In this episode, Steve Fretzin and Charlie Gaudet discuss:
- Moving beyond hard work toward sustainable growth
- Escaping the founder-centered business model
- Outperforming talent using systems
- Protecting time as the highest-leverage asset
Key Takeaways:
- Hard work eventually becomes a liability when it replaces strategy, systems, and recovery. Sustainable growth requires designing the business so it scales without destroying the founder’s health or capacity.
- Businesses stall when the founder becomes the bottleneck for decisions, delivery, and growth. Long-term scale only happens when systems and teams replace heroic individual effort.
- Top performers win not because they work harder, but because their systems reduce variation and create consistency. Documented, measurable processes turn small improvements into repeatable, compounding gains.
- Return on Time matters more than effort, activity, or hours worked. Delegation, automation, and pricing strategy free leaders to focus on high-impact thinking instead of constant execution.
“They have to look at ROT, which is return on time… Where are they spending the time, and how do they maximize their time?… Raise your rate… leverage AI… More and more attorneys are able to get more done in less time when they can leverage AI in the right way.” — Charlie Gaudet
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About Charlie Gaudet: Charlie Gaudet is the author of “The Predictable Profits Playbook: The 7- and 8-Figure CEOs’ Guide to Generating Consistent and Sustainable Growth“ (voted #1 Book on Sales & Marketing by Indie Excellence) and host of The Beyond 7-Figures Podcast.
The International Business Times called him “The Go-To Business Coach for 7- and 8-Figure Businesses” and perhaps the “busiest sales coach in the US.“
GritDaily said Gaudet is: “regarded in entrepreneurial circles as one of the top coaches for helping entrepreneurs surpass the seven and eight-figure mark.”
Yahoo Finance referred to him as: “The CEO Whisperer.”
CEO Weekly said he was one of the top 10 “Innovative CEOs to Follow.”
And he’s listed at the top of several “Best Business Coach” lists.
He’s been an entrepreneur since the age of 4, created his first multi-million dollar business at 24, and has helped others generate millions with his strategies.
He’s received numerous awards and recognition (including founding a company named as “One of the Best Seed Stage Companies” by Ernst & Young), received his Certificate of Leadership Development from The US Army War College and has his business advice featured around in the world – including Inc., Forbes, Salesforce, Success, Entrepreneur, and Fox Business – as well as on podcasts and radio.
He was named one of American Genius’s Top 50 Industry Influencers.
He trains in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (two gold medal finishes) and is a 3-time wrestling state champion. He lives in Florida with his beautiful wife, three adorable kid-preneurs, and one badass dog.
Connect with Charlie Gaudet:
Website: https://predictableprofits.com/
Connect with Steve Fretzin:
LinkedIn: Steve Fretzin
Twitter: @stevefretzin
Instagram: @fretzinsteve
Facebook: Fretzin, Inc.
Website: Fretzin.com
Email: [email protected]
Book: Legal Business Development Isn’t Rocket Science and more!
YouTube: Steve Fretzin
Call Steve directly at 847-602-6911
Audio production by Turnkey Podcast Productions. You’re the expert. Your podcast will prove it.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Steve Fretzin [00:00]
Heads Up counselors, if winging it is your business plan, this may feel a little uncomfortable. You might hear something that leads to structure results and actual control in your career. Steve Fretzin here, kidding around a little bit. Enjoy the show, everybody, and let’s have some fun.
Narrator [00:21]
You’re listening to be that lawyer, life changing strategies and resources for growing a successful law practice. Each episode your host, author and lawyer coach, Steve Fretzin, will take a deeper dive helping you grow your law practice in less time with greater results. Now here’s your host, Steve Fretzin.
Steve Fretzin [00:43]
Hey everybody. Steve Fretzin, here and welcome back to the be that lawyer podcast. Whether you are getting this on one of the many podcast channels, my website or on YouTube, I hope that you’re getting a lot of value to help you be that lawyer, confident, organized and a skilled Rainmaker. We are here twice a week to help you learn all the things you never learned in law school. Quit complaining about it. Let’s do something about it, and this is the show for you to do that. I also want to mention, if you love this show, you might also love my other podcast, future rainmakers. This is less of an interview show, and more of me just giving you direction about how to, you know, market and biz dev and time manage, and all the things that you want to hear maybe more directly from me, but today we’re going to get into the weeds. I’ve got an amazing guest. How you doing, Charlie?
