Leadership In Law Podcast

S03E101 Fish Where the Fish Are with Attorney Brandon Woodward

• Marilyn Jenkins • Season 3 • Episode 101

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Handshakes feel friendly until someone stops paying. We sit down with corporate and M&A attorney Brandon Woodward to map a smarter way to build, protect, and sell a business, without losing sleep or leaving money on the table. From prosecutor to in-house counsel to founding partner, Brandon shares how a client-first model, disciplined systems, and strategic networking create leverage for small and mid-sized companies that rarely see “big law” attention.

We get specific about where deals go sideways and how to prevent it: tight operating agreements that outsmart bad state defaults, buyout terms that preserve friendships, and succession plans that make a firm salable. Brandon explains why you should “kill the hero” by shifting from a personality-driven brand to a durable identity, so your practice or company carries value beyond the founder. He also shows how to find hidden equity, valuable dirt under modest shops, books of business that throw off reliable cash, and competitors willing to pay for peace.

AI takes center stage as a practical co-pilot. Hear how legal-specific tools summarize 70-page leases, flag non-market clauses, and suggest risk language you didn’t think to include. The secret is targeted prompts and a lawyer’s judgment, AI as your sharpest first pass, not your final draft. We also talk team-building by strengths using DISC profiles, pairing rainmakers with grinders, and installing a 3x rule for every hire or software purchase. Pay profit first, price your value, and stop running an expensive hobby.

Reach Brandon here:
https://www.wkfklaw.com/
https://www.instagram.com/bizlawbrandon/


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SPEAKER_00:

From the law and explosive world to building that five teams. What can we do for successful firm leaders? Whether you're a discount leader or just starting or turning as a law firm owner. The Leadership and Law Podcast is here to equip you with the knowledge and tools you need to build a successful and fulfilling legal practice.

SPEAKER_02:

Welcome to another episode of the Leadership in Law Podcast. I'm your host, Marilyn Jenkins. Please join me in welcoming my guest, Brandon Woodard, to the show today. Brandon is a seasoned corporate and business attorney with a strong focus on startups, early stage, and closely held private companies. With experience as both law firm partner and in-house counsel for public and private companies, he offers practical legal guidance from a business-minded perspective. Brandon co-founded Woodward, Kelly, Fulton, and Kaplan in West Palm Beach after opening his own firm in 2011. He's a former president of the Martin County Bar Association, holds top professional rankings from Martindale Hubble and AVO, and is a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Law and Rockhurst University. I'm excited to have you here, Brandon. Welcome.

SPEAKER_01:

I'm glad it worked out. Glad we got to do this today. How are you?

SPEAKER_02:

I am great. Thank you for asking. All right, let's jump in and tell us a little bit about your leadership journey.

SPEAKER_01:

