The #1 Financial Blunder Killing Law Firms And How to Fix it Fast (Ep. 133)

Written By Adedayo Adekunle

Are you a law firm owner struggling to make sense of your financial operations? You're not alone. Most attorneys start their own practice without formal business training yet every day, you're expected to juggle the roles of lawyer and CEO. At The Lawyer Millionaire, our goal is to simplify financial planning and business growth for high-earning law firm owners like you.

On this episode of the podcast, I spoke with Peggy Gruenke, co-founder of CPN Legal. Peggy has years of experience helping more than 400 law firms clean up their books, streamline operations, and boost their bottom line. In this post, I’ll share her best practical advice and key takeaways from our conversation so you can put your firm on the path to sustainable, profitable growth.

1. Use Real Financial Software—Not Pen and Paper

A shocking number of firms are still running on paper systems or a jumble of spreadsheets. Peggy’s message is clear: you can’t make smart business decisions without accurate, up-to-date data. Law firm accounting requires specialized tools (like QuickBooks integrated with Clio), both for compliance and scalability. Don’t risk financial blunders by delaying this upgrade.

Takeaway: Make the switch to real accounting and legal practice management software, so you have reliable data for every decision.

2. Safeguard Your Trust Accounts

Trust accounting errors are one of the biggest, most dangerous headaches facing law firm owners. Peggy has seen it all: “I can count on one hand the number of clients who came to us with accurate trust accounts.” Many lawyers have no idea their accounts are off until it’s too late. Trust accounting mistakes can lead to ethics violations and potential disciplinary action.

Takeaway: Conduct regular trust account reconciliations, and be sure your bookkeeper and CPA understand trust liability rules. If you’re unsure? Get help immediately.

3. Design and Track the Right KPIs

You can’t grow what you can’t measure. Successful law firms track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) tailored to their business. According to Peggy, some top KPIs for law firms include:

  • Weekly cash flow reports (know what’s coming in and going out)

  • Expense-to-revenue ratios (especially payroll and marketing spend)

  • New cases opened each month and their average value

  • Marketing ROI (track how your marketing spend translates into new clients)

  • Attorney utilization and realization rates (are hours being billed and collected?)

Takeaway: Start with clear, simple numbers. Reliable KPIs reveal trends, highlight bottlenecks, and help you make smarter growth decisions.

4. Build a System for Faster, Easier Collections

Many firms let collections drag them down. Peggy recommends writing off anything over 150 days old if you haven’t collected it by now, it’s probably not coming. More importantly, law firm owners should not do collections themselves; let a staff member or outside provider handle those tough conversations objectively.

Other tips for staying on top of collections:

  • Collect retainers upfront (even for flat-fee work)

  • Bill at least twice a month to reduce client “sticker shock”

  • Use legal billing software to automate follow-ups and offer easy payment options (including credit card and ACH)

Takeaway: Make it easy for clients to pay you, and take the emotion out of the process. Your cash flow—and stress levels—will thank you.

5. Shift Your Mindset from Lawyer to CEO

Building a profitable law practice is about more than billable hours. As Peggy shares from her own entrepreneurial journey, serious growth happens when you start treating your firm like a real business. Whether it’s moving into an office, hiring your first employee, or documenting your processes, every step reinforces your identity as a business owner.

Takeaway: Invest in team, systems, and your own leadership growth. Scaling requires calculated risks, willingness to pivot, and treating your firm like a true business not a side hustle.

Start Building a Smarter Law Firm Today

Stop relying on gut instinct and outdated habits. Clean financial data, proven systems, and a CEO mindset are your recipe for wealth and freedom as a law firm owner. If you need help getting started—whether it’s cleaning up your books, identifying the right KPIs, or creating a financial plan for growth—The Lawyer Millionaire can help.

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Connect with Darren Wurz:

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Transcript:

Darren Wurz [00:00:00]:

Most law firms have major issues with their trust accounts and they don't even know it. Welcome to the Lawyer Millionaire, helping law firm owners grow their businesses and their wealth. I'm your host, Darren Wurz. You know, most law firm owners aren't trained to run a business, and that's okay. Yet every day you're expected to wear the CEO hat. Poor trust accounting, unreliable financial data, and low collections aren't just annoying, they're dangerous. In this episode, we'll unpack the financial and operational systems that you need to scale with confidence. My guest today is Peggy Gruenke, Co-founder of CPN Legal.

