I had a company meeting with the team at Modern Law last week and was blown away at the steps that they had taken to proactively start solving problems. They had been brought into the decision making process a long time ago and that’s part of our culture and it’s been really great and it’s been…
I think our team has gotten stronger or although it does take new behavior in reaching out via Zoom and via Slack and having that chat the same way you would in the office, that inner office banter, the stress level is high. I’ve got my two teenage boys with me and today’s the first day of actually trying to… They’ve been assigned to work and we have to figure out this new system while managing the firm.
Google My Business slow-downs
That’s not going great, just to be honest, but we’re working it out and I’m sure it’ll get smoother as time goes on. A couple of changes I’ve made. I’ve pulled all of my marketing, all of the marketing for Modern Law has gotten pulled. Google My Business has shut down a lot of its capability. It’s no longer accepting reviews or posts. It had to send a lot of people home and it is moving resources away from Google My Business. So I’ve pulled all of those advertising dollars right now. I pulled all of my other existing campaigns, marketing campaigns, and I’m going all in on Facebook and Instagram with a message that targets emergency family law needs. Those are the people that are going to be clients right now and our phones were pretty good last week, but this week, there’s been a dramatic drop off. I know it’s only Monday, but we track these things in real time and so things are definitely slower this week.
People who can wait on their family law matter will, so my job is going to be to target the people who can’t wait. So I’ve already started working on that strategy. Things are fluid and they’re moving quickly. The other thing that I’m looking at is reducing expenses. We’ve had two offices, one our main office here, and then another office in this same building that’s on a month-to-month. We went ahead and put in notice, so we’re not going to use that anymore.
Slack
Right now, we don’t have very many people in the office and we don’t anticipate that that will be so, and we can save that money and I would prefer to save money in any way that other than laying people off, although we are looking at productivity numbers of people every single day. So that’s one of the other things that we’re doing to build in transparency and accountability, posting on Slack each day, each person’s number of hours tracked and then if it’s low, I’ll just call them out publicly on Slack and say, “Hey, did you forget to put in your time?”
SBA loans for your firm
Because that’s how we make our money. So we have to shift the way we are interacting with clients. We have to shift the way we’re interacting with each other. I’m also looking at my copier lease is up and I don’t think I need a big huge copier. We already have snap scans, so I think I’m going to get printers and I should be able to save a lot of money there. I also submitted my SBA loan application over the weekend on Sunday and that is for the SBA, has allocated quite a bit of money to small businesses who are presumed to have felt an economic hardship due to the coronavirus and that allows you to apply for up to two million dollars in small business loans at 3.75%. So that application is in. Today, I had to also email them a assigned IRS form that gave them the ability to pull my transcripts and the email box was full.
It got rejected because so many people had mailed in and emailed in these applications. So we faxed it in, it was accepted. That is in and we’ll see what happens with it. Again, this is a time of such tremendous change and massive opportunity all at once. I’m going to keep you in the loop with what’s happening here, what’s working, what’s not working, problems that we have, opportunities that we have, things that are going well and things that aren’t. And hopefully, together, we can come out of this a stronger legal industry, well equipped to take on the future that is more remote and that has more legal needs than ever. Thank you so much. Don’t forget to subscribe. We’ll talk to you soon.
