Episode seven - Andy Poole

my guest today on the your law firm success podcast is Andy Poole from Armstrong Watson Andy thank you very much for your time thanks for agreeing to come on so you’re the first accountant that we’ve had on the your Law Firm success podcast can you tell me a wee bit about you what you do and why you’re interested in law firm success yeah thank you Stephen and thanks for having me on you know do delighted to be here delighted to be the first accountant and you know my role formally as the chief operating officer at Armstrong Watson were a top 30 UK firm of accountants but for nearly 20 years now all I’ve done is advise lawyers in terms of my day job my client facing job so I’m the legal sector partner at Armstrong Watson and what that entails is advising off first in terms of trying to make themselves better businesses so it’s not just the accounting side but it’s also the corporate finance side it’s the Strategic side it’s the training side because I’ve been so immersed in the legal sector for the last 20 years I actually feel more like a lawyer than I do than accountant and so how did you end up drawing the short straw and it’s going back actually I cannot take too much credit for it it’s going back to my previous firm actually where we were part of an International Alliance where the partner and I wasn’t the partner I was a director and the partners actually looked at this and said we’ve seen another firm specialising in Professional Services and it’s works really well for them can you do the same of thing then and I looked at it and said well yeah I can see a we through there I can see how it helps to differentiate us because not only can we do that sort of accounting work efficiently and effectively and more knowledgeably but we should then be able to do extra things over and above what other accountants that don’t specialised will be able to do in terms of helping the law firms in improve their businesses but the one tweak I did make was to say well I’ll do it but I’ll only do it if I can Niche even further so it’s not just the Professional Services businesses it’s the legal sector in particular and I think once you do that you then become well known hopefully you become famous within a sector because you’ve niched the niche and it’s far easier to be able to hopefully get that trap record within the sector learn more about the sector but also make it easier so actually what I find now is that that law firm clients are coming to me rather than me having to go out and them which is a nice place to be but you’ve got to make sure that you back that up with actual deliverable successes to your clients I mean I suppose it’s parallels with our own service and you know we specialise in digital marketing online business generation but for the legal sector I mean we will sometimes do pieces of work if we get referred that work but never go out looking for it and how have you found or how did you find how were you received initially by lawyers I mean lawyers can be quite sceptic or sceptical and a wee bit and you know traditionally a bit suspicious about others from other sectors I think they can but I think they also look for a track record and quite often when I go to speak to a law lawyer about something hopefully the knowledge comes through because you can you can talk the things that are happening within the section becomes abundantly clear why you’re different and but I think the usual question coming back is how many other law firms have you done this for what’s your track record or when I try to refer in somebody else that might be able to provide such as an IT consultant or business developer or all the sort of work that that you do the first question to come back is how many other law firms does that that does that provider act for who they done it thought before because they don’t want to be the guinea pig and that then almost reinforces the benefits of the specialisation because the more specialist you are the more you’ve done the more you’ve got that track record to be able to prove that yeah that’s a fair point you know we definitely get that a lot it just sometimes raises questions around competition the types of firms that you work with are they all sizes yeah I mean it’s because of the specialism it’s uk-wide in fact we’re getting a few International mergers of late we’ve been acting for a couple of firms out towards the Middle East ratted for a US firm coming into the UK to an Australian firm coming into the UK so it’s becoming increasingly wide geographically but certainly the whole of the UK is our bread and butter and it’s all types all sizes of firms we don’t tend to get into sort of the magic circle firm you know I wouldn’t look to be aiming at those sort of things but you know if you’re looking from top 50 law firms all the way through to self–practitioners is where we at all right good and on that basis you will have seen firms who have been very successful firms that have been less so what would your definition be of Law Firm success think it’s a really difficult one I mean it’s going to be different for each and every Law Firm usually it stand to achieving the objectives of the law firm owners themselves but but that depends on those Law Firm owners having clear agreed objectives themselves which which actually I find is pretty rare others might set out a purpose so you know for example our Quest is to help our clients achieve Prosperity secure future and peace of mind and it sort of rolls off the tone for us because that that’s ingrained in in what we do and therefore all of our tests of whether we’re meeting our objectives whether we are being successful is based on that on that Quest but in order to find that you need to be able to see what measurables there are so you know a few things that that we like to see and include there are things like client advocacy net promoter scores employee feedback scores employee retention rates you maybe instructional growth rates there’s got to be some kind of measurable to be able to see what success looks like