Darren Wurz [00:00:40]:

With decades of experience in legal operations and law firm bookkeeping, she's helped over 400 firms clean up their books, implement better processes, and grow sustainably. All right, we're here with Peggy Grinke today. Peggy, it's great to have you on the show.

Peggy Gruenke [00:00:59]:

Thank you, Darren. It's nice to be here. And it's nice to know that you're a Cincinnati guy. That doesn't happen very often.

Darren Wurz [00:01:05]:

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And you know, you and I go way back. Met you pre Covid. Yeah, that's now a marker in history for us. Yeah. So, yeah. Before we get into all of the great stuff that you have to share, you've been working with law firm owners for a long time and you have a lot of wisdom around helping them operate better and more efficiently. Let's start with a little bit about your journey.

Darren Wurz [00:01:32]:

So could you just share with us a little bit about how you got into the legal world and how CPN Legal came to be?

Peggy Gruenke [00:01:39]:

Sure. Actually, I started my career in IT as an IT consultant, which led me into, oddly enough, into the direction of getting involved at the Cincinnati Bar Association. They were looking for a database programmer, help them with their database and a director of membership. And that's where I landed in the world of lawyers, was at the Cincinnati Bar association working as their director of membership. And in that role I really got involved with working with the solo small firm committee and really mentoring that group along and got attached to them really quickly. And I helped teach at the UC Law school, the Business of law. And from there I went and left that role, which was still probably one of my favorite jobs ever. And I went and managed law firm for about 10 years more of a mid sized law firm.

Peggy Gruenke [00:02:35]:

And during that, while I was managing that law firm, I continued to meet with lawyers for coffee and lunch and mentoring them on starting up their law firm practice. And at the time, CLIO was just being bored. The whole idea of taking your law practice to the cloud. And my background in it kind of melded well with that. Right. So I was helping law firm set up virtual law firms, basically. Right. Eventually I was dipping my toe enough into that water, that pond of helping lawyers while I was still managing law firms, and I eventually broke loose and started CPN Legal.

Peggy Gruenke [00:03:14]:

And I was doing it by myself, wearing many hats, which is something I did not preach to my lawyers. I always preached, find your niche practice and people will come. I took my own advice, and my husband, whose background was in finance, he joined me at CPN Legal, and we decided to really hone in on the business of bookkeeping for law firms with the focus on Clio software and the integration with QuickBooks Online and Building a business around that niche area. And that's what has taken off, and that's what we did.

Darren Wurz [00:03:51]:

Yeah. What a great story. You know, we're in the right place at the right time there.

Peggy Gruenke [00:03:56]:

Yeah, yeah, we did. It took off in many different ways, but we now have a team of 32 employees up here in Cincinnati, and we continue to grow rapidly.

Darren Wurz [00:04:08]:

And you must be doing something right. Yeah. Because your growth really has been incredible. I've been witnessing that over the last several years. So kudos to you. Let's talk about some of the bottlenecks. Right? What are some of the biggest bottlenecks that you see in how law firms manage their operations?

Peggy Gruenke [00:04:29]:

That's a great question. We see a lot of that. So when law firms come to us, they're coming to us for a reason. There's usually a pain point. Right. When they're coming to us, there's actually two reasons. They're coming to us because they're brand new and they're really smart, and they're coming to us before they experience any pain, and we're getting them started off on the right foot, or they're coming to us because they have experienced some pain points in their business, and these. These pain points have happened.

Peggy Gruenke [00:04:58]:

These financial issues that they find themselves in have happened for a number of reasons. One of the reasons is because they have. Have denied themselves using financial software to run their business. Right. And they insist on running their business on paper. Which. Which, you know, Darren, you can't run a business on paper and have good data to make financial decisions. You know, my background's in data.

Peggy Gruenke [00:05:27]:

Right. Database program. I'm data driven. Right. In order to make business decisions, you have to have good data. So that's one of the first things we see, is they come to us running their Business on paper, trying to reconcile accounts, inaccurate data. Right. The other thing that they come to us with financial blunders is the mismanagement of their trust accounts.