It's a bit of an odd, windy tale. I actually started as a criminal attorney. Different states call them different things: prosecuting attorney, district attorney, states attorney. So I was that in my hometown of Kansas City, Missouri for a couple of years. That got that's a good job, but it ultimately I wanted to move on a little bit. And the next best job that came along was in-house counsel at a very large corporation. Going from criminal to corporate is not the easiest jump in the world, and it's not a very traditional one either. But the skills that all attorneys have are fairly transferable. It's problem solving. It's getting to the root of an issue and seeing what you can do to resolve it. We attorneys are, as you've figured out by now, we're problem solvers. Being married to one is not a particularly delightful activity because we want to solve all the problems all at once. But after, so I was in corporate counsel at a very large company in Kansas City, uh, Missouri. They built very large things. I ended up getting an offer from a company here in Florida that was one of our biggest customers. So just as big. The first one was privately held and employee owned. The second one is publicly traded. I was with them for a couple of years. We all decided that, like I said, there's a lot of lawyers and didn't need that many of them. At one point, I decided this job seems to be tailing off. Let's open my own practice, thinking, well, some flexibility, a little easier choice of clients and things like that. So that was 2012, I believe. Opened my doors with a spare bedroom and a card table and about a hundred bucks. And I said, hey, let's do business law for everybody. And that was the gap in the market that I think I took advantage of. And that was usually business law is the province of large firms with large retainers and high hourly rates. Who looks out for? My first yeah, my first client was a pet sitter. Uh Fortune 200 company to a my next client was a pet sitter. Not a lot of capital in the pet sitting business, but you know what? They had a good agreement. They needed something that they could show their client that had the basics. Okay, I'm watching this pet for this number of days. I get paid this rate, and this is how it's going to work. Those fundamental principles of business law don't change, whether it's hundreds of millions of dollars buying and selling stuff worth more than the GDP of Ecuador or a pet sitter or a house painter or a service industry, a small mom and pop. It grew. A lot of networking, a lot of real personal one-on-one time with the business community here in South Florida. And it just grew in 2018. I knew I needed a little more help. We needed some additional attorneys. I needed litigation support. Every so often people do get in trouble, and we do have to actually go to court. I'm not a I'm not a litigator. And that and it worked out. That's how Kelly, Woodward Kelly Fulton Kaplan came into existence. And we've been together ever since. Partners, two locations, got quite a few associates, and we've done pretty well. My role has never changed. Mine is still business law, particularly on the front side. It's the putting businesses together, putting people together in businesses. I also hold down the mergers and acquisitions practice. I am the mergers and acquisitions practice, which is a fancy way of saying buying and selling businesses. And there too, you hear about MA and big companies, and usually you're seeing a very large law firm in that. If we just want to sell the shoe store from one generation to the second or document a succession plan, you need somebody like me to make sure it's done right. Same thing if someone is at uh transitioning the business to a new set of owners, you got to have that done right to protect both sides. And folks were just no before they still do it. They'll we shook hands on it, or he's gonna pay me over time, and I'm just gonna change the name in the record books, and it's now somebody else's. And that's yeah, that's the reaction I give. A lot of not quite that simple. And then, of course, somebody just stops making the payments on it, or what happens then, or so there's a claim from when the old owner held the business, and now who picks up the tab for that? That's why MA Council, essentially buying and selling businesses, somebody like me needs to be in there to document it, guide everybody through the process and get it going. So that's where we are now. It is 2025. I've been at this for 26 years now, and uh couldn't couldn't imagine doing anything else.

SPEAKER_02:

Wow, that's fantastic. Yeah, it's all about those having somebody on your team that knows the what-ifs that you're not thinking about when you're going into that.

SPEAKER_01:

It is excellent.

SPEAKER_02:

Okay, great story. I love that you went from big to small to your own firm and you've had lots of experience like that. What's something about your journey that might surprise our listeners?

SPEAKER_01:

Just how how a little bit of customer service and a little bit of technology can absolutely set you head and shoulders above your competition. Maybe I didn't see all of my notes. Marilyn, where's your head, where's your practice and where are you headquartered? Houston. Houston, okay. Texas, Florida. It's a little different in Texas. You still have that sort of Midwest mindset to you. In Florida, I found as soon as I opened that the majority of Florida attorneys were very comfortable with their practices. They called people back when they needed to and wanted to. They marketed when they needed business. They didn't always treat their customers of any size with the respect and diligence that they deserved. And from a Midwest mind point of call people back and these people pay your salary, that didn't sit well with me. So by really leveraging technology and we were able to walk and talk a little bigger than we were, for a bit, we our phones are answered 24 hours a day. Not by me, but we do have a service that comes in after hours. And it's surprising that someone that runs a business may not be free between nine and four to think about calling us uh to book an appointment. We booked folks after hours, we talked to people incessantly. I marketed to chambers of commerce and young professionals groups. I made, it's not an original thought, but there's a uh an expression in marketing called fish where the fish are. And so I went to accounting firms, I went to property management firms, just taking lunches and having and showing up where they did and saying, Who does the legal? Or because those are the individuals, particularly the accountants and the financial planners of the world. They will see trouble before, or they're the ones that are very invested in protecting what they have. And so even if the business owner doesn't see it himself, that he may or may not start needing it a legal, legal counsel. I guarantee you their financial planner does, and their or their accountant will say, Yeah, you need your con you lost on three different contracts. Why don't you have that contract written professionally? It's always worked for me before. No, it hasn't. You got paid for the cleaners last time. So that's so that's that was a surprise to me that I thought we were in for years of hustle and struggle, or I was just gonna have to go join another firm when in fact that just some elbow grease and understanding what the market wanted really all that that that really set us up for success.