Charlie Gaudet [01:26]
I’m doing awesome. Man. Are you ready to rock and roll? I’m ready.
Steve Fretzin [01:30]
I love that. Your shirt says results. You want to hear something funny. So I changed the name of my company a couple times, but when I first started out, and I worked primarily with entrepreneurs, the name of my company was sales results. I loved it. I thought that was the greatest name in the world for what I was doing, which is sales training, essentially, and coaching. But when I started working with lawyers, they weren’t having it. They didn’t like the word sales. Didn’t necessarily like the word results right there on the cover of the magazine. So anyway, but.
Charlie Gaudet [01:59]
Funny thing is, everybody’s a salesperson, right? Everything all the way down to my kids, yeah, to you, to I, even if you’re, you don’t think you’re in sales. You’re, if you’re trying to influence or persuade or have somebody just line up with your point of view. You’re, you’re still in sales.
Steve Fretzin [02:20]
Yeah. Might be the only argument I’ve ever won with my sister. She’s a therapist, and she was arguing me. She’s not in sales, not in sales. I said, Well, how do you get business? And she started telling me, and then I saw the light bulb pop at her head. She go, Yeah, I guess I have, you know, kind of putting myself out there. I go, yeah. So Well, everybody, you were in for such a treat today. We’ve got Charlie. We’ll introduce him in a moment, but let’s go through our quote of the show. Entrepreneurs say stay stuck by working harder using the same approach. Real growth requires changing the system, not increasing effort. Perfect quote for lawyers who are really stuck in just doing the same thing over and over. So welcome to the show and tell us a little bit about that quote.
Charlie Gaudet [03:01]
I find that there’s, there’s really two hard parts to growing a business, but that’s just, it’s human behavior in general, right? I don’t know about you, Steve, but when I was raised as a kid, I was told the secret of success is hard work, right? And so or the early bird gets a worm and stories kind of like that, right? And I took that very seriously. I would set my alarm for 330 in the morning so I wouldn’t, quote, unquote, oversleep. I worked seven days a week. I would work until I couldn’t keep my eyes open anymore, and then I’d go to sleep. But if I happened to wake up, I’d always set my alarm for 330 but if I happen to wake up at midnight to go to the bathroom, I would just force myself to stay awake and start working again, and because I have like, one speed, and that is, like, all on super fast, right? And if you tell me to do something, I’m going to be fully committed to it. And so if the secret to success was hard work, I was determined nobody was going to work harder than me. Well, it didn’t take long before I’m driving home. Still remember the moment I’m looking over the hood of my vehicle, staring at my house, and then in that moment, I realized I wasn’t actually going home, I got this shooting pain from the base of my tailbone all the way up into my skull, and within 30 minutes or so, I was on my Back in the emergency room, and the doctor told me that I was dying. My organs were shutting down. I had my body was experiencing some sort of stress response, and I was dying, and that was a wake up moment for me, because everything that I was told that I needed to do in order to succeed in business was not working for me. And the most frustrating thing for me is I would look around at all the different people that I knew and in the industry and out of the industry, and going, I don’t get it. I’m working harder than all of them, but they all seem to be making more money than I am. What am I doing? Wrong. But you know, working hard is enough to get you to that one to even that 3 million mark, right. We just get we grow our businesses from hard work, word of mouth and referrals. And the first hard part of growing a business is starting it. The second hard part is when you fall into that founder strap, and that is around that one to 3 million mark. You fall into that because you’re successful. And when I say that, it’s because you know you’re successful, you get to that one to 3 million. But if you if you think about an org chart rather than the person at the top and everybody filters below, you’re in the middle, and your marketing depends on your ability to have word of mouth and referrals. Your sales depends on your ability to close it. Your operations depend on, you know, you making decisions, pointing the fingers. Your client delivery all depends on you. You’re in the middle, you pull yourself out, and the whole thing collapses. And then the thing is, is you can’t outwork yourself out of the founders trap, because I just talked to a gentleman yesterday. He has 450 clients. Awesome. I said, What would happen if we just added 15% more, 15% more clients? What would happen? And he said, Oh, honest to God, I don’t know. I don’t think I can handle it. I says, the whole thing would collapse. As it is, I’m struggling handling 450 clients. I just don’t know how I could do any more. Yeah, and when I asked him, What’s your plan to get out of it? And he’s like, it’s been working more, but I can’t work anymore right now. It’s at the sacrifice of my family. I can’t even have dinner with my family without in the back of my mind feeling guilty, because I know there’s fires I have to be that have to put out. And so this is where we have to start thinking in terms of systems and better strategies, both in sales and marketing, and then also with the team itself. Yeah. And then, as we’d be able to do that, we get ourselves out of that founder strap, and then we hit our next, you know, massive spike in growth.