Peggy Gruenke [00:05:50]:

You work with lawyers, you understand the ethics behind them managing their trust funds. We have over 400 clients that we work with. I don't. I think I can count on one hand the number of that have come to us with accurate trust accounts. Okay. So when we onboard a client, the first thing we do is a trust account analysis and we fix it right away. All right? So that is. That's a.

Peggy Gruenke [00:06:14]:

That's. And I take that very passionately because of my experience at the Cincinnati Bar Association.

Darren Wurz [00:06:19]:

Yeah.

Peggy Gruenke [00:06:20]:

The other thing is they don't have the mindset or the understanding as to how to grow their business. And I want to help them. That's what I'm passionate about. That's the joy to work with somebody. So I want to get them into that mindset. And they don't have that when they come to us. They don't have the ability to grow because they haven't created a budget, they haven't created a plan so that we want to bring that to them when they come to us because they don't have it with them. The other thing that.

Peggy Gruenke [00:06:50]:

Two more things, and I'll. I'll leave this topic, but the other one. And we found this during COVID there. And they came to us. They came to us because all of a sudden, to get a. Look, to get one of the loans, right, they needed financial reports, all right? They had submit P. Ls and balance sheets, so they didn't have any. Right.

Peggy Gruenke [00:07:08]:

So they were coming to us to set this all up, which we did. But they didn't have lines of credits. Nobody. Nobody saw the importance of getting a line of credit or having an established relationship with their banker. Right?

Darren Wurz [00:07:20]:

Yeah.

Peggy Gruenke [00:07:21]:

So that's something that we preach at the. If I'm talking to a new lawyer setting up their business, one of the first things we talk about is get a business relationship with your banker and get. I don't care if you. You're. You may never need that line of credit, but get it now, okay? And have it available because you never know when you might need it. To me, that's a financial blunder and oversight that they have. The last thing I'll mention that I. The big financial blunder is that the solo small firms tend to.

Peggy Gruenke [00:07:55]:

Tend to cheap out and they decide to use their paralegal to be their bookkeeper. The worst thing ever they could do. Right. First of all they're not equipped to be a bookkeeper. They don't understand the ins and outs of accounting for law firms. And you're exposing your business to someone that really shouldn't see that side of your business. Right?

Darren Wurz [00:08:17]:

Yeah.

Peggy Gruenke [00:08:18]:

So that's my summary of the blunders we see.

Darren Wurz [00:08:23]:

Those are really great. I'm surprised by the frequency of finding issues with the trust accounts. It seems to be a really, really common thing and really serious for law firm owners.

Peggy Gruenke [00:08:40]:

I'll tell you. I'll tell you, Darren, the surprising part is, is the majority of them don't know that they have problems with their trust account.

Darren Wurz [00:08:48]:

Oh, wow.

Peggy Gruenke [00:08:49]:

Okay. Because they. Then they have a bookkeeper that they've been entrusting, doing things, and they're not using the QuickBooks tool. I don't know. We're big QuickBooks users. Right. And we're CLIO users, and we use a lot of the integration tools available with these products, which helps us manage the trust management. Well, they're working with bookkeepers that don't understand trust management.

Peggy Gruenke [00:09:12]:

Okay. And a lot of times they're working with accountants that don't understand trust liability accounts. And the accountants are trying to zero out the liability accounts at the end of the year, and we're like, what are you doing? You can't zero that account out. So that. That's part of the problem is they haven't looked at it and they're trusting. They're entrusting somebody to do something and it hasn't been right. And that's a problem in itself because ethically, if you read the ethics rules, a lawyer has to sign off on the trust reconciliation every month. And California just came out with really strict laws about their trust after all, that blunder happened a couple years ago, so.

Darren Wurz [00:09:53]:

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I certainly share your passion in helping law firm owners, solo and small firm owners grow their business. I often find that that's sometimes more exciting than the financial planning work that we also do. And one of those areas is helping law firm owners identify KPIs for themselves. I'm curious, what are some of your favorite KPIs that law firm owners really should be tracking regularly to stay on top of their business?

