Luke Carlsons Kanzlei: Mehr Top-Anwälte für weiteres Wachstum

0:00Unternehmer/Gast Uh my name is Luke Carlson. I own a law firm. We do real estate and business uh litigation primarily. Our niche practice though is representing homeowners against bad HOAs. >> Mhm. >> Our revenue is rough right around 15 million. >> Man, >> uh we >> That sounds amazing. I feel like everybody loves you, >> right? I had to come up with some number. >> No, it's great. >> And I didn't want to say a hundred. Um >> No, I meant not that. I meant everybody hates their HOI.

0:26Alex >> Oh, [laughter] yeah. No, no. We have an we we have an endless market. So, no, it's been great. Uh, what's stopping us from scaling currently though is I would say talent acquisition. Um, you know, running a law firm, having lawyers, it's all A talent. There's no B talent or C talent. >> Yeah, I'm familiar with the model. >> So, >> if you see my business. Yeah. >> Yeah. >> So, that's our biggest constraint right now.

0:50>> So, right now you have more more um more demand than you can deal with. Yes. >> Right. >> And so, manpower would be your >> constraint. Okay. So what do you do right now to get people >> right? >> No, I'm asking what do you do right now? >> So right now we have recruiters, several recruiters. We uh leverage Indeed, Zip Recruiter, all the platforms. >> Uh we go into LinkedIn. We try to poach from competitors. I mean, pretty much everything that you can do, we do.

1:20Alex >> I think one of the biggest uh >> How many people do you hire a week? >> Um it's not really on a week, maybe a quarter. >> Okay. Okay. >> We probably bring on another attorney every >> two attorneys a quarter. I would say we're at 31 lawyers total. >> What's a uh >> what's an attorney worth to you in gross profit per year? >> Uh we typically have a three times multiplier. So they make us three times their salary.

1:45>> But what is it? What is it? What? Just give me the absolute. >> Oh 600 grand. >> Okay. So they make you 600k. >> Yep. >> And so you pay them 200 >> right around there. Yeah. >> Okay. Cool. So they make 800 total, 600 gross profit. Okay, got it. Is that correct? >> Yep. >> Okay. Um, so what do you pay uh the to to recruit somebody? What's your cost of talent acquisition? >> Uh, typically 30%. >> Okay, so 60K. >> That sounds about right.

2:10Alex >> Somewhere in there. Okay. So, what was uh what was profit last year? >> Uh, profit came in at about 4 million. >> Okay. So, what stops you? How many how many people would you need to hire in order to get to maximum uh capacity? Basically, how could you meet your demand? >> Yeah, saturation. Um, I would say we could probably bring on another 20 employers, 10 each state. >> Okay. So, right now at your current rate, you do eight a year. So, you're like two and a half years behind at your current rate in terms of

2:42>> matching demand. >> Yeah. >> Right. >> Okay. And so for you to get these 20 guys, it would cost you $1.2 million, right? >> Yep. >> And that would generate you $12 million, >> right? >> Yeah. >> And then what were margins in the business again? You said 15 and four. So >> it's about 4 million. >> 30 30-ish% or like a little less than that.

3:04>> Okay. And so um I'll say that we we'd add another, you know, four millionish to the bottom line here. And what are multiples in the business for for your space? >> Uh >> like eight >> say around eight. >> Yeah. Okay. >> So when I'm in your situation, I just see this and this. >> Okay.

3:30>> And so I think like so when I pointed originally, what stops you from doing more? Well, >> because you're doing all the stuff, but obviously there's more than two attorneys a quarter that are getting hired in the marketplace. >> Yeah. I I think it's just a lot comes from sort of our bar. I mean, we can bring in lower lower level lawyers pretty easily, but at our caliber and what we do, it's very hard to get that type of talent.

3:56>> Yeah. >> So, we interview a lot. I mean, we meet a lot of people. We go through a lot of resumes, but just the the funnel is >> a challenge to make it through the funnel. >> Yeah. I mean, it sounds like you just need to 3x the amount of volume that you're doing right now on the recruiting front. >> Just being super real. >> So, it's like if you have two recruiters, it's like why not get 10? >> Yeah. >> Like being like just being real. Like, so it's like, okay, we're we're doing how much out outreach do you do?

4:23>> Um, in terms of >> like because you do outbound towards uh legal people. Um that's third that's >> yeah I don't have a metric on outbound to be honest but um in terms of the recruitment side of things I mean daily we're constantly reaching out when we find the right candidate so it might be through LinkedIn it might be through yeah >> competition it might be what in house recruiter >> uh we do >> okay so fundamentally and like I'd say like what's stopping us from doing more the first answer would be metrics because you don't know how many outreaches you're doing um but beyond that like uh do you have kids

4:55>> I do >> okay so uh boy girl, >> two boys, two girls. >> Sweet. Okay, so imagine all four are going to disappear in 30 days unless you get 20 attorneys that are at the caliber that you want. It's >> fair, >> right? Aggressive. I know. >> It's good. Yeah. >> Yeah, >> I know. Alex is dark today. >> Yeah, I know. I can I can tell. [laughter] >> Um, no, for real. What would you actually do?

5:20>> Probably 10x it like you said. So, >> I mean, the real talk is like if this would be a more complex issue if you had big cash flow issues because then I'd be like, "All right, we have to look at the model, we have to look at pricing, we have to change the like we'd have to do four other steps before getting here." If you have $4 million in profit and you could put 1.2 in and get $32 million in taxfree enterprise value. >> Yeah. No, it's not economics. It's simply talent pool. But I hear what you're saying, >> right? Yeah. Yeah. So, it's like we have two recruiters or three recruiters. Like we had um one of our one of our portfolio companies, we had to spin up a team of 50 activated and good salespeople. So we ended up hiring 90 in 12 weeks.

5:53>> Wow. >> And we're spending lot you know few hundred,000 a day in traffic to make sure that you know like that we don't like every day that they're not productive we're losing multiple hundreds of thousands a day. And so you have to have a bar. You have to make sure that they're you know productive and all that kind of stuff. But what we did was we hired 15 different recruiting firms and we did bulk wholesale deals with them saying like give us five people we'll get a discounted rate because we want five. The terms of that is like if they don't work out for a little bit extended from their normal thing you can replace them. Um, and I understand that the difficulty of of of hightouch talent, but you just probably need to go up market in terms of the level of recruiter that you're going after, like recruiting firm that you're going after. Like you can get recruiters all the way up to, you know, million- dollar year recruiters, right?

6:39>> Um, and so when I see this is this is a pure resource issue. Like spin up three times the recruiters, whatever your outbound is. Like right now you're like, well, when we find somebody, we do a reach out. It's like, yeah, but it's like, okay, well then how do we do 10 or 20 times the reachouts? And then once we have that in place, then we're kind of good to go. >> Gotcha. >> That's how I attack these problems. >> No, I like that. So, thank you. >> Just violence. [laughter]

7:03>> I like violence. So, >> thank you. Thank you.