SPEAKER_02:

I love that customer service, you're right. At different parts of the country, it's different. I grew up in North Carolina, so the southern hospitality kind of thing, that service type industry, it does make a difference. But the one thing I really love about what you said is you went networking where your customers would be, instead of just focusing on, say, a BI or something like that. Get out there and that's one of the things we recommend is get involved in the chambers in the area, not just maybe your city, if there's other ones, especially in South Florida. There's so many different chambers and that sort of things and networking groups.

SPEAKER_01:

I love a good networking. And but a lot of it has to do with your particular management style, just your style in general. One thing we use here at the law firm is the disk profile D I S C. You may have heard of it. All of our staff go through it. Any potential partner or employee of any stripe, all the way up to partner, goes through the disk profiling system metric. So we find out how do we work best. One of my things is the face-to-face. One of my things is this sort of, as we say, kibbits, it's the easy back and forth like we're doing, to get that person to, and I'll steal it from B and I to know and trust you to say, okay, I like Brandon. Brandon seems like he can, he got, I'm gonna ask him some questions about my business. I'm gonna trust him that his advice is worth paying for. My other partners don't have necessarily this, the gab, the rep arts, the back and forth. And that's fine. We need grinders, we need folks that can take a pile of work, of complex, very brainy work here and move it over to that side of the desk. And we have a couple of one of my partners is excellent with strategy, but he's a crashing boar at parties. And I tell him that I tell him that daily. But uh we have another one of work. That's great. Yeah, I need to want to golf with you. I just want to get the work. And I'm like, let me go, let me go get it for you.

SPEAKER_02:

I love that. Having the right, there's the one thing that I've learned through hiring is there's always someone who enjoys what you don't and hire to still build your team and of a nice so that everybody has something that they're excited about and they're good at.

SPEAKER_01:

Sure.

SPEAKER_02:

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01:

And my my admin, who is my right hand person for quite a lot of things, has almost a complete 180-degree opposite disc profile than I do. Loves rules, loves strategy, loves certainty, and everything is done a certain way. We have a lot of lists. Dear Lord, we have a lot of lists. But we also have a lot of processes that we didn't have before I brought her on board. And uh, when my day is regimented and scheduled, by gosh, work gets out the door. Left to my own devices, I would be writing a blog, and then I would do a podcast, and then I would go figure out where my next client meeting is going to be. There's time for all of that, but it also needs to have some sort of structure, rules, and uh and organization around it. So that's why you're right, having your team, and when you're in business with folks, sometimes your friends don't make the best employees or team members. It just doesn't work, especially if you're all very similar, similarly minded. That is something I do preach when folks are getting into business with each other. Let's put together a proper shareholders' agreement, or in the LLC world, that would be an operating agreement, to really drill down who makes decisions and when do we need to all meet and when do we all need to agree on something, or when can we let the guy that knows stuff make that decision? How are we gonna treat each other when things go very well? We're making good money. How do we split that up? What if we get an opera offer to buy all of it to buy it? Well, how are we gonna decide how we're gonna handle that day? It also works in reverse. If we have to pass the hat, we were we got stung, we did we're not we're burning cash. How are we gonna feed this beast? A good operating agreement or good rules of the road can absolutely save friendships and families. I always say business with friends and family is not a great idea, but it can work as long as everybody knows what the rules are. Not my original quote, but an attorney once said, the ride is always smoother if you know where the emergency exits are.

SPEAKER_02:

I like that. That makes a lot of sense. Because planning that exit strategy in the beginning when we're all friends, knowing where you're going. And no, no surprise bumps in the road.

SPEAKER_01:

No, I sit them down, I'm like, all right, at some point you guys are gonna disagree. Let's not make that the end of a 20-year friendship. Let's figure out, okay, if we really don't agree with each other, what does it take to get away from? And it's usually a buyout. Because if you if left, left to your own devices, each state has a LLC statute. Florida has one, North Carolina has one, Texas has one. And I can, and I while I don't know every state, I can, it's almost a certainty that the rules that are in the state's laws are terrible. They are generally going to be say, liquidate the company, everybody gets what they got out of it into it, and then you have to blow up the company. That's not every state, but the default rules, if you don't make your own rules, are generally pretty crappy for all involved.

SPEAKER_02:

And your whole team. Oh, yeah. Especially if it's a good business. That's interesting. I always like to find out what sparked your interest in law.