Peggy Gruenke [00:10:29]:

Great question. I have about six of them. And I'll tell you that when we design our KPI reports for our lawyers, it becomes very specific to their business. What's important to them to grow their business, which means they had to have put some thought into it, right, Darren? And the other thing is that they have to have good Data, Darren, we can't do KPIs without having good data, you know that. So, so we have to really look at what we have available to build the KPI reports out off of. Right. But a couple things I'm going to start with is people don't think of a cash flow report as a KPI, but I do. Okay.

Peggy Gruenke [00:11:13]:

We're really passionate about doing weekly cash flow reports, especially with new startups and as they grow. The thing about the cash flow report is it forces the business owner to look at their business every week. Okay, what's our revenue? What's our expenses? Am I protecting myself for upcoming expenses? Am I going to be able to afford that payable that's coming up or the rent? Am I going to have any shortcomings? Because in our cash flow analysis that we do, we actually look at what billings are going to happen. What's my wit, what's going to be, what's my upcoming revenue that's going to happen. What's my ar that's going to happen. What trust money is available to pull out of trust during that billing cycle. So we account for a lot of things that are coveted. What's my lockup and how's that going to affect things? So I use that cash flow analysis as part of our KPIs because it's going to affect.

Peggy Gruenke [00:12:06]:

It's a cash business, right? And it's. And I will tell you that it's the simplest business you'll ever have. Law firm businesses are so simple and they tend to over complicate things. Right? It's a simple business. So we talk a lot about that. The other thing that we like to look at is on the P and L, we really like to look at ratios, okay? We like to look at the ratio of your expenses to revenue to begin with, but we really like to focus on breaking out. What is your percent of payroll? What's your spend on payable versus your revenue? Right. What's your spend on marketing versus revenue? Because if you're not spending on marketing, you're never going to make money.

Peggy Gruenke [00:12:50]:

And I'm really passionate about that. All right, if you're, if your spend on marketing is less than 1% and you're not growing, there's a reason why you're not growing. Okay? So we do a lot of P and L analysis based on percent of income to see where you're heavy at on your percent of income, right? And if you've got too much left over, let's invest some of that income in somewhere where you can grow, right?

Darren Wurz [00:13:16]:

Yeah.

Peggy Gruenke [00:13:16]:

So let's look at that. The other thing that we'll look a lot at is we'll put together some graphs about how many new new cases are you getting a month. Right. And what's the value of those cases. So we look a lot at what's your monthly month like what, what's your fixed success, how much money do you have to bring in a month to cover your fixed expenses? And anything over top of that is pre money. Coffee. Right. So how many cases do you have to bring in a month to cover your monthly nut.

Peggy Gruenke [00:13:47]:

So we like to track what's those number of cases that have to come in. What's the average value of those cases. Right. To get that we need good data, right. So we track that and we build the graphs out to kind of track that. The other thing we do also track is our return on investment on marketing. So if we're really doing a good job at tracking marketing spend and leads and conversion of leads in our database, we can actually get a good return on investment. Return on investment number for our KPI reporting.

Peggy Gruenke [00:14:21]:

Right. And knowing what's coming up, the last one that we do really look at is, is utilization and that this is what drives the billing of a client of the law firm, right. The revenue of the law firm. What's your utilization rate? And at CPM Legal, we bill by the hour. We're just like a law firm, we monitor utilization rates really closely. Okay. And if we see a dip in utilization rate, I know in two months it's going to affect my revenue. Right.

Peggy Gruenke [00:14:51]:

So you've got to be tracking your utilization rates by attorney and finding out where you have issues and really tackle those issues head on. Don't sweep them under the carpet, all right? They're not going to go away by sweeping them under the carpet. But you've got to track those utilizations and look at your realization rates for billing and collection. So in the long run, that's the KPIs that we like to track.

Darren Wurz [00:15:17]:

What a great list. And if these are foreign to you, maybe you need some help on some of these. I mean, listening to this list, right, this might feel a little bit daunting, but to have somebody put this together for you and compile it and then have it at the ready, that is super, super powerful.

Peggy Gruenke [00:15:36]:

We always, I always like to talk to talk to lawyers, but think that how you're going to make money, right? When they. It's a simple business, but at the same time it's a hard business. Because they're, they're a lawyer and they're a business owner, right. They're wearing two hats all the time. They're wearing two hats, right. So they got to think about being the lawyer, but they also got to think about how am I going to make money, right. And so they got. It's a simple math model.