Steve Fretzin [06:58]
I mean, we’re getting into the weeds already. I wanted to kind of introduce you a little bit, but we, I think we’re off. Think we’re off to a flaming hot start. But the thing I’ll just mention about specifically the legal industry, is that, you know, lawyers are really proficient at just doing everything themselves. Like, that’s their whole mindset is, like, it’s just easier for me to do it, or they wear, like, a dozen hats, or just like, delegation is more trouble than it’s worth. And, like, I don’t trust this person. It has to be done my way. So, like, when we talk about the founders trap, like you’re talking to the right audience, because law firms and lawyers, I mean, many of them, are still stuck in the, you know, in the 70s and the 80s and the way things were done back then, it’s like a slow moving train. And fortunately, the last I’ve seen in the last 10 years really a big pickup to automation and delegation, and people really starting to understand, you know, hey, I’m going to bring in a CEO, or I’m going to bring a COO into the company. This is actually a law firm, but it’s also a business, and I’ve got to treat it like that. And that’s been eye opening for a lot of lawyers who are kind of still sitting, you know, in the background, trying to do everything themselves, that they’re seeing themselves get lapped quite a bit.
Charlie Gaudet [08:03]
Yeah, well, there’s a few things that you brought up. And for one, and I’ve worked with several attorneys, so I understand, you know, the challenges that they’re faced with, and everything that you said, they feel like they can do it better and so forth, but being as busy as they are, the last thing that an attorney wants to hear is, so wait, I have to document a system. I actually have to sit there and document a system and the whole deal like, Oh, you got to be kidding me, right?
Steve Fretzin [08:26]
Yeah, they’re already tracking their time makes enough, right?
Charlie Gaudet [08:29]
Yeah, exactly. So that’s oftentimes why they won’t do it. But like them, it’s like, this is one of those moments where it’s like, I don’t say I’m lazy at it, but I just don’t like to do it myself. So I created one system, and that was the system of creating systems. And then all, it’s a system, system. And then all I would do is I would record a screenshot of me doing it once, and I would say, Yeah, I would walk them through, talk them through. This is what I did. This is how I did it. This is what you have to watch out for. I record the system, or I record it once with a screenshot, then I send it off and I say, Please document this, and then do the next task and share it with me so I can ensure that it’s done right. And then, once you build that habit enough times, it actually becomes really, really, really easy. But there’s another reason why this is important with lawyers. One of the biggest opportunities that exists in a law firm is intake, right? Because there’s that’s the first experience that a new client really has with the firm, is during that whole intake process. But where lawyers often drop the ball is they hire people, and they hope they have somebody has experience, and they hire them, then they bring them on board, and then maybe they have a couple different people. But there’s so much variation between different calls and different situations, and nobody’s worried. Listening to the calls, nobody’s ever really providing them with any you know, coaching or training, and you might have one person that is absolutely crushing it, but then the next person isn’t crushing it, and that variation, Dr Deming says variation is the enemy of excellence, right? That variation really creates a massive gap in performance. So legal marketing is super expensive, right? They spend a lot of money. And you know, for most lawyers, if they just get one more high quality case, you know, every few weeks, that can be a massive game changer for them, yeah. So they spend all this money in marketing, then they get somebody to call, and somebody’s on the phone, and they lose them right off the bat, because there was no system and training to deliver that exceptional experience right off the bat. Yeah, and so, like, there are so many different opportunities where we want to look for, where is there variation, to eliminate the variation in addition to what’s taking up my time that could otherwise be delegated.