but that’s going to be set against where our objectives you know beyond that you tend to fall back on things like the income or profit preferency partner and that like work for some but it’s pretty crude in terms of the measures and they’re quite broad buss and they might actually hide quite a multitude of sins so we might be doing quite well from a fee income growth perspective but actually our employee feedback isn’t very good or our retention isn’t very good and actually we’re not hitting our objectives as owners because we’re not contributing to society or we’re not contributing to our corporate social responsibility etc so I think to start with you’ve got to make sure that you almost define that success for yourselves at a broad level so you’re setting your vision your values and then you start to come up with the measurements to see are we actually hitting it so you know some of our listeners might be surprised to learn that as an accountant you’re not starting straight away from the point of view of turnover gross prod profit net profit Etc you’re starting with something that’s softer and for a lot of firms certainly smaller firms that can be something that’s seen as sort of woolly nonsense the purpose side of things but do you see that as being a sort of initial and sort of fundamental Bedrock upon which everything else can be built or placed yeah I think it has to I think it’s actually becoming more and more important and I think more law firms of whatever size are starting to buy into the fact that it is so fundamentally important because particularly if you look at the different generations of people are working within law firms and they’ve typically they’ve got different traits and the younger generation coming through are all about wanting to make sure that they that they’ve got an alignment of interests with the business that they work for so that they’ve got this this purpose that got we understand where we are and then if you look back to the last couple of years where there’ve been so many recruitment issues within the legal section particular one of the solutions to recruitment issues is getting your culture right is getting the working in it’s getting your vision it’s getting your values right so that people can differentiate not just on the pap but in terms of how does that look and feel to me and that’s why you need to be thinking a lot more you know as people businesses it can’t just be around the nbers the nbers are there as metrics are there as measures to see whether we’re hitting our successes but actually that could be as I say more around our net promotor score it could be around our client feedback scores rather than around our theme so the metrics that you’re looking at vary depending upon the purpose of the firm whether or not it’s defined one or not and because some will have a very you know Purpose Driven Law Firm where money as you see isn’t everything and in fact having a good work life balance liking the clients that you work with is more important whereas others it will be much more about leverage fee earner income but that if you want to attract what you’re seeing is if you want to attract talent and you want to attract the right type of talent then you need to be quite clear on what your values are because otherwise you can end up with a nber of people who are out of sync yeah absolutely and then that that sends not just in terms of issues around retention that that sends mix messages out to the target market because you should be communicating to your target market this is who we are this is what we stand for this is what we’re all about and everything we do should tie in around that you know so we should be communicating that Vision but we should be communicating why that Vision why those values are important to you as clients of our business and if you’ve got different people coming into your business that actually operating in a completely different way well that just rides or sheds all over what you’re standing for and then therefore your client relationships will suffer as well so you know it’s really important to have that that alignment and therefore it’s not just a matter of having you know these this Vision these values you know put as maybe four or five words or put up on the around the offices it’s got to be something that you live eat and breathe there’s got to be measures around making sure we are doing that there’s got to be encouragement you’ve got to recruit basis you’ve got to appraise on that basis you’ve got to do something about it if people aren’t behaving in line with what you want them actually to achieve so there’s a lot more to it than that so it’s  a bigger picture there’s a lot of investment in time required to make sure you get that right that’s really interesting I think given as I say you know we talked on that briefly and I know that Armstrong Watson offer a whole range of consultancy services to law firms when you are beginning to work with law firms I’m thinking of you know a pyramid with the top being culture and then you work down at what point do you actually begin to discuss the financial metrics with a firm in that service because it the discussion we’re having is sort of opposite to I think what people might think one would have with an accountant about law firms they think they’d start with the nbers but in fact we’re starting with some somewhere completely different there’s a few different areas and you’re right we do consult on this and that there’s various information on this and in the public domain people will be able to Google it buy books and read it and take it for themselves if they want to as well but you know going down in the order of things that that we tend to look at we mirror uh the principles of the EOS principles in the Gino Wickman book of traction so we start off with the vision the sort of things we’ve talked about already and what is our vision what’s our purpose you know what do we stand for what do the values look like Etc we need to Define and work on that then we move on to people and we need to