Peggy Gruenke [00:16:03]:

You got to fill your hours, you got to think about your, your billing rate, how many hours you're going to bill, what's your profit on that, what your expense is going to be. You can fluctuate your billing rate and play around with those numbers until you get what you want to get to, to your profit number you want. Right. But then you got to look at your collection realization and your billing realization rates, right. How much of the billing is actually going to show up on the bill? Are you writing stuff off before you actually put it on a bill? Which to me is the biggest. No, no. Ever. That's telling me that you're not trusting your own work.

Peggy Gruenke [00:16:38]:

Right. If you're writing down billing times before you even let the quite the invoice, that tells me like you don't even trust what you're doing. You have. That's another problem you got to deal with. That's another problem. Let the client see the bill and let them make the decision about the quality of the work. Right. It might have been valuable to them.

Peggy Gruenke [00:16:58]:

Right. So think about that. And if you're having problems with collections, that might be a problem because of a client service level problem, it might go deeper, right? So it's a. There's a lot going on in your business and it all starts with client service. I could go on, on a whole nother topic about that, but the client first. And you run a professional service business. You know that, you know, you got to start with the client first. And if you're taking care of the client, they'll take care of you and your collections problems will go away.

Peggy Gruenke [00:17:32]:

But yeah, so you got to think about how you're going to be letting.

Darren Wurz [00:17:36]:

Yeah. Collections is an area that a lot of law firms actually struggle with. And some of the fixes are simple. But what are some of your top tips on improving collection rates?

Peggy Gruenke [00:17:49]:

Okay. The first thing we do is when someone comes to us, anything that's over 150 days, we write off. It's just noise. It's a distraction and it's noise. If you haven't collected it now, just. You're not going to collect it. Right. Would you agree? I mean, it makes you sad.

Peggy Gruenke [00:18:09]:

It makes you sad, right? So let's just get rid of that. If they actually come back and they want to do more work with you, then you can go back and collect it, right? But let's get that off the books and let's deal with the low hanging fruit that you really can collect, right? And at that point, the biggest thing that they can do wrong is have the lawyer try to collect, okay? The lawyer should never do collections. This is, anything should be outsourced or given to an office manager or a legal assistant. It should be the collections, okay? And the lawyer will fight me on this tooth and nail. And I'm like, I don't care. You should not be involved in this discussion.

Darren Wurz [00:18:50]:

Why is that? Can you, can you break that down first?

Peggy Gruenke [00:18:53]:

They get too personal. They want to defend themselves. They want to. You got to take the personal. It's not personal. It's business now. And if you give it to somebody else to have a talk about it, they can take the personal site out of it, okay. And have a different type of discussion about it, okay? And then, and then we can, then I can have a discussion with the client that says, you know, well, this, this type of work was done.

Peggy Gruenke [00:19:18]:

I know. Are you not happy with it? Well, let me go back to the lawyer and talk about that, okay? And then I can have it set. Hey, I talked to the lawyer. How about, he said he would give a 20% discount on there, you know, would that make you happy? But be the, you know, good cop, bad cop. We used to own a bar, okay? And my husband and I would play good cop, bad cop. Let me be the good cop, okay? And then the lawyer can be the bad cop or vice versa. I can be the bad cop, the lawyer can be the good cop. So that's why that's important.

Peggy Gruenke [00:19:48]:

So but on the collection side, do that, right? And on the other thing, on the collection side, get retainers up front. And we, and this is another topic on billing, our most profitable law firms bill twice a month, okay? First of all, they get retainers up front if they're hourly. Even the flat D guys get retainers up front, okay? Get retainers up front, bill, bill twice a month. We do invoicing for our clients, most of all of our clients, and then replenish those retainers. Then you're never hounding for ar. And think about the amount of energy and time is spaced as waste of inflicted ar. And it's such a negative conversation to have about ar. It's such a negative topic, it just drains everybody.

Peggy Gruenke [00:20:36]:

The firm and everything. So avoid it up front by retainers, replenishments, regular billing. And the other nice thing about billing twice a month is your clients are getting less sticker shock. Right. And you're communicating with them more regularly.

