Judith Bachman, ESQ., Founder, The Bachman Law Firm
Judith has been practicing law for more than 25 years. She is licensed in both New York and New Jersey. Prior to launching the firm, Judith was a litigation associate at Shea & Gould and then Dechert, Price & Rhoads. During that tenure, she worked on headline making matters including complex real estate disputes, securities cases, contract claims, and anti-trust issues. She received her J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School and her B.A. from SUNY Binghamton.
AUTOMATED EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:01] You're listening to Scaling Up Services where we speak with entrepreneurs authors business experts and thought leaders to give you the knowledge and insights you need to scale your service based business faster and easier. And now here is your host Business Coach Bruce Eckfeldt.
[00:00:22] Are you a CEO looking to scale your company faster and easier. Checkout Thrive Roundtable thrive combines a moderated peer group mastermind expert one on one coaching access to proven growth tools and a 24/7 support community created by Inc award winning CEO and certified scaling up business coach Bruce Eckfeldt. Thrive will help you grow your business more quickly and with less drama. For more details about the program, visit eckfeldt.com/thrive . That’s E C K F E L D T. com / thrive
[00:00:57] Welcome, everyone. This is scaling up services. I'm Bruce Eckfeldt. I'm your host. And our guest today is Judith Bachman. She is founder of the Bachman Law Firm. We're gonna find a little bit about her background, about the work that she does with growing scaling companies.
[00:01:11] I'm excited for this. I think the sort of the legal side is an untapped or at least oftentimes unthought of kind of aspect of the growth process. You know, it's not just about contracts. It's about everything related to risk, about opportunities. How do you really manage the business successfully from a legal point of view so that you can grow and scale successfully some key things? I'm sure we're going to talk about here with that. Judith, welcome to the program.
[00:01:35] Thank you, Bruce. Happy to be here. I appreciate you making the time.
[00:01:39] Yeah. So let's hear about your story first. So background, how did you get into law? Look, what was the story that got you in to law and then then founding your firm and the sock a little bit about the entrepreneurial journey that you've had.
[00:01:50] Sure. So my story starts when I was 4 years old and marketing you all the way back there. A very brief version of this story is I had an argument with my mother when I was four over what she wanted me to wear that morning. I apparently won the argument and she told me I should be a lawyer. I asked what a lawyer was. She said, You argue for a living. I said, That's it. The last time I have asked myself what I wanted to do.
[00:02:17] That's great. That's great. So take us from 4 years old to have started a law firm. What was the journey like?
[00:02:23] So when I graduated law school, I went to work for a very big firm. For about four years, I was a litigation associate.
[00:02:30] That firm broke up, which is a story unto itself, I'm sure, taught me some entrepreneurial lessons and sort of broke my naivete as to what a law firm was. After those that period of time, I went to the New York office of a Philadelphia firm for two years, was working on tobacco litigation, looked around and said, my life has to be something different than that.
[00:02:54] All of it is there's a kind of epiphanies that come to people every once in a while.
[00:02:58] Yes. Yes. So after that, I started on my own. And for 20 years or so I was on my own making a good living. But I truly was a solo practitioner. And then about five or six years ago, I woke up one morning and said, you know, if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, no one will pay me a dollar or my family a dollar. And frankly, no one will care much. They'll just go on to the next lawyer. So from that time, I would call that my business mid-life crisis. I've been working as any other Roger Ignor to try to build a business into something more than me. And that's what we've done.
[00:03:33] Yeah, no, that's great. I see the timing and particularly for kind of professional services. You know, I'll meet with folks and know they'll say, you know, I'm I run my own business or own my own business. And for a solo practitioner, I always say it's like you don't have a business. You've got a job. You know, you don't have other people working for you. If you don't have, you know, the capacity to deliver things outside of your time, you the hours in your day, you have a job now. You got a very nice job. And you can I you know, I'm kind of a solo practitioner now as a coach, but I think it's that mentality of my building, you know, a really great lifestyle job or my building. A business, a company is a really critical distinction. And then a decision I think every entrepreneur kind of at some points makes. And I'm fascinated that you spent that long as sole practitioner.