SPEAKER_01:

I've always had uh it's there's an expression I use a lot, and it's an old it's an old Seinfeld quote. It's what are lawyers really? It's we're the only folks that when we were kids, we read the inside of the top of the box. You can move your pieces around all you like, but if there's a question or things get sticky, you always go to that one person. I was always that one person. Whether it was as a kid knowing the rules of the game, which is really all what lawyers are, but there was a particular moment in college where my fraternity was happened to be running a party. It was getting late into the evening, morning, campus police will show up by the fraternity house, and they're like, send out somebody to talk to us. Let's send me out there. And I'm like, okay, give us a half hour more, and we clean up the entire neighborhood tomorrow. And the police officer comes back with, we'll give you fit, we'll give you 15 minutes more, but we're taking somebody in right now, and you still clean up the neighborhood. I go, nobody gets taken in right now. We shut down in the next five minutes and we clean the neighborhood two Saturdays in a row. This is I'm negotiating like my fraternity brother's freedom depends on it. At that point, it did. And the officer looks at me and goes, Okay, we can leave it at five minutes. Nobody goes down, no, we're not, nobody goes down, and you're cleaning the neighborhood two days two Saturdays in a row. I go, and by gosh, we lived up two hours a day. I go back in the door, I close the door. Guys, we have to we have to shut the party down right now. And it worked. And they really sparked my interest in law. I just knew that I had the ability to negotiate, to get to a solution. There was I read lots and lots of business books. They're back on one of these shelves back over here. Getting to yes was always one of my favorites. It's okay. You start with what's common. Everybody wants to do a deal. Everybody wants you, want to buy this business, the other guy wants to sell it.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Start with that. Now you get ego and pride in the way, and it's worth this much, or I want these things to happen, you're doomed at that point. But if you can focus on the deal and get it done, and that's why transactional practice has always been just a hoot for me.

SPEAKER_02:

I love that. Yeah, make win-win deals and everybody's happy and life goes on. Absolutely. So you were on the other side, and then you went into corporate. Did you always know you wanted to work with business law and helping people with their agreements and that sort of thing and making deals happen?

SPEAKER_01:

No, I just fell in. I sleep really well at night. The business attorneys with. We don't necessarily have to absorb all of our clients' issues. So much of the law is personal. They're if you're injured, if you're talking, if you're talking to a personal injury attorney, someone's had their life disrupted by something that's probably not of their choosing. They didn't choose to break their leg, contract this disease, have a doctor do something horrible or make a mistake. They didn't choose any of that. And now they are have real physical pain on the other side. Criminal. You're in a situation, you didn't necessarily not to get all uh lay miz and jabal genre. You didn't mean to steal the bread, but you're in a situation where that's that you did what you did, and now the state is going to try to do something horrible to you. So those family law, a lot of very personal, a lot of crisis sort of things happen. I'm down for my fellow human being. I love my fellow man, but at the same time, my role was to be here at business. It's look, we employ a lot of people, we help a lot of folks with the business side of things. And here's the thing: if a deal doesn't go through, nobody's going to jail, no one's going to pass away, no one's kids are going to get taken away from them. It's a so mentally, and I have a family of three boys and a wife, and I'm out of here at four or five o'clock every single day, and my phone doesn't ring on the weekends. That for me has made it all worthwhile. Yeah, and it's not the best answer I could give you, but at the same time, it's like transactional practice is all about getting deals done. There's usually a nice, there's usually money, for lack of a better term. There's money behind it, and money's going to fix a lot of the problems.

SPEAKER_02:

I love that. And I like the way you say you you sleep good at night, and you're not seeing people on their worst day. You're seeing people when they're looking to the future and building something. I love that.

SPEAKER_01:

And closing days, we had a closing day on Friday, and uh a fellow was he walked out$2.1 million richer when he left my office. And it's a long way to get there. But it was his, it was a business that he inherited. And he's like, I don't really want to. Should I close the business? And I said, Well, why don't we sell it? Yeah, we did turn a sad, sad moment into a well, he sold a business, got eight, seven figures for it. So not a bad Friday.

SPEAKER_02:

No, not at all. And then selling is definitely an option where I think a lot of the more family-owned businesses when it comes to a transition and not the generational, the succession planning, maybe they didn't do that. And it and closing, it's not always the best thing. You don't realize the value in it.