Darren Wurz [00:20:53]:

Yeah, yeah.

Peggy Gruenke [00:20:54]:

And I'll tell you one last tip about ar. And we're seeing a trend on this a lot because a lot of the software, law practice management softwares, are building this into their systems. More is collecting credit cards up front. Okay. And now lawyers ethically aren't allowed to store credit cards because they're not. So the systems now are allowing you to store the credit cards without the lawyers ever seeing the credit card information. Right. So like even CPM legal, when we engage with somebody, we collect credit card up front.

Peggy Gruenke [00:21:27]:

So if somebody goes 30 days past due, we charge that credit card and it's in our fee agreement. Okay. So a lot of our lawyers now are adding that to their fee agreement when they take on a new client, get that original retainer, they're storing that credit card information for their fee agreement to be used when the client goes past due. So there's a lot of things for it. And then you got payment plan options now too. Right. So there's a lot of proactive things you can do now to kind of eliminate those AR issues.

Darren Wurz [00:21:59]:

I love that. That's a great idea. In fact, we do the kind of the same thing. We have a system that we use. The clients input their credit card information. We never see it because in the financial planner world, there's a rule about custody. And you, you have to avoid custody by not having access to the details. And so we have a special program that's regular regulator friendly, you know, that enables us to be able to do that.

Darren Wurz [00:22:27]:

And I guess, you know, you know, before all of that, you know, accepting credit cards in the first place, because a lot of law firms still want a check payment, but you got to make it easy for people to pay.

Peggy Gruenke [00:22:40]:

And it's funny, you're in a business that's highly regulated, right? Yes. Think about lawyers. You guys are more regulated, right? And to your point, you've got to make it easy to pay. So now, like with Clio, now you can send out bills via text. So now their invoices are showing up in text. You know how easy it is to click here, pay, Apple pay, Google pay, so many different ways to pay. It's lovely, right? So gotta make it easy.

Darren Wurz [00:23:07]:

Fantastic. Great, great tips. Thank you for those. Peggy. I've got a few questions left here. I want to get your Thoughts on, you know, the mindset shift that law firm owners need to make. What is your advice for law firm owners trying to shift from lawyer mode to CEO mode?

Peggy Gruenke [00:23:27]:

I'll tell you a story to help frame this, okay? And it happened at our business. You notice how fast we're growing, right? When I started the business, we were working out of the house, my husband and myself, and we were working, and we would work in the evening, and at one point, my husband would look across the desk and say, peggy, you really need to get office. And I was so against him. I'm like, no, this is fine. We're fine. We're fine. And he keeps saying, no, we need to get an office. And I finally said, okay, we'll get an office.

Peggy Gruenke [00:23:57]:

So we moved up the street here in Westchester and opened up an office. It was two or three months later, opening up that office, we started growing, and we were knocking down walls, we were hiring, and we were getting more clients. And I'll tell you what happened. It was a mind shift in my mind, okay? I went from working at home to this little home business to understanding that I had a real business to run, right? So for the lawyers, that mind shift happens when you have to understand that you have a real business to run. And that happens when they remove themselves a little bit, right? And when they say, oh, I have to hire that first employee, get out of that house, open up a real office, treat yourself as a business, and you'll start seeing things change in your own mind. All right? Get your financials together. Get a financial package together. A lot of times they just don't treat themselves as a business.

Peggy Gruenke [00:24:58]:

It's like a sidekick. Does that make sense? You have to get that mindset mind shift change by making a drastic change in how you're thinking about your business and to build it, they will come. It's true. I don't know what else. I don't know how I'm going to explain it, but it does happen.

Darren Wurz [00:25:21]:

You're so right about that. You know, bringing on team members, you. You kind of naturally grow, you know, you kind of have to have some little bit of faith, but you grow the capacity, and the business will grow itself.

Peggy Gruenke [00:25:34]:

Yeah, I like that. You have the faith. You have to have the faith. One of the work you have to. I had down here, you've got to learn how to take calculated risks, right? Sometimes because to grow, you have to learn to take calculated risks, and you got to learn when it's time to hire, right? And that's so scary for Lawyers. Right. Especially if they don't have any finances to look at. They don't know.