[00:04:19] And then making that decision, I guess, was tell us more about that decision. Was it was an easy decision. Was it hard once you made the decision, what were your next stumps? Because.
[00:04:29] Because that's a big change in terms of how you see your role, how you see your business, how you kind of design and structure the company. What. Tell us about that process.
[00:04:37] So it really was a personal journey. And I would think that you and your practice have seen entrepreneurs through that, at least on the other side of it. For me, I had been practicing law for a long time and felt like I had a pretty good understanding of the substantive areas of law that I was addressing. But in the course of my work, I started working with entrepreneurs, emerging companies and maturing companies. And as I looked at them, I saw a little bit of myself in them and realized that I had as much interest in building on the entrepreneurial side as I did in practicing law. So the steps I took were a to view myself and portray. Myself as more than just me. So I began hiring staff. I rebranded as a firm rather than just my own name and really changed my both my internal perception of myself and tried to change the external perception that can be a hard one.
[00:05:39] I mean, I think that both externally. I'm not sure which is order. I mean, there's the external side, which is, you know, how do people know me? What's my reputation? How do I shift this or pivot this reputation? But I think the internal one is just as hard, maybe even harder, depending on how kind of attached you are to it and how. I mean, especially, you know, in a case like this where you've you've been doing it for 20 years, like how ingrained the behaviors that the mindset, the kind of patterns are, what were the what were the hard parts about making that transition?
[00:06:10] So the number one challenge, I think is as a common challenge that you probably face everyday with your clients, which is learning to delegate and to let go. Right. So one is not just you. And to to serve your clients in a way that makes economic sense and is efficient and frankly will help you scale. You need to learn to delegate. And letting go of that control is a daily challenge for me. But it's a necessary and necessary thing to achieve.
[00:06:38] Yeah, I see, though, particularly in these kind of situations where you have professionals who are truly experts in domains and experts in areas and then pride themselves in kind of their self-identity and their self-worth is tied up in the and the work product itself or the work that they do. And shifting to that more kind of entrepreneur leadership, you know, founder, CEO mentality of your work, you're now leading the company to do these things and hiring people that can execute on this now is is hard and can be a big shift. Any any strategies that have worked particularly well for you in terms of developing this delegation muscle and exercising it on a regular basis.
[00:07:16] So I had read an article a while ago where somebody summarized their approach, which really resonated with me. So I love lists. Right. And in fact, if I do something that's not on my list, I'll write it on my list in order to cross with it.
[00:07:31] I love that there's like a whole classification of personality types that do that.
[00:07:36] Right. I love it. So the advice in this article that I read was make your list lists are great, but then go back over your list. And for every single task on your list, write down who you're delegating to and follow that as that's your list. Your list as to delegate your list is not to do. And that has really worked for me.
[00:07:56] And a key one, like you said, it's it's kind of a necessary skill or necessary capability if you have any hopes of being able to build a business around yourself that is going to have value and capabilities above beyond your hourly capacity is that you need to do that. So talk to me more in terms of how when when you decided to grow in scale or focus on building out a company, rather just a solo practice. What are some of the other challenges you read into things you needed to do, other things, things you know you needed to do or things that came up that you didn't anticipate then ended up being important to the process for you.
[00:08:30] So the other big piece for me, which is going to be reflected even in what we're discussing substantively is the idea of systems.
[00:08:39] So as a solo, obviously you just do what you do, or at least that's how I approached it, right. I had a I had to make a court appearance. I went and made a court appearance. I didn't have to write out. Here's how you make a court appearance.
[00:08:51] Here's as you say, where you go. Right. This is what the wear.
[00:08:57] So when you have staff and in order to scale, whether it's going from a solo to a three person office or a three person office to a 50 per person, office systems are really integral in enabling you to grow.
[00:09:13] And we've spent a bunch of time and it's frankly an ongoing endeavor to write policies and procedures for how we do things. A quick, easy example is, you know, obviously we use online legal research. So there's a whole signing process. You need credentials. You need to know what database to access. You need to know how to input a search. Those things are second nature to people who've been practicing for a while. But we're hiring perpetually, or at least we try to hire on an ongoing basis. And when we bring somebody in for a trial, they work. We asked them to do a research project and they need to use our system in order to do that. So we have a set of procedures which we hand to them. Here's how you do online research in our office and they have that doesn't require any instruction.