SPEAKER_01:

There is. There, there's value, and the value can be teased out or found in a lot of different places. The obvious is what you know, what does equipment look like? What do you have? Do you have real estate? South Florida real estate is some of the most expensive real estate in the country. And if you bought, even if your little transmission shop only makes$200,000 a year, you might be sitting on top of two, three million dollars worth of property if it's on a major highway. Your business isn't worth much. The dirt underneath it sure is to a Wawa or a quick trip, a racetrack, something like that. So yeah, there's real estate. So there's that aspect of it. The book of business. If you're a service industry, insurance agencies are very lucrative. They are because how often you never change your insurance once you have good home or good auto or some life. Those are just residual cash cows for that agent and the broker once one level up. My kids didn't want to go in the insurance agency with me, in the insurance business with me. Should I just close? Why? That is a stream of income that somebody out there, another agency will absolutely step up and take off your hands. Service industries, they have money. If you're an actual proof, if you make products, okay, your competitor might be a very good researcher. They might just want you out of the business. Even if you're very intimately tied up with the business, there's still ways to, in the years before you want to take an exit strategy, start separating yourself away from uh the business. A practice management group I know calls that kill the hero. Take your name off the door. Now we know we want to have your name on the door, my name's on the door, but you'll see law firms stop with the name of the partner on it. They will be Main Street Law or the Adoption Law Center or the Men's Divorce Clinic or something like that. At that point, separating the attorney from the actual practice. And now you can start replacing the attorneys inside, and it still has value because you built a brand out of it, and it's not so much tied up to Brandon Woodward, Marilyn Jenkins, something like that.

SPEAKER_02:

And that's yeah, that's something that we've noticed in a lot of different marketing agencies as well. You any kind of business, you don't want it to be you being the brand. And try to move away from that so you do have a sellable asset when you decide you want to exit or whatever your future holds.

SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. The ticket clinic, those have sprung up in every single state. And I believe they're owned by like three guys.

SPEAKER_02:

Really?

SPEAKER_01:

The local guy does, yeah, there's a local attorney that runs the ticket clinic, but or 1-800 DWI or something like that. But it's like you don't really know who your attorney is, but you certainly know that the that they advertise a lot and they're in your town. And that when those sort of commoditized legal up legal processes, tickets a ticket, really is. So you don't need the best guy, you need the most cost-effective guy. And so that's why, like I said, you'll see attorneys moving their name off of the doors. Even if it was a concrete company, yes, you want to absolutely start moving the name off of it, the family name, because those family members ain't gonna be there for much longer.

SPEAKER_02:

No, true. And we're running into it, always comes down to succession. Do your kids want to take this over? Farming is a big example of that. There's all the named farms, and then they're trying to get away from that. Agreed. That's very interesting. So you said you've been in this business for about 26 years. What kind of changes have you seen in the legal field over this time?

SPEAKER_01:

I'm seeing a lot. I'll get to the tech side of things and the AI, which just in the last three years has seen more change in three years as it relates to AI than anything else I've seen. Prior to that, though, I have seen a bit of a shift away from research associates, interns, and paralegals. There's not enough, the the market got a little is still very saturated. There, there's a hundred thousand lawyers coming out of law school every single year. And they have to, they want jobs. And they're taking the jobs that the paralegals used to have. And paralegals are expensive. So you'll see there, the world of paralegals is getting much, much smaller. Same thing with just an associate that isn't also a rainmaker. I can there's always somebody gonna look up stuff in books cheaper than you. And I don't necessarily, you don't necessarily have to have a law degree behind your name to do it. So associates need to on day one start working on their book, their building their brand, as, if you will, and moving forward with it. Now, specifically as it relates to tech, it started with legal research when we ditched the shepherdizing books for Westlaw, and then we were all Westlawing things, and we paid those exorbitant subscriptions for that. But just since, and I think AI gets smarter every six months or so. I was on a drafting board for one of the more prominent legal base, not Chat GPT. There is one that specifically for lawyers, I'm happy to share that with you some other time. The end of that story is I can dictate what I want it to do, and then it will have kind of an outline. It'll have a strategy about what I would have done without knowing me. And I've trained it on my own documents. Same time. Here's a perfect example. I needed a catering contract. Okay. Uh catering is going to make the food, it's going to deliver it. This AI came up with the one paragraph that it says when we deliver the food to the site, we will take its temperature and we will guarantee and warrant, those are two different things, that it will be at the proper temperature when we deliver it. And that is the extent of our warranty about temperature. That way it's cold, let's say it's cold potato salad, when they deliver it, it is below 38 degrees, and they will put a thermo pen in it and take a picture of it as they're bringing it into the facility. And then they leave. Now, if they leave that man, if they leave a mayonnaise-based potato salad out for the next four hours, someone doesn't feel good afterwards, they can prove, and it's written right into the contract, the food is the right temperature when we believe when we deliver it to you, full stop. I did not even think about food temperature. I didn't that's a good get. That's a good thing. That's the ability is to expand your experience level. That's really what AI is. It's like it takes your experience but aggregates it with everybody else's caterer somewhere got burned on food temperature. So it started making its way into catering contracts and it made it into mine. And the caterer I gave it to was like, Holy crap, I never thought of that. And I go, I did.