make sure we’ve got the right people with the right skill set with the right approach with the right values that match with what we’re doing that that also match with the roles that we’re asking them to undertake we need to make sure people got those skills and not so often you’ve got people that are heads of department for example that are heads of Department because they’ve either been there the longest or that their billing is the highest rather than having the skill set to develop people to train people having this strategic Outlook to almost picture themselves as a mini managing partner of that particular team with the responsibility and the accountability to be able to make that drive to win the word to be able to put the processes in place that that that would enable people to shine so it’s then about the people then we start to think about well what do those people need to do so it’s the process it’s thinking about how do we want people to work who’s going to do what work and what tools are we going to use what are the systems what are the controls what are the ability to be able to make us more efficient so what automation can we bring in etc so still you’ve gone through all of that before starting to define and looking at the nbers the next thing down for me then is what we would call the data now that’s when you start to get to the nbers because you’ve got to start to define based on all of those things what are the appropriate measures of success and almost having this principle of everybody has a nber in some cases everybody has a series of nbers but making people understand why they’re the appropriate nbers not just reporting your p&l not just reporting your balance sheet but distilling that down into key performance indicators in terms of how efficient am I being what am I being tasked with doing but again it’s a backdrop of what an expectation might be so you’re then reporting that as part of a scorecard for people to be able to self-improve themselves so it’s only at that stage that we start to look at the nbers beyond that we then start to look around the management structure in order to be able to make sure where we’re setting objectives and we’re setting tasks are we actually going to get them done and that brings you back to the word traction which is the title of the Gino Wickman book that that covers all of this and you know I think a it’s an amazing book it’s an amazing management principles that enable you to have alignment right the way across the organisation tying that right the way back into your vision so that everything’s aligned around all of your tasks all of your prioritisation all of the big ticket things you’re going to invest in are all structured around making sure that you have that success that we started with in terms of what’s the difference between success or not etc so it’s something that enables you to cover all of those things I’d encourage people to go out and read the book there’d be a hugely valuable in investment of time that I mean we’ve talked a bit about vision which is at the top you know that’s at the top of your pyramid and then we move on to people and we spoke about this before for and that unlike a lawyer you know a lawyer you know quite often a technician you know they start off as a technician and then they can move into management type roles as a result and as you were as you were mentioning the personality might be the wrong fit they are very good at being the technician or the fear and that does not necessarily mean that they’re going to be a good manager of people nor that they know that they’d want to be you know I found this myself over the course of the past maybe two years having established a digital marketing agency having you know like 12 or 13 years ago having actually never been in one and we were able using enthusiasm and results and encouragement and networking to grow the business to a particular point before it then stalled and it’s only really in recent times after having brought in a managing director that I’ve now understood how important it is to have the entrepreneurial aspect or the technician aspect combined with I think what Gino Wickman refers to as being an integrator can we talk a bit more about that because I think you know I think the whole people side of things is probably the most difficult but to implement but also the easiest for one to get one’s head around yeah absolutely I think you’re right you know that that word integrator is in there is very important it’s an extension of what I said earlier in terms of you know having the right people the right skills task with doing the right things in order to be able to move your organisation forward and you know there’s an extension of that in the traction book you’ve got the principle of a Visionary and an integrator so essentially that could be typically as a chief executive might be the Visionary a chief operating officer might be the integrator and actually if I look at our own business we’ve got Paul Dixon as the chief except we’ve got me as the Chief Operating Officer and actually we do work together quite well in in in terms of that because Paul’s got huge strategic Visionary skills and I’m quite a detailed person actually you know although I might be starting with the vision here and looking at that but actually I am inherently a detailed person I make sure things happen I make sure things get done and therefore I’m probably the integrator so it’s about the teaming up with those skills and having the right mix of the skills so the Visionary is there to be able to enable the entire business to be them to buy into the dream to be able to setting well where do we want this business to be and how are we going to get and looking at the big picture strategic angles but they might not necessarily have the right skills to be able to say well if that’s where we want to get to that’s great but how are we going to get there and it’s the how we’re going to get there that you then need somebody like an integrator to be able to come in and actually deal with that