[00:10:00] That's a Q and I just see so many companies struggle with the scaling, you know, scaling their business when they haven't really defined in and well articulated documented terms how these processes happen. You know, they start growing and they start putting more people on it. And that's the wheels are coming off the car because they just don't have they don't of the.
[00:10:20] Execution side of it really figured out, yet I've seen it on the client side, too. So the emerging companies that we work with, there's, you know, the whole range of challenges that you might and one might imagine.
[00:10:35] But the most prevalent one is their struggle between autonomy and system ization. Right. So what I've observed is that there is this quest for revenue in the quest for revenue seems to overtake the need for centralization system and systems.
[00:10:55] And it's really doing a disservice. I think ultimately to their ability to set up a structure and to scale. And I'm sure you've observed the same thing.
[00:11:04] Yeah, it's it's I think do do see that dichotomy or at least that sort of tradeoff or the perceived tradeoff that a lot of companies focus on, just like, well, just go sell, sell, sell and then we'll kind of worry about it later. The only one for me that comes up is by by sitting down and figuring out what are your processes you think you end up defining, what are your core strengths and where should you really be playing and what are the services that you're really good at. And that actually feeds the sales process, because once you figure that out, it's actually easier to sell that because you've got a you've got a process. You know what you're actually selling. You've identified typically, you know why you're particularly good at it. So you can now have some sort of benefits. And what the outcomes are like, you start to know, oh, I see that the outcome of this process, the outcome of this service that we have or these benefits I can start selling benefits against. So, you know, ironically, I think that actually going back and figuring out my core processes and figuring out what works about them and why we're great doesn't actually help the sales process if done. Right.
[00:11:58] Right. Well. And for me, it actually almost served the inverse, which is on the on the strategic systems. Right. It helped point out weaknesses for me. Right. So as a professional service firm, to me, the core challenge that all of us face is that a lot of my business development is based on personal relationships. And that's I haven't solved the the riddle of how to scale that right. If it's personal relationships, then it's driven by you being present. So in thinking about how to make the sales process more systematic, it's forced me to recognize that weakness. Think of some ways to try to compensate for that, but at least it's drawn my attention to that area.
[00:12:43] No, that's excellent. Tell me a little bit about talent. Like you mentioned, hiring people and always be looking for talent. What has been your strategy or what have you tried in terms of who you hire? What level do you hire for? What kind of skills or capabilities or fit do you typically look for? And then what do you kind of training on? Tell us a little bit about your experiences so far on the talent side.
[00:13:03] I just think this is a service based businesses. It's so talent focus or so talent to paint, you know, being able to find the right people, have them trained up and be able to execute on the processes. Well, what what are your experiences so far?
[00:13:15] So it you know, I've come to say that that our inventory write what we sell is brainpower. So hiring brainpower is the key. The way I've built it is to have two pools, right.
[00:13:28] One is employees, you know, w nine to report every day and do the main work of getting the product out, being responsive directly to that clients or to me. And then we have a pool of sort of on demand attorneys who I use on a project by project basis. Those are generally very sophisticated people who have a particular focus that a project may call for. And those are people generally that I have long term relationship with. I know their resumé. I know their talents. And I can really have them swoop in and help out to deliver a key product, you know, with regard to our hiring process on the employee side. I spend some time reading a number of books, including who and, you know, think of think of other great helpful books on the subject.
[00:14:22] And we developed, I think, almost a 10 step hiring process with USPI Guinn's, which at nine out of the 10 steps I've happily delegated.
[00:14:31] So literally good.
[00:14:33] I don't I don't know who we're interviewing. I think we have an interview today. We have two more on Wednesday. I don't know who they are. Never met them. Have anyone looked at their resume? So that's a beautiful thing.