Steve Fretzin [11:08]
Well, Charlie, I’ll tell you something interesting. The book over my shoulders, 101 top Rainmaker secrets to growing a successful law practice. And I’ve interviewed at this stage probably 300 rainmakers on my show, on this show, and I’m not going to say that they all say the same things, because they all say different things, but if I had to bring back one reoccurring theme that separated the most successful from the ones who were still sweating it, it was systems. You know, it’s that they had figured out that if they don’t put systems in place to manage and train and handle, you know the work and communicate with clients, and all the different you know, different variations of things that are happening that they’re always re defining what their business is or what they need to do, and there’s no consistency, which is to that quote that you just mentioned.
Charlie Gaudet [11:54]
So, so I work, most of my clients are six, seven and eight figure companies, right? But because of just the reputation that we have in the industry, I’ve got some bigger companies that will reach out, and one of them was the founder of Planet Fitness, and so he reached out, and I’ve coached him, and you know, we have a tremendous relationship and but one of the things that I had to ask him is they said, Look, let me ask you a question. You turned around and you created a business, and one of the most competitive industries in the entire world. Not only that, there’s a very low barrier to entry. If I wanted to start a gym, I could do it this afternoon. And then you went ahead and you did something crazy. You charged people like 10 bucks, 10 bucks for a gym membership, yet your margins were consistent with people who are charging significantly more than you, and you created one of the top 10 franchises in the entire world. How would you summarize that success? And you know, so you could apply that into your other businesses. And he said, systems. And I said, Well, go on and explain a little bit more. He said, Charlie, our systems were so dialed in and consistent that I could walk into any plan of fitness in the country. And I could tell you on average, how many T shirts were given out on a given day. I could tell you how many pens were stolen from the front desk. I could tell you when the trash barrel would get filled and how long it would take before somebody would then empty that trash barrel. Everything was dialed in so specifically, and everything had numbers and metrics so that when I wanted to make a change or I wanted to increase profit, I just had to pull one little lever and I could immediately, because everything was tracked and systematized, I could immediately see what the impact was, and we just continuously went to optimize, Yeah, same thing could happen in law firms.
Steve Fretzin [13:51]
It’s just awesome, yeah, and John Morgan was my 500 guest, and he was all in on, he said, he said he could, you know, he’s in Hawaii talking to me, which is great, but he has, you know, big computer screen with all the different, you know, firms and all of their data and all of their information. So he maybe not the quite the point of the trash can analogy, but, you know, knowing, like, everything about, you know, these firms, to see that they’re dialed in the right way and following the systems, and if they’re not, you know, to make sure, you know, somebody steps in and makes that change. But listen, man, before we go any further, I just want to make sure people know who we’re dealing with. We jumped right in, and I’d have a chance to kind of introduce you, but Charles Gaudet is, um, CEO and founder of predictable profits, obviously, working with 678, figure companies around the globe. Give everybody a little in almost, you know, near death experience. I mean, give everybody kind of a Reader’s Digest version of kind of how you came to be sure.
Charlie Gaudet [14:47]
So I’ve been an entrepreneur since age of four. Never had a traditional, quote, unquote, real job after granted. Stan, no, selling artwork to my neighbors, artwork.
Steve Fretzin [14:57]
Oh, I think you told me about that. That was the. Cutest thing in the world. What was the artwork? I forgot it was like, You made like, like turnkey on their hand or something. Wasn’t it was something cute.