detail to make sure that we’ve got the ability to be able to achieve the vision and that’s why it needs to be a team because very rarely do you get people with the all of those skill sets and even if they have they’re pulled in so many different directions it’s impossible for them to achieve everything so again sounds as though you’ve been on that Journey yourself where you’re probably trying to be all of those things and you realised I need to bring somebody in to be able to do the bits that I’m not necessarily the best at and that then enables the growth it enables the you to achieve your growth and Ambitions and it also reminds me of another book which you know we discussed previously as well which is the e–myth which is another good book for people to read if you’ve not done so already where it talks about how you might be able to get a business to expand and if you’re too relying on certain individuals in order for the business to succeed then you’re never going to be able to grow you’re never going to be able to let go so again you need to be able to make sure that’s when it ties then back into the processes and how do we actually do things how are things dollar out yeah so you’ve got a blueprint for this is what we do so that you can then roll that out to other people as well so there you need that combination to be able to let go it can’t just be without the Visionary and the integrator making sure it’s all reliant on those two key individuals in the e–myth which I found you know pretty interesting they talked about the technician the entrepreneur and the manager which are sort of similar in terms of roles and understanding that when you start off in business you are essentially performing all three but there’s going to become a point quite quickly where you’ll understand will actually I’m more suited or I get more strength from or I am better at being entrepreneurial being the Visionary rather than what you described which is the integrator the operator more of the manager to make thing to make sure that things actually get done while the technicians are actually doing you know they’re on the tools they’re doing the work and I suppose what you know what what’s quite interesting if you’re if you’re looking or you’re dealing with smaller firms as you probably you know you might start off with say one or two partners they’re probably not in a position at the early stage you know they may have done their Vision work let’s asse that they’ve done their Vision work and they’ve got a culture and they understand where they want to go to and there’s two of them and basing well we can’t afford at this point for one of us to be full-time Visionary and the other one to be full-time manager because really we actually need to be getting the work done what’s your advice to people like that or Partners like that who think well yeah I’d like to begin to do that but I can’t afford to do that at the moment but I would like to think about how I can begin to divide my time or identify what I’m better at so we can begin to divvy up those roles between us knowing that they now need to be done yeah I think to start with their needs to be that clear delineation and I think that needs to be between the let’s say that that example of the two partner firm you know which roles are each of you going to take because there’s no point you’re both doing the same thing we need to make sure that the one’s responsible for one one’s responsible for another at that sort of size I don’t think you can go full-time managing partner and you know chief executive or whatever those titles might be you need to keep all the tools at that sort of size in a professional people business but if you full-time are working in the business you’ll never get the opportunity to grow and you will pretty much always stay as a two partner firm you might employ a couple of assistants that that work with you etc you need to try and find that discipline to work on the business rather than in the business and that’s the danger particularly for smaller law firms it’s all about hitting our fee income targets delivering to our clients which is great that’s what you need to do but at some point we need the discipline to be able to lift our heads up to start to work on the business because if we’re just drawn into that rat race of always going around on that that uh hamster wheel that’s where we will be all of the time and I had these sort of conversations with law firms all of the time and it’s about setting time aside in your diary it could be the same point every week where you know this is when I’m going to work on the business this is when I’m going to develop a strategic plan this is when I’m going to look at recruit this is what I’m going to look at opening in new areas or different work types etc and once you’ve got that in your diary you’ve got to stick to it so you you’re setting that that time apart it could be that you get in touch with people like ourselves who might be able to facilitate the Strategic discussion that actually force that to happen because sometimes when you actually bite the bullet and you make sure you invest in that program you want to make best use of it and you’ll make yourself available to the time for a consultant to be able to support you it could be slightly larger firms than that it could be maybe three to 10 partner firms where you’ve got strategic away days and making sure they’re in the diary making sure that they are actually producing rather than just a nice time way to be able to bind the partnership which is important but you’ve got to make sure you’ve got something tangible coming out of that as well and sometimes with that you can bring along an external facilitator for the day again to make sure that what’s coming out of it is actually the right sort of things for the business as you grow but it’s the main message there is don’t just work into business work on the business as well yeah it’s a very good point and I can see how that would Cascade down from the vision because if you have set your vision and you’ve set