SPEAKER_02:

There you go. So that's it finds a thanks with the things that you don't think about because it's the large language model, and that makes a big difference. That's amazing. The temperature, that's a great paragraph to put in there.

SPEAKER_01:

About something that small, or actually, it's very large. And you certainly AI has gotten a little bit firmer and better than putting up citations, Baskins versus Robins, and things like that. And those are good for a giggle. And of course, you never use it for the actual what comes out. But I was doing a presentation and I needed three examples of the difference between an HR problem and a legal problem. And I pitched it to my AI thing, and it gave me three of those scenarios, and then they were too easy. So I said, meet harder. And it knew what I wanted, and it made the scenario, the fact pattern, significantly more difficult. So it only turned on a couple of words. It was loss, it was bar exam hard. And I gave the quiz to a bunch of HR professionals, and I knew I got them when half of them said it was a legal issue and the other half said it was an HR issue. And I said, discuss amongst yourselves. They thought I was great. I got no, that was that one came from our AI as well. So there, yeah, so that has been the change. One, attorneys are asked to do more, but at the same time, we're asked to do more. We're giving, we're getting much better tools to do it.

SPEAKER_02:

Excellent. So when it comes to contracts, now I know that in the past there were always these template contracts that would be you bring in the paragraphs, take out the paragraphs. Are you finding that using AI to maybe review and see what's missing, uh proofreading your work? Are you using things like that to save you time?

SPEAKER_01:

Or yes, yes. And no, it's some of it's a lot, it's just me. And since I'm in the middle of a deal, and by the time I send it out to somebody, and by the time it comes back, I can have AI just handle it. We're looking at a uh a small commercial lease, and I say small 65, 75 pages, and I will put it in there and I will say, review this commercial lease on behalf of the landlord looking for unusual or non-market terms. The prompt is really important on that. And that's a whole you can, I've actually seen classes on how to do prompts better. And it took me a while to get my prompts at least, and sure enough, it provided a summary right there of each paragraph. And sure enough, about halfway buried into it, there was like an early out clause that would not affect the it would not suit the landlord at all. And so I went back to that section. I went, hold on, no, that's completely non-market. Somebody tried to sneak one past the goalie there. So I flagged it. I would have flagged it, but it would have I would have been two hours into a reading by the time I caught it. And would I have caught it? Yeah, but I much rather had the computer flag it first. And so that was a great move, a great move. I'm like, hey, we got to take this out or we gotta renegotiate this. So first pass of documents, telling it what is market and what is not market. Look for things that are unusual. AI is not smart enough to know why it's unusual, it just knows that I've read a thousand quiet enjoyment clauses. I've never seen one say that. Let me bring that to the attorneys. And that's what you want an associate to do.

SPEAKER_02:

Nice. I love that. Yeah, I find that the, like you said, the prompts are incredibly important to make sure you're getting what you want. And if you ever get stuck, I don't know if you've done this before, but you're not getting exactly what you want from the prompt. You can actually ask AI, okay, this is what I'm looking for. How would I prompt you to do this? And it's pretty incredible in that way.