Charlie Gaudet [15:08]
You know? I mean, to be honest, a lot of it just looked like scribbles. I was trying to build it out at scale. My dad, he worked every waking hour of every day, and my dad would come home when I did see him, and he would say, kid, if you ever want to make it in the world, you got to be an entrepreneur. And so, because they didn’t really know my dad until third grade, because he worked so much, yeah, I decided I’d start my own business. And so I just did what I knew how to do, and that was draw. And then I went to my neighbors and tried to sell it. And that’s what, yeah, okay. And then, you know, I continued that journey of entrepreneurship. Right after college, I started business nominated by Ernst and Young as being one of the nation’s best seed stage companies. By 24 I created my first multi million dollar business. And then after that, I just continued to build and grow companies until 2010 and that’s when somebody offered to pay me to help them grow their business. And I started predictable profits, and we’ve helped many companies make it on the Inc 5000 fastest growing companies list, and the results that we’ve generated are so uncommon. International Business Times calls me the go to business coach for seven, eight figure companies. DM news just named me the number one marketing and sales thought leader in 2025 then some cool things. I mean, Yahoo Finance calls me the CEO whisperer. Miami wire named me the number one CEO in Florida. MSN just called me the leading coach for eight and nine figure CEOs, because the few, you know, nine figure CEOs that I work with and but all of that right there, well, you know, it’s kind of cool, whatever, but it really has nothing to do with me. It just so happens that I’m the CEO. It really does happen to do with, like, it’s that in our business, we have a system for coaching, right? We call it the predictable profits operating system. And it’s like that system to generate those results month after month, year after year, and it’s a system that just sort of, like, that’s what drives the results, and that’s what gets the press. And, you know, people come to us because they want to know, how do I grow my business faster, more predictably, and then less dependent on me? And that’s sort of.
Steve Fretzin [17:08]
With proven SEO and digital marketing strategies that drive actual clients to your firm. Rankings.io. Prides itself on proof, not promises. Mentality. The best firms hire rankings.io. When they want rankings, traffic in cases other law firm marketing agencies can’t deliver. Get more rankings, get cases and schedule a free [email protected] today. Hey everybody. It’s Steve Fretzin as the you know, I’m the host of the be that lawyer podcast, and if you’re serious about growing your law practice, let’s talk. I’ve coached hundreds of attorneys to build bigger books of business without selling chasing or wasting time. This isn’t a sales pitch. It’s a real 30 minute strategy session to explore what’s possible for you in your practice. Just head over to fretzen.com and grab a time that works for you. And let’s make this your breakout year. Something that I do when I meet with a new lawyer is and again, I’m focused on business development, personal branding. I’m not looking at the whole picture like you are, but I do want to find where their gaps are, where their bottlenecks are, where their potential is sitting. What are you looking for when you meet with a new company and somebody says, hey, you know what? We’re $10 million company. We want to grow. We’ve stuck at 10 million for five years. We don’t know why. Like, what are you evaluating in that company to identify their potential?
Charlie Gaudet [18:24]
So they’re they typically fall into one of three traps, and sometimes all three. The first trap would be what we call the setup trap. You know, when people think of marketing, they go, oh, yeah, we do marketing. But even the CEO of a $500 million company, when I said to him, I go, Hey, you can’t do marketing. And he looked at me, and he goes, Huh? I go, you can’t do marketing. He says, What am I doing? I said, marketing is a function. It’s a function of how you create, capture and nurture demand. So let’s talk about how effective are you at creating and capturing and then he realized that two thirds of his entire marketing operation was operating in the dark. And so even that somebody that big was in the setup trap. The next one is the sales trap. And that is, you know, do you have a sales team that’s performing consistently, or do you have to be the ones that steps in and close the deals and save the day? And that would be the sales trap. Lot of companies fall into the sales trap and then the scale trap. And the scale trap is everything just depends on them, for delivery, for operations, they’re just involved in way too many decisions. And a lot of that has to be a team issue. There’s also a lot of guesswork. They don’t know, do I have the right team and the right seats and so forth, and so that would be the scale issue.
Steve Fretzin [19:40]
It’s like an org chart where, like the leaders here, and then everybody’s reporting up to that one person, yeah, yeah.
Charlie Gaudet [19:47]
And take it. And so take a guess. The average person can only effectively manage how many people, if you had a guess,
Steve Fretzin [19:57]
I’m gonna say effectively. Three, five.
Charlie Gaudet [20:01]
Well, actually, so I guess contextually, it makes sense if they’re doing work themselves. So if they’re doing more than just.
Steve Fretzin [20:09]
Most lawyers are, I mean, even the ones. I mean, I’ve got managing partners that are billing, you know, 1500 hour plus hours a year, and managing a firm and a team of people and everything.
Charlie Gaudet [20:19]
So in that case, you’re right. Three would be like maximum, right? If they’re doing the work and managing others, three would be about maximum, okay. But if they’re only a manager four to seven, okay? If they’re only managing people four to seven, okay? Because that, if they’re a manager, they should only, they should be looking at, how do I help everybody perform better at their jobs, creating, you know, and supporting them with different strategies and coaching, and then even trying to recruit and onboard other people, because, you know, there’s going to be some turnover.