your ideal of Law Firm success is involving whether it’s financial gain whether it’s also maybe a work life balance whether it’s an ability to spend a bit less time on the tools and to work on growing the business and having discussed that you would understand that well if we want to achieve this I can’t be on the tools full time because as you say the business is never going to grow and certainly in the in the in some of the earlier podcasts that we’ve recorded particularly with Stephen Gold and Greg White who both built very successful firms they were quick to point out that they were almost off the tools as soon as possible not because they couldn’t do it just because they understood that their skills lay within more of Business Development and creating relationships and Greg didn’t discuss this on the podcast but I do know that one of his biggest successes that he attributes a lot of their overall success to is the strategic hiring of an operations director who has then helped them with the next stage which is working out the process can we talk a bit more about that as that’s the sort of next level down on the pyramid yeah I say in terms of making sure that what we do not only for expansion purposes you know we talk there about the principles in the in the e–myth where you’ve got to have a standard way of working you know think this projects a standard brand to the market expectation from clients in terms of what they’re going to receive how and when but it also helps us from a an efficiency perspective it helps from a consistency perspective it helps us to be able to grow because it means that the person set up the business doesn’t need to bring and oversee every single new recruit into the business all the way you’ve got a standard way of doing things and you ideally that should be docented it should be mapped out it should be reviewed on a regular basis to say well why do we do things in this way as soon as you start to write things down and you speak to your teams about the way we do things you start to identify where you’ve got well you’re doing this over here but you’re doing it differently on there why do you do it in that way over here learning from them and thinking ah I can understand that now I’ll build that into my process or it could be that you’re doing something that we don’t need to do at all or it could be that you’re doing something that technology could or automation could replace or it could be that you are doing something that that we don’t need to be doing at that particular level but we might be able to do at a more junior level cost effectively once you’ve gone through that review process you’ve then got the way to do it and again in the transition that is referred to as the way within answer wat so we turn that into the aw way for example so we’ve got this set way of understanding this is what we’re going to do this is how we’re going to do it this is when we’re going to do it these are the tools that we’re going to have as well now it might be quite difficult particularly in the law where people say well that can’t always be done because you’ve got so many different angles and so many different Junctions that that a case might may turn take litigation we don’t know how the other side’s going to react we don’t know whether it’s going to go to court or not we don’t know what information we go to have we don’t know whether our client wants to settle or go all the way so there might be different Junctions all the way and it can get quite complex to map all of that out but it usually pays huge dividends to be able to do that and the answer there is to cut it down into the biz chunks what do we do up to the first potential Junction once we’ve got there once we’ve gone off a junction what might happen for the next stage before we get to the next choice so again you’re building this flowchart now that there are we don’t do this we help to develop that that process and docent it but we don’t do it in a flowchart basis but there are some Consultants out there that will turn that into a flowchart can be hugely powerful for you to be able to see that visually particular if he part of a large organisation to be able to communicate it but it doesn’t need to be that that formalised it can be simplified as long as you’ve got an understanding of what you’re going to do and how you’re going to do it that then helps new recruits we can come in seamlessly this is how we do it we’ve got a roadmap to  be able to follow and that feeds back into your point earlier on about working on the business as opposed to in the business and I imagine you have seen it or dealt with it the objections many times which is along the line of you know I’ve got fee targets to meet yeah I in fact I was I was doing the training course just yesterday for one of the largest law firms in the country and we were talking about process we were talking about building it and again I was getting those exact responses how are we going to find time to be able to justify doing it you know my general response is you know if you don’t find time then you’ll always be up against it because you’ll be acting inefficiently and therefore you’ll never have time to do anything you’ve got to bite the bullet at some point to be able to say how am I going to release that time to be able to use it more effectively that requires an investment time up front but once you’ve done that this should enable you to be far more efficient and therefore it releases time so you’ll get that time back in the future so it should pay for itself and the evidences that that that it does if people want to shortcut it me it’s not the ideal answer but they can do and easier way is potentially by going to your team and a lot of this should come from the team because we need to make sure they’re involved in it so they buy into it but you may be able to go up to them and say okay through the work that we do what are the cases where you have repetitive work that doesn’t really add value that’s a pain in the neck to do where you’re having to do Time After Time and