Peggy Gruenke [00:25:56]:

They don't know because they'll come to me and say, can I hire? And I'm like, oh, let's look at your finances. Let's project. Let's see what's going to impact. It's going to have. What do we have to change in order to cover this person? But they also have to be willing to pivot. Okay. So they have to be able to be flexible in their decision making and realize that they made a bad. Sometimes made a bad decision.

Peggy Gruenke [00:26:18]:

So that's. There's two things. They have to be able to take calculated risks, but they have to be willing to pivot.

Darren Wurz [00:26:23]:

I love. Thank you for that reminder. Yeah, that's so important. On the other side, realizing when what you're working, when you're doing what you're doing isn't quite working. And we need to. Need to make a change.

Peggy Gruenke [00:26:36]:

Yeah, we do that a lot here.

Darren Wurz [00:26:38]:

Yeah. And we did that in our business. And one of the books that helped me kind of make that shift into being more of a business owner was the book Buy Back youk Time by Dan Martell. I'm curious if you've read it.

Peggy Gruenke [00:26:52]:

No, I haven't. No.

Darren Wurz [00:26:54]:

Okay. I think you'd really enjoy it. That's actually the book we're reading currently in our book club, which any of you are welcome to join if you're listening to the show. So my last question to you, Peggy, along those lines. You know, most business owners have read a number of books. I'm curious if there's a book you're currently reading that you're really enjoying or maybe a book that you did read that was really helpful to you in growing your business.

Peggy Gruenke [00:27:21]:

I have a couple. Get a grip. It was a nice one. I enjoy reading. That's part of the Traction series. We don't do EOS system. But I'm intrigued by it. And.

Peggy Gruenke [00:27:31]:

And I like a lot of the stuff about it. The one I'm reading now is Ten Times is Better than Two Times.

Darren Wurz [00:27:38]:

Oh, yeah.

Peggy Gruenke [00:27:38]:

By Dan Shepard. Yeah, I just started reading that one, too. There's another one I read about processes and of course, I'm drawing a blank on it, but it was a really good one. That taught us a lot about. We're big on processes here because we have to. By the way, lawyers. The only way you're going to grow is if you learn to put processes in place. You can't grow until you have documented processes.

Peggy Gruenke [00:28:06]:

And I'M passionate about that too. But I wish I could name the name of the book, but I can't. But there was a good book about creating processes and the tools to use to create those products. Like there's a product called Whale that we use to do stuff to create processes with. We use Slack for some things. We use Trello for something. You know, you gotta find the right tool to use for your business to make things work. Well, yeah.

Darren Wurz [00:28:33]:

Is there anything else that you'd like to share with our audience before we go?

Peggy Gruenke [00:28:38]:

No. The only other thing that I would stress is if you're a lawyer running a business, please take the time to think about your law firm as a business and be mindful of your finances because I want you to be successful. I truly want every law firm to succeed. And that's our tagline at CPN Legal.

Darren Wurz [00:28:56]:

I love that, Peggy, you and I share that same passion and I love it. All right, well, thank you so much for joining me today.

Peggy Gruenke [00:29:04]:

All right, thanks, Darren.

Darren Wurz [00:29:05]:

All right, well, a big thank you to Peggy Grinke for joining us today. You can learn more about her and all the great work she's doing at CPN legal by visiting cpn-legal.com Be sure to check the show notes for all the links and the resources that we discussed. So here's my challenge to you today, listener. Stop operating on instincts alone and start building a business on real financial data. Get those KPIs in place. As law firm owners, we're not just practicing law. We're building businesses that create freedom, impact and long term wealth. At the Lawyer Millionaire, we help you design a financial plan that that supports your business growth, cash flow and your future exit strategy.

Darren Wurz [00:29:52]:

If you're tired of guessing your way through, we've got you covered. You can learn more about us at our website, lawyermillionaire.com and there you can also download the first chapter of my book for free, the Lawyer Millionaire. And don't forget, you're invited to join our free book club for law firm owners. Check the show notes for the link. Who is the Lawyer Millionaire? It's you, my friend. Own it and live it. I'm your host, Darren Wirtz. Thanks for joining me.

Darren Wurz [00:30:23]:

See you next time.

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