[00:14:44] The beginning the first step of the process is they submit a resume and then we ask for a one paragraph writing sample on a subject that we've chosen so we can compare apples to apples out of all the candidates. And on the WHO model, we do a lot of sort of exploratory questions and we put a lot of stock in references, you know, from prior jobs. And then the very last step when I meet the candidate is a trial day of work. So we, you know, have them come in. They work on a project where they're an employee for a day. They experience us. Experienced them. And that really is the telling capstone to the whole process. I like that.
[00:15:27] I mean, actually we did this. So the technology company that I founded and round for for many years was was one of our learnings when we developed our hiring process. We would have them common and we were a pair programming. We are extreme programming software company. And one of things in extreme programming is pair programs. So you're to work side by side with another programmer on the code. And so we bring people in and have them pair for a day.
[00:15:50] And that for me it kind of came down to, you know, an interview only really tells you how well somebody can interview.
[00:15:58] Doesn't really tell them. It doesn't really tell you how well they do the job.
[00:16:01] So actually having someone come in for a day and honestly, if we had more filters, we had probably 70 some 70 percent of the people that ended up not making it through that process were people we liked. But by the time they went and spent the day with us actually doing paper, getting so many people were doing their programming at the time, they opted out. They realized that the the dynamic and the way in which we work and the that the sort of challenges of that were what were not what they wanted or were not what they could. You know, they were interested in. And so they would opt out of the process. Thirty percent of people, we would opt out for various reasons. But but for me, that was that was great because the last thing I wanted was the high price.
[00:16:41] And then a week later, they're like, I can't do this anymore. Right.
[00:16:43] Now that that's so valuable to have them drop out. I mean, it's it's you were looking for not a fit as much or more than you are. I'm looking for a fit.
[00:16:53] And the suit the farther back. The other thing I learned is the farther back you can push that or depending on how you look at the far forward. Earlier in the process, you can find those those opportunities for them to opt out the better just because you have you have reduced your investment or the amount of time you spend. And that's half the battle is just filtering out filt filtering out the people. And you don't you don't want everyone to be successful in the interviewing process. And I think that's one thing that people kind of get wrong, is they sell too much and they do too much trying to trying to sell the candidate on taking the job when in the end it may not be a good fit.
[00:17:21] Right. Right. And I don't want to mislead you or anybody else. Right. We we have our it's really hard to find a good match. Right. The right people. Right seats. Right. No matter what our process is, it's long and tiring
[00:17:36] I've learned it is absolutely critical. You can't build a people business without the people.
[00:17:41] Yeah, exactly. And it is long and tiring because it should be just like let's just it's the nature of hiring and the nature of finding the right people for the right job.
[00:17:50] And so I don't I don't think you're experiencing anything out of the ordinary when it comes to people based businesses.
[00:17:56] So let's talk a little bit about the work that you do for clients. What is your primary focus? What are some of the insights you've you've learned in terms of working client, working with clients, in terms of the things they get wrong or they get right from a legal point of view? Give us a little insight on the work that you do.
[00:18:12] So our main focus or group of clients typically are businesses that have five employees are up about three million dollars in revenue and up they span various industries, manufacturers, particularly food manufacturers.
[00:18:29] We seem to have a niche with real estate holding companies, family businesses, but it's really the more the cross-section of the characteristics of the businesses and the business owners rather than the industries themselves. And in working with those kinds of businesses, they seem to be really on the precipice of putting these structures in place that I think are, as you said, underutilized as a tool to build your business. So, for instance, many of those businesses do not have formal corporate structures.
[00:19:03] They all just live because I can't tell you how many times that I got to know. Someone calls music.
[00:19:08] We think about hiring a coach. We're like a five million dollar company. There's three partners.
[00:19:12] And I say, OK, what can I see a copy or operating room in there? Well, we don't really have one. Cool. OK. It happens all the time.
[00:19:20] Right. Right. And it you know, I I can understand and empathize with it. Right. You're focused on building the business. You want to make it go. And it seems like it's maybe something you can easily push to the side.
[00:19:34] But from my perspective, it's so critical and it will give you the platform to go further than you can get without it. Yes. So, yeah, you know, particularly if you're successful. Right.