you go and ask your team that and they will come back to you with one or two or three examples of what they do in their day job all time you can start to work on that to start with you then show a solution to that you fix that particular issue it might be by technology it might be by automation for example we take that out of equation or it could be passing that bit back to the client it could be a a data portal where the client can actually fill in those information pieces for you instead of us rekeying all the time that then goes through all the rest of our software so there’s lots of solutions and once you’ve seen that and you see the efficiencies that that brings that actually creates the Goodwill for people they actually we’ve had a wind here an easy win let’s sit down and invest the time in making sure we’re doing that right the way across the board and I’m of conscious because we’re sort of reaching the limit of time that of doing the podcast and also what I I’m really Keen because this is really interesting and we’ve got three I think we’ve got the starter the first three points from traction it’d be good to cover the other two maybe another time is because these ones seem to me like you talk about doing things chunk by chunk you’re bit by bit you know so you’re not overwhelmed by everything that you have to do I think the establishment of a vision is a relatively straightforward exercise that people can carry out understanding more about yourself and your partners that you’re in and who’s interest in what and who’s good at what for example you know you talked about your colleague who’s the chief executive who much more Visionary now that’s me I like to think I’m a detail person but then when I work with somebody who’s properly detail oriented I can see that I’m not and I understand now having experienced that in my own business how much value there isn’t that and around the correct management of people the nurturing of people appraisals Lanes roles and responsibilities how clarity doesn’t particularly resonate hugely with me because I like things being a bit not vague but uncertain you know maybe that’s part of my mindset whereas others like to be very clear as to what they need and I’d undervalued that and the processive to for one of a better word of your work types and of your work and all in order to help you achieve your goals is again something that I think for lawyers initially they would be thinking oh that man that sounds like a lot of work whereas in reality by working on the business and by taking that time you’ve already gone two steps into it by taking the time then that’s another step forward towards you achieving your goals for Law Firm success and so if we could leave data and management the management structure just for another time Andy that would be great and instead if I can guess what you’re going to say already but for the benefit of of anyone listening because you’ll have seen it a lot what separates those that achieve success from those that don’t yeah I think for me is those that have that clear clarity of thought that we talk about all the way through and invest the time in getting these things right well I think these sort of things are not easy to just Implement if it was you everybody be doing it that means if you do put the hard yarding to implement it you’ll have some real tangible benefits you know we went through this ourselves as a firm a few years ago I can tell you it’s absolutely transformed our firm for the better the firms that we help on more firms on this journey have as well and I think for me it’s biting the bullet it’s lifting your heads up its investing in your time and sometimes your money in terms of support you might need along the way in order to be able to get those tangible benefits because once you’ve gone through it and everybody’s used to this is our operating system things will happen naturally and there is a process around it to be able to make sure that it does happen and it’s continually evolving and we’re continually focusing on the right things which then means that you’re not pulling in different directions and once you’ve got this hming you’ve got you’re set for future you’re set for future growth and whatever you set as your measures of success whatever you set as your vision you are far more likely to be able to achieve that thank you very much and I know we didn’t cover everything that I think we’ve covered enough to get started where can people find out more about you and Armstrong Watson thank you I was trying not to do anything as a as a sales piece I’m trying to provide information and referring to the books which people can go and read and try to implement things themselves as well there’s lots of principles you can take away but if you do want to have a look you know Google I’m sure we’re top 30 UK accountancy firm there’s a page on our website that’s dedicated to the legal sector so again if you search sectors and then legal sector you’d be able to see the Strategic support that we do and is a bit of a brochure there in terms of how we support firms along the lines of implementing traction as well but beyond that if anybody just wants to pick up the phone get in touch with me you know Google me you’ll be able to find the contact details on that I’m always happy to have a conversation in terms of what are your strategic objectives what are your challenges what are you trying to get through and because of our experience in the sector hopefully we’ll be able to point you in the right direction even if you don’t engage us to do anything more formally okay Andy thank you very much thanks for your time that’s great thank you really nice to speak with you Stephen so thanks very much for listening to today’s episode I hope you enjoyed it I hope you’re enjoying our content we be delighted to hear any feedback that you have you can find out more about the your Law Firm success podcast at mltdigital.co.uk/podcast please Subscribe please share with your friends please share with anyone who you know that you think would be interested.