SPEAKER_01:

But at the same time, it's also useful for other things, too. A couple of friends of mine were interested in forming up the first Irish American Bar Association of Florida. There is no Irish American Bar Association of Florida. I'm a tiny bit Irish. These guys are super Irish. I said, guys, we need a logo. And one of them went into Chat GPT, or it's actually logo GPT, and within 15 minutes, he had three mock-ups of the Irish Tri-Colour and the Scales of Justice, a an Irish floor. Oh, and the floor and a gator. Who didn't know to put a gator, the Irish tricolors, and the scare scales of justice, and something in Latin? I was like, this is great. I we gotta have this. And of course, every good every good organization starts with a good logo, starts with a good t-shirt. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, exactly. Gotta have the t-shirts. And what was your experience going into video court during COVID? And then, of course, a lot of that's still continuing.

SPEAKER_01:

The thing about video, and we didn't have to go to court, like I said, but uh, what really stunk is you don't get that in the room sense. That's a trial attorney skill, but it's also a transactional attorney skill as well. If I can't pick up why this guy is not answering my questions, or I'm asking some questions, and I can't, I don't even get it's hard to explain, but you know what when you see it. Body language thing. Body language, vibe, feel, touch. If they're uneasy, you're getting more information than you think. Now, in the cold confines of a Zoom call, you're not getting that. And you certainly don't know if on the other side of the camera there's a Don't mention the lawsuit posted sitting behind the or directly underneath the guy's camera. It's rare, but no, it was uh I tell you, the uh the COVID was tough on the transactional attorneys as well, because we would used to be done face to face, get on a plane and fly somewhere, and we still do that. It's a lot of money. We are going to have a face-to-face over it. Yeah, like I said, COVID really hit us where it hurt on that, but we're through it now. We still have uh Slack and Teams and Zoom and all the other tools. And when we're in the middle of a deal in the due diligence phase, it's very easy for the other side and I, and remember, we are working collaborative to just jump on a quick, quick call and say, hey, schedule four set 4.7. I have no idea what you're asking. What do you want? And they it's that cuts the email out of it right there.

SPEAKER_02:

And it's yeah, it's so much more effective to just hop on a and we do the same thing on Slack or Zoom and just handle something. It's so much easier than trying to type it out. It's you're not getting it here. Let me let's just brainstorm on this really quickly. Absolutely very cool. Very cool. This is this has been really good. I really enjoyed your what you're doing and how your firm has grown and your attitude of taking towards the network. And it's ingenious going to the CPAs and those types of things that actually work for your ideal client. I love that.

SPEAKER_01:

It is, like I said, and by doing it that way, it actually gives me more exposure to those professionals. So when one of my clients from anywhere goes, My wife is tired of doing the books, I'm like, oh, I know I work very well with three different CPAs or bookkeepers at three different price points. Would you like their would you like their contact information? Now that's value. And we are always trying to be valuable to our customers and our clients, regardless of the kind of lawyer you are or service or industry you represent. So being that resource absolutely goes a long way. Oh, Brandon hooked me up with that really good CPA. Oh, okay. Or I needed a CFO because I'm taking all of my depreciation on all my trucks all at once. We're not tax efficient as a medical practice. Okay, why don't you go talk to a fractional CFO about that? And these are all folks that I what used to be a Rolodex is now my iPhone contact list and their apps and makes my job easier anyway.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, you're bringing value in uh in all sorts of ways. Just from your networking, you're bringing value to your future deals.

SPEAKER_01:

Absolutely. And when I needed my pool repair, I had three different pool repair guys I could choose from, and they were terrified of disappointing me.

SPEAKER_02:

I love it. I love it. So if you if our if you wanted our vis our listeners to have one good takeaway, what would you suggest? What would you hope they take away from this?

SPEAKER_01:

Could you give me a little more clarifying for about the law, about business, or or what?

SPEAKER_02:

I think business in general. I just love the way your whole I think it goes this way.