[00:19:47] So if you're successful in your example and you help the business go from 5 million to 50 million in revenue and they have no operating agreement, at some point they're going to be figures between the partners. And that could spell doom for the business.
[00:20:01] Yeah. I've written a couple of articles on those. It's it's not it's a question of when, not if. And it's not even that, you know. Oh, well, you're going to have some conflict. It's you know, look, people's lives change. You know, people get married, people get divorced. People have kids. And when these things happen, you can create just a, you know, people of different situations. Different. Context, different needs. They want to pursue different venues with the business. And unless you have a good structure or a good operating structure and governance model to be able to make these decisions and very clear, effective ways, you're going to destroy value. You're going to you're going to lose value in that business and the drama and the uncertainty that comes with that. And it isn't always drama is and that, you know, things end up going to court. Sometimes it's it just it ends up in a quagmire and the decisions don't get made. And oftentimes not making a decision is worse than making a poor decision just because it ends up putting everything in limbo.
[00:20:51] Right. And so I would add two things to that. And so it's not only the worry about, as you say, things are potentially going wrong in the future. It's how are we operating our business today and how are we operating it tomorrow and 10 years from now? And the idea of a corporate structure gives you the framework to get through all of that. Right. So, for instance. Right. You would expect in a corporation to have a board of directors and corporate officers. I cannot tell you how many of my clients say, no, we don't have that yet, or that's too much structure for us. We don't want to do that.
[00:21:27] And what they're missing is that the reason that exists is to give you a process or a system to look back to where we were before.
[00:21:36] As to how to make decisions and how to manage your business. So, you know, it's not and you can be on your own board. It's not as though you give up control. It's that you are adding voices in the room.
[00:21:48] And I think that what people don't understand and it's I think it's one of the key things to as you look at sort of strategy and planning. You know, having a good set of advisors, you know, people can give the input and insight and not even governance. Some of their undercity have voting rights, but they have no input. And they have no formal product process to set that strategy. And to set those plans can be really helpful, particularly when the company gets bigger and you start having, you know, things get complicated. You know, you're running different divisions. And it's not something often one person you've got to keep in their head, you know, all the moving pieces and be able to effectively operate within them. So they're good, right?
[00:22:23] So, yeah. So one thing that I know you are very familiar with and and would like to make sure that everybody out there sees as an alternate path or at least an interim step is the idea of an advisory board. Yeah. So and this is true for professional service firms. Any service firms we need we as entrepreneurs need to hear voices other than our own and we need to fill in our knowledge gaps. So one way to do that is to have an advisory board, which is a more informal version of a board of directors. You're not bound to follow them. And you want to sort of populate them with people who have different perspectives and different knowledge than yours. But they're really there as a sounding board to help you along.
[00:23:08] Yeah, and I think it's important to just highlight that difference for folks as a board of directors has a governance role, a voting rights role, a board of advisors. It's a non-binding, it's formal, but non-binding or it can be formal and but non-binding in terms of, you know, the decisions or suggestions that are coming out of that. The other one I would add to it is that expertise is really good and network is really good. The other one I'd like to see is sort of a diversity of thinking style and risk tolerance.
[00:23:33] So if I'm dealing with a founder or CEO who is, you know, a really strong sales person, you know, high risk tolerance, willing to bet the farm every time, making sure that they have, you know, some someone on their board, on their advisory board who is, you know, a little more conservative, a little more of a risk mitigator just to balance those things out, at least from perspective, point of view can be really helpful. So, you know, think about learning style or think about your kind of management style, learning style, risk tolerance. Those kind of making sure you've got diversity on your board on those areas can be really powerful as well. And I think that's a great insight. So what else? So that's kind of founding documents, your your governance documents, making sure that you've got those things in place. What are some of the areas that you see companies needing to kind of really be strategic about from up from the legal side of things, what they need to get right to be be able to successfully grow the business?
[00:24:25] So I think there are two two pieces. One is going back to the idea of systems. So you need a legal system as well as every other kind of system in your business. So, you know, if we go back to the if you look even at five minutes worth of the we we work story for a second.
