On this episode of Lawyer Business Advantage, I speak with my client Renee Ross, owner of Ross Family Law. In her first year of running her firm, Renee built a million dollar firm from the ground up while taking two weeks of vacation along the way! In just a few short years, Renee has built a multi-million dollar law firm while taking weeks of vacation every year. She has truly built her Perfect Practice. Learn how she did it…coming up next on Lawyer Business Advantage!
Alay Yajnik: [00:00:00] Welcome to Lawyer Business Advantage, your source for biz dev tips, wisdom and inspiration. I’m your host, Alay Yajnik. We’re unleashing your inner rainmaker in 3…2…1….
Alay Yajnik: [00:00:14] It’s my pleasure to welcome to the show Rene Ross of Ross Family Law. Renee, welcome to Lawyer Business Advantage.
Renee Ross: [00:00:21] Thank you so much Alay. Thanks for having me.
Alay Yajnik: [00:00:24] You’re welcome. I really appreciate you jumping on my show. It’s been so much fun seeing how your firm has grown and developed over the years. I’m really familiar with with your firm, obviously, but our listeners probably don’t know. So could you tell us a little bit about how you’ve grown Ross Family Law over the past several years?
Renee Ross: [00:00:45] Sure. How much time do you have?
Alay Yajnik: [00:00:49] We’ve got about a half an hour. But for this question, let’s do it in about a couple of minutes if we could.
Renee Ross: [00:00:56] Sounds good. I started my small family law firm in the nether regions of the East Bay in 2014. It was just me and a very part-time paralegal that I’d worked with for a really long time. And I really didn’t know much about running a business when I started out, but I had really incredible mentors. And so a lot of what I did was adopt things that I saw that they did well and incorporate that into my vision of what I wanted my firm to be. And I picked up new mentors along the way.
Renee Ross: [00:01:30] I spent a lot of time studying business, hiring excellent business coaches like Alay. I had a lot of slow organic growth. It was intentional that the firm grew as the right people came along. And that’s essentially what I mean when it’s organic. I didn’t intentionally try to grow too much, too fast. It was who is the right people at the right time? And a lot of it was really based on relationships.
Renee Ross: [00:02:09] And anyway, so we grew from that first year with my part time paralegal and myself. In year two, I added another really experienced senior lawyer. With that senior lawyer, I then needed another paralegal. And after that, business started to continue to grow and I had more business than I can handle. And so I brought on yet another lawyer and more staff. And fast forward a few years later, I’ve got a multi-level firm that can handle really complicated cases that need large staffing and but at the same time, help garden-variety cases as well.
Alay Yajnik: [00:02:57] Right! And thank you for the plug, by the way. It was a pleasure working with you as you were starting your firm. And one of the things I loved about how you’ve grown it, you mentioned that you were fairly conservative in terms of figuring out when to bring people on board, when to take on additional consistent expenses month over month. Can you tell me a little bit about what was going through your head as you were thinking through some of those decisions and why you chose to be more conservative rather than, “OK, I’m going to invest for growth and I’m going to go for it?”
Renee Ross: [00:03:29] Absolutely. I felt it was a philosophy that I had that if I was lean and mean, I was more flexible and adaptable as a business. But that doesn’t mean that was without struggle. I mean, I made very conscious decisions to keep overhead low, especially office space. But Alay, you know, for years I struggle with “Do I get more space or not?