Steve Fretzin [20:48]
Yeah, well, those are traps that I’m seeing on a pretty regular basis. Obviously, I’m dealing with the sales trap. And mostly the sales trap that I’m dealing with is people that have no system for business development. We’ll call it business development, we’ll call it business development, because we’ve got some flowers out there and butterflies, but right some call it marketing. That’s like business development. Light is market, and they’re not the same thing with the terms. They use the term so but they either have no system, or they have a system they created themselves that they don’t even know if it works, not but it seems to work, and so they just keep using it. It’s mostly an outdated, just a pitch model, right? Just get out there. Here’s how smart I am, here’s how good I am, here’s why. You know, you need to use me. And then, you know, they get ghosted, and they wonder, why?
Charlie Gaudet [21:32]
Well, here’s the thing, too, if they don’t have a strong setup, it makes your job so much harder, and helping people out of the sales trap, because one thing that we know is a our buyers or our clients or prospects, however you want to word it, they’re researchers. In 2019 the average person looked at 17 different sources of information before making a buying decision. And 2021, that went up to 2727 different sources of information before making a buying decision. Currently, it’s estimated that it’s at 3636 different sources and what, according to Mackenzie and Forrester, and things that I’ve been talking about now for about six months, by the year 2030, 100% of all sales decisions will be made without a sales rep. Now I want you to think about what that means. Does that mean that what you’re doing becomes not relevant? Not at all. What that means is, by the time somebody gets on the phone with one of the law firms, they would have already decided I want to do business with this person, but now the onus is on the person that’s on the receiving end to make sure they don’t lose them, or that you’re a good fit, right, that they’re quality, right? Yeah, exactly. But how many times have you gotten into a situation, or you’ve worked with a client and they did everything swimmingly well to get them on the phone, but then the experience that they had with the person on the phone killed the deal.
Steve Fretzin [23:04]
I would say that, you know, like we talk a lot about intake in law, that’s like they have, like you said, they’re paying all this money for these marketing agencies to get them the leads in the door, or people are hustling to get business in the door and then to blow it on the intake, or to blow it because you don’t have an effective sales process, is a killer. Like, you’re working and spending too much effort, time and everything, to then not have a really good I’ll tell you what I called a couple of contractors. I was mentioned in the last show, like a couple of contractors, only one got back to me and I was leaving voicemails. I’m like, first of all, why am I leaving a voicemail. Like, aren’t there automated answering systems and like, answering systems in like, call centers that, why would you ever want someone to leave a voicemail instead of setting up an appointment? That was the first thing second is, so you do leave a voicemail, and then they will call you back. Like, are you just asking to not do business in the area? Like, I don’t. It just blows my mind. I’m like, I always say I got to get into that landscaping business, or I got to get into right because, like, How bad are these owners where they don’t recognize the simplest of ways to lose business.
Charlie Gaudet [24:12]
And if you’re a law firm and you don’t return the call within it’s really within 15 minutes. But give them a little flexibility, within an hour, yeah, if you don’t return a call within an hour, statistically speaking, your odds of closing that deal go, they drop more than 50% like significantly lower than 50% because there may be two or three other law firms that I’m calling. If you’re lucky and you’re the first one, awesome, you’ve got the greatest chance. But if I get your answering machine and then I get the second one and I had a great sales conversation, I might just be like, You know what? I’m not going to waste my time on lawyer number three or waiting for lawyer number one to call me back. This is I feel really comfortable and confident with this decision. You know? What? Let’s move forward.
Steve Fretzin [25:02]
Yeah, let me ask you this question. I’m changing directions just slightly. The number one thing that my attorneys are asking for is, how do they and it’s not a life work balance, because we know that’s not a thing anymore, but they’re looking to figure out, how do they work less and make more and get more. And I haven’t, no, I have a feeling you’re gonna say the word system in there, but the idea is, like, they just, they need to get out of that, the trap of billing hours, managing teams, thought leadership, rain making. There’s like six hats. And so how do they get out of that, just the ridiculous the mind, even just the mind set, would be helpful of what their mindset should be to get out of trying to be everything to everybody.
