The Solo Practice Guru - Emily LaRusch - Episode # 004

Solo de Facto

This special episode of Solo de Facto features Emily LaRusch, founder and CEO of Back Office Betties. Emily joins host Kory Underdown to discuss how while the average person may not be able to take care of their legal issues themselves, a solo practice attorney may struggle with some common issues of running a solo practice. Emily offers her expert tips and advice on how to successfully run your solo practice.

Takeaways

• You shouldn’t be getting burned out running your own business. When starting your own firm you try to do it all but that gets overwhelming very fast.
• Don’t be afraid to increase your prices. If no one is complaining about your prices you are undercharging.
• Don’t undervalue yourself. You spent all the time in law school and it’s your area of expertise.
• Offer to apply the fee for consultations toward the case work. The conversions are much higher on that rather than having them be separate.
• A fractional team is a great team. Fractional CMO, CFO and others will save you money and time. Utilize a fractional paralegal.
• While it can be time consuming and difficult to train someone, the reward of getting that person trained is well worth it.
• When running a solo firm, some important statistics are how many calls were leads, how many were spam and how many were existing clients.

Quote of the show

2:58 “Somebody got really blunt with me and said your business will not survive if you don’t make a change. You need to go and you need to do this fast. I took him really seriously because I was scared at that point in being a new business and things just were not going really smoothly.

I went home that day and I rebooked our pricing and I sent it to my customers and my worst fears were realized, a couple cancellations came in. So I’m thinking they were wrong, I knew it, I knew this was going to happen, this is the most terrible thing ever.

And then what happened was, with just a tiny little increase, the few people who just got upset about it and left over a few bucks were inconsequential. Now we have less work, and we actually had our revenues go up a little. All in all, if you’re afraid to do it, don’t be. Just pull the trigger. It's going to be ok. If no one is complaining about your prices at all, you’re underpriced. “

Links

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emily-larusch/
• Company Website: https://backofficebetties.com

Ways to Tune in:

• Amazon Music - https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/923f06e0-f8e6-4cb3-9472-5b4f460c496b/solo-de-facto
• Apple Podcast - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/solo-de-facto/id1586010951
• Google Play - https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuc29sb2RlZmFjdG8uY29tL2ZlZWQueG1s
• Spotify - ​​https://open.spotify.com/show/6uooFxN96HtKCoFuI3LJ3w?si=ImsDozpARi2_7J4_oWLqDg&dl_branch=1
• Stitcher - https://www.stitcher.com/show/solo-de-facto
• YouTube - https://youtu.be/VTjclGxB4nw