[00:24:45] All right. So from what I understand as to how we work was operating and its people were operating, they were really, for instance, the salespeople were told to go out and make any deal you can and you will get paid commission based on that deal. There was no understanding that the deals that they were making were profitable or unprofitable and no consideration of that.
[00:25:08] So the challenge that they failed that was to put a system in place.
[00:25:14] So in particular, the legal side of that is you really want to have a templated. Documents you want your team to understand what our contracting process is, what we want from clients, what we can give clients. And here's the funnel in which we want to take them from shaking their hand to start to having them sign up and delivering them great service. And I think that that unfortunately gets pushed to the side where people don't appreciate. Even in the context of service based business.
[00:25:46] And I like that because you're going to using kind of the legal lens to actually look strategically at the business and what services are provided rather than this kind of checkmark at the very, very end as I go. Okay, let's throw let's throw it over to council to get a review of this document, you know, thinking about it upfront and using it as that more of a strategic review than a, you know, end of process, you know, just going to do a double check on it. I like that idea.
[00:26:09] Took me a little bit about, I guess, the process of hiring an attorney, hiring counsel for your business.
[00:26:15] If you're a founder, CEO, executive in a company and you're kind of going through the process or you decided you you have need. How do you go about finding a good fit? What do you look for? What do you suggest people look for in terms of skills or capabilities, size of company? How do people go up finding the best legal help in the market?
[00:26:35] So I can tell you how it works with us.
[00:26:38] And you know, I have some changes to the process that I wish I could make, but don't have the power to do it. So typically what happens is, you know, you're you are talking to your fellow entrepreneurs and you say, oh, boy, I really need to finally write my operating agreement with my partner.
[00:26:57] And somebody in the room says, oh, I have a great attorney, call so-and-so. And typically what happens is they'll call so and so. And based 95 percent on that recommendation from their colleague, they will hire the person, the first and only person that they've spoken, you know. So it's a lot of referral based trust, which makes sense because where trusted advisers.
[00:27:20] Right. You're a trusted adviser to the founders that you coach. I'm a trusted advisor to my clients.
[00:27:25] So you would expect that a recommendation from a trusted friend would be a logical place to go again? That that makes sense. But it's not. Doesn't necessarily lead you to the best match for you. So my suggestion is, as with anything in life, you need multiple choices. So I would always recommend that you talk to at least three attorneys.
[00:27:50] It's like hiring. You know, you're hiring a lawyer just like you would be hiring an employee. You need to have a really committed interview process and to make sure you're getting the most appropriate help, you can do some of your own background work. Right. Not only should you rely on the recommendation of colleagues or friends, but you can ask the attorney for, you know, some representative clients and see if those clients are willing to talk to you as a potential client. Some well, some won't. You can also look you can get a lot of information online. If you're looking for a litigator, you can look up and access public court records and you can see what cases they've litigated and how those things have played out. You can also ask the attorney for samples or other representative information of what they've done before. And the other thing I would say is part of the challenge becomes pricing. That is understandable, but is the absolute wrong thing to make a decision on. Right. If you're if you're hiring a cardiologist to do a heart open heart surgery, you're not going to ask them, can I get a discount on my heart surgery?
[00:28:59] Right. Yeah, I'm sure there some people that would. But because they see the correlation of outcomes.
[00:29:06] Exactly. It's this is you're doing this because you feel a need. And this is critical to building your business. And you have to treat it that way.
[00:29:17] I agree with Judith. There's a bit of pleasure. We're gonna hit time here if people want to find out more about you, about the firm. What's the best place to get that information?
[00:29:25] So we do have a Web site. It's the Backman law firm dot com. So T H E B A C H M A N L A W F I R M dot com
[00:29:36] I’ll Make sure that the link is in the show notes so people can click through and get that truth. It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for taking the time. Great insights, great conversation. I really appreciate it. Bruce, thank you so much.
[00:29:48] You've been listening to Scaling up Services with Business Coach, Bruce Eckfeldt. To find a full list of podcast episodes, download the tools and worksheets and access other great content, visit the website at scalingupservices.com and don’t forget to sign up for the free newsletter at scalingupservices.com/newsletter.