the horizon that you don't see yet is
The no-profit zone that's approaching, the parabola, right? things might be stable today, but the thing about being a business owner and running a business is that things are always changing. There is no status quo that you will reach where you can simply coast for the rest of your life. And that's a hard message to hear. And so while, you know, I share the sentiment, why retire, right?
You want to build a war chest that would allow you to have an escape hatch, to get out of here if you needed to, right? You want to build the capability to throw the geese on the desk and walk out the door one day if you need to. You need financial resilience, especially in a world that is changing so rapidly. And where ten to twenty years from now, what you do may be obsolete because the world is changing that fast.
I hate to give you these tough questions to think about, but they're so important to think about. Let's end with two questions that Slywotzky asks that are very good questions to ask. Now, question number one Write down what a client is really buying from you, and then ask what they will want in five years that they don't ask for today, not what they want now. That game is already over.
Darren Wurz (21:08.8)
Okay, so question number one. What should I do with this information? Here's the here's what you should do. Question number one, what is the client really buying from you and what will they want in five years? You've got to understand that. Question number two. Slywotzky says, do not go ask your happy clients how you're doing. Go find your most demanding critic and ask, what am I afraid to find out? That's a genuinely frightening question, but you won't regret asking it.
You want to ask your unhappy clients why they're unhappy.
Now, once you've asked these questions, do something with what you've learned. Pick something that you're doing in your current work that a machine or AI will do acceptably well in the next three years and decide right now what you're going to sell instead of it. Not your whole practice, one thing. Okay? And a warning. This book, reading this book, will not change your business design.
Slywotzky studied reinventors who rebuilt every five years. And the reason that is rare is not that ideas are hard. It's that the design that is going obsolete is the one that's still paying you today. And it's very difficult to demand something, to dis dismantle something that is still working. Boy, boy. This hits home for me. You know, because I've had to reinvent, I've reinvented our business.
Many times in the last five years. I've probably reinvented it once a year in the last five years. you know, I started out as a very community-based financial advisor, you know, doing the traditional percentage of assets, you know, we'll manage your investments and trying to beat the market, right? But the market shifts and the market changes. And, you know, that that in itself was an old and dying market and still is an old and dying market.
Darren Wurz (23:08.044)
You know, because what we've realized is that the best thing we can do with your portfolio is optimize it for performance, reduce the costs as much as possible, and maximize the tax efficiency. And we can we can do our best work there. Trying to beat the market? Sometimes you can, sometimes you won't. And the risk is that you don't and you underperform it significantly and you have a very unhappy client. But you know, I kind of go I'm kind of going down a rabbit hole here. The point is we've
Transitioned our business entirely by asking first, what does the client really want? So I started working more with lawyers and then with law firm owners. And I started asking myself, what do they really want? Because my business is going obsolete just as fast as any other business, right? Machine learning, AI, people have AI to run their investments now. And you know, all these things are happening so quickly. And so
You know, what do law firm owners really want? And what they really want, well, I'm assuming you really want, is someone to help you grow your business and grow your personal wealth. And so what we did is we brought business coaching and business advice into the fold. We hi we brought on business coaches to work with our clients. And so rather than just helping you grow your personal wealth, we're helping you with the thing that ultimately changes your personal wealth, and that is your business.
Because at the end of the day, that is the single biggest leverage point for you. Growing your business, you know, increasing your income, growing the value of your business, right? And so if we can help you there, then we can help you have more capital with which to build more wealth. And then we also realized that one of the biggest things our clients needed help with was taxes and tax planning. Because as you make more money, the taxes start to become onerous and you start to ask the question.
Should I really be paying this much in taxes? And what can I do to mitigate taxes? And ultimately, taxes become your biggest expense. And so we brought a CPA onto the team as well so that we can handle the tax filing and the tax planning. And the other thing we realize is that many law firm owners have three different advisors handling these three different functions, and everything is very disconnected, and that's where mistakes happen. And so we transformed ourselves yet again into the family office.
Darren Wurz (25:32.088)
Four law firm owners where you get everything under one roof, a one stop shop to help you grow your business, minimize your taxes, and maximize your personal wealth. And so I've seen this, I've seen this happen, and it's worked for us, it's worked well for us in asking the question, what do our clients really want? And how can we be in the best position to serve them? And what will they want five years from now? That's something that I'm gonna have to start asking now as well.
Here at the Lawyer Millionaire, this is the work. We help law firm owners look at their firm and their personal balance sheet as one interconnected system. And the profit zone is so critical because it determines how successful your business is going to be. And if you're still going to be making money five years from now, what your practice will be worth and whether it ever actually converts into capital that you can harvest.
Your CPA is looking backwards at last year. Your investment person is looking at a market that you don't control. Somebody has to be looking at where the profit will be. We bring you the whole team that looks at everything together. The CPA, the business advisor, and the personal financial advisor. If today's episode landed for you, I've got a free resource that you're going to want grab right now. It's our client attraction playbook.
The link is down in the show notes, and it's the practical layer underneath everything that we just covered. How to position your firm where the value is moving instead of competing where it is draining out of. And by the way, come join us inside the Lawyer Millionaire community at community.lawyermillionaire.com. You'll gain access to a network of over 100 law firm owners.
And exciting events like our monthly hot seat and book club discussions on books just like this one. Well, that's it for today, friend. Thanks so much for joining me. But remember just one thing before we go. If your law firm isn't giving you wealth, how in the hell is it going to give you freedom? Can I get an amen out there? Now, go make the cash flow and make the profits grow. And I'll see you next time.