SPEAKER_01:

And I told this to a set of brand new attorneys that were being sworn in. It's a big, very emotional, teary sort of ceremony. Moms and dads are in the gallery on the judges in the fourth district, fourth DCA here in Florida with swearing in these attorneys. Know how your business makes money. And that's if you're the owner or the employee. Where do you fit in? And how does your business make money? And if you're not the boss, how does business make money off of you? My firm works on a three-to-one principle. I don't hire, I don't buy a piece of software, I don't buy uh a yellow pad, and I certainly don't buy or employ, hire a new body to fill a role here unless I'm I can see a way to three X. I want to see three times revenue what it costs me to put that person in that seat. If I can't see three times revenue, why am I doing it at all? If you are the worker bee, understand that your boss is getting three times your rate on the other side. Understand your value and understand where you fit into that. And if you're the again, if you're a worker bee, you understand, oh, I'm valuable. Here's how I can make myself more valuable. You might survive the next round of layoffs that way. If you're a boss and you are not getting maximum ROI out of everything, your phone system, your softwares, your tech, your people, your vehicles, then there's hidden money there. And the other thing is if you are a boss, a book I recommend highly, and that's called Profit First by Michael Malkowitz. It is if you are not paying yourself your full rate and pay the profit first, that's what goes in your pocket, pay yourself your full rate, not a discounted rate, and then talk about vehicles and facilities and other people. Because if you're not paying yourself, you have a very expensive hobby. And that's hard to hear for a lot of business owners. And I I get them sit across this desk and I go, What do you mean you didn't pay? You're not, you don't you're not making any money. I see your trucks all over the road. I I said, take half the trucks off the road, pay yourself.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. I think it's I think it's something that that's the it's kind of when you look at where the expenses are. That is in a small business, a lot of times that's where it cut it comes from. Absolutely. Absolutely. I can I need that money to go do this. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

It's all your money. It's but you get to get paid first. You have to. Otherwise, like I said, it's go work for somebody else. Why would you do that? I love the freedom. I love, I love the name on the door and all those sorts of things. But at the same time, it's gotta be, it's gotta everything I have is a look for return on investment in literally everything you do as either the business owner or an employee or a contributor to a business organization.

SPEAKER_02:

I love that advice. Know your worth and make it more. Yes. Yeah, I agree. I know my listeners would love to connect with you and reach out to you. Where could they reach out to you or connect with you?

SPEAKER_01:

Sure. I've got all the usual uh spots. We have my LinkedIn, which is just Brandon V. Woodward. You'll see it all over LinkedIn. I do try to check my messages there. We have a website, WKFKlaw.com, whiskey kilo, foxtrot, kilo law.com. There's a contact there. Also on there is a copy of a white paper I wrote maybe two years ago about the steps you need to take about selling a business, whether it's a family business or a professional practice. I put it on there. It's not salesy, although get a lawyer involved is one of the steps in there, but it does crystallize some of that. Okay, you don't want to be doing this the rest of your life. Where do I even start? Start by downloading the paper right on my website that talks about how you would sell a business in a year or two or how to even get ready for that. The other ways to get a hold of me, you can certainly call the office. We're generally available for some kind of phone calls. It's about all the oh, we have social. We are on Instagram at bizlawbrandon.com. Now I intimately run every detail of that of that platform, but uh, we do try to put out some useful information. We try to put out some clever information from there from time to time, but we do respond to messages through there. Obviously, not legal messages, but website, email, phone calls, socials, platforms, Facebook. That's how to get all of us.

SPEAKER_02:

Fantastic. I'll make sure that we have those links in the show notes. This has been a great conversation. I really appreciate your time today.

SPEAKER_01:

Now glad it worked out. Thank you so much for having me.

SPEAKER_02:

Absolutely. Thanks for joining me today for this episode. As we wrap up, I'd love for you to do two things. First, subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss an episode. And if you find value here, I'd love it if you would rate it and review it. That really does make a difference in helping other people to discover this podcast. Second, you can connect with me on LinkedIn to keep up with what I'm currently learning and thinking about. And if you're ready to take the next step with a digital strategist to help you grow your law firm, I'd be honored to help you. Just go to Lawmarketingzone.com to book a call with me. Stay tuned for our next episode next week. Until then, as always, thanks for listening to Leadership in Law Podcast, and be sure to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts so you don't miss the next episode.

SPEAKER_00:

Thanks for joining us on another episode of the Leadership in Law Podcast. Remember, you're not alone on this journey. There's a whole community of law firm owners out there facing similar challenges and striving for the same success. Head over to our website at lawmarketingstone.com. From there, connect with other listeners, access valuable resources, and stay up to date on the latest episodes. Don't forget to subscribe and leave us to review on your favorite podcast platform. Until next time, keep leading with Victim and keep growing your firm.

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Marilyn Jenkins

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