Charlie Gaudet [25:52]
Well, that they have to look at rot, which is return on time, right? They have to be able to look at that rot. And so where are they spending the time? And how do they maximize their time? So that would be number one, yeah, because most if they look at their the amount of time that they’re working behind their desk and their billable hours, but compared to the hours they’re actually working, they’re going to see there’s quite a disruption. So increase that rot. The next thing you want to look at is, how can I increase the rate? Right? And so that becomes sometimes, such as easy as just raise your rate. Like, sometimes it’s just that easy, just raise your rate. Yeah, other times, it’s a matter of, you create marketing. Can create that perception of, you know, increase value, and then, therefore it makes it a lot easier to increase your rate. But, you know, raise your rate. That’s another way that you can do it. But the conversation that you and I can have today, that we couldn’t have a few years ago, is through technology, particularly that of AI. And more and more attorneys are able to get more done in less time when they can leverage AI in the right way. And so less time and less people actually when you can leverage AI in the right way, attorney is going to be going through an interesting shift now, and they’ve already started to experience it, and they’re going to be experiencing it more in 2026 and beyond, because they’re going to have to start thinking differently about, wait a minute, I’ve been billing by the hour for so long, but now I can’t actually bill by the hour when I can get something done that would normally take six hours, and I’m doing it in 2030 minutes. How do I do this and maintain my margins? They’re going to have to start thinking about now outcomes, and start changing their billing structure in terms of outcomes and being a little bit more creative that way, some of them may just go right to retainers and just bill on retainers a certain amount, and then this is what you get access to, but this is going to be an interesting paradigm shift for the legal world.
Steve Fretzin [27:46]
Yeah, I’m a big fan of automation, to your point. And there’s a lot of tools out there now that either leverage AI or even just that are just, you know, basic automation tools that we use. And then the other part is just they have to be better at delegating. I think they’re just so comfortable taking on everything when in reality, to your point earlier. Not everything is someone’s genius, right? Not everything is is what they should be spending their time. If you enjoy it and it makes you happy and it’s your best, it’s what you do best. And there’s 10 other things you’re doing where you’re not happy and you’re not enjoying it, you’ve got to find a way to delegate that away and get someone under you to deal with it. It’s just, it’s not you should not be your jam, and that’s why I think a lot of them get burned out. They’re just trying to do too much.
Charlie Gaudet [28:31]
Think about just what you’re saying right now, if a lawyer is like, oh, it’s only going to take me 50, say, 30 minutes. It’s only gonna take me 30 minutes. No big deal. 30 minutes, right? Yeah. So 30 minutes, you don’t think it’s a big deal, but then 30 minutes over the course of a week is two and a half hours. You take two and a half hours, you multiply that by, you know, 52 weeks out of the year. Let’s just say 50, because it’s easy math. Now we’re talking, you know, 100 What is it 100 and said 125 hours? Is that what it is? Yeah, let’s just say it was 125.
Steve Fretzin [29:05]
Let’s say that we’re math scientists, and it’s.
Charlie Gaudet [29:09]
But 125 hours. That’s because you just decided you were gonna make an exception for 30 minutes a day, and you did that every day, and that’s 125 hours, right? If the average person works 40 hours per week. Now you’re talking, you know, almost an entire month, right? You’re talking almost an entire month of, yeah, right, 4040, 80, and then, yeah, yeah. But of that, it could have been billable, yeah.
Steve Fretzin [29:38]
Like, think about that. Or that’s that could have been spent growing business or managing or training people, like, there’s all and then that’s only one thing. Like, you find five of those things, seven of those things, 10 of those things, and now you’ve got 500 hours a year back on your plate. That’s what that incremental. You know, pieces, they add all these tasks add up.
Charlie Gaudet [29:59]
It’s. This is, here’s a perfect example. You mentioned John Morgan. He is absolutely brilliant. If you look at John Morgan, some people might go, he’s lazy, like some people might think, because he, you know, he’ll use his time differently than other people. It’s not going to be like hustle, hustle, hustle and like the bro culture and whatnot, but he understands that he’s delegated so much and created so much leverage. He might be the wealthiest pi attorney in the world. My guess, if he’s not, he’s going to be one of them. But he’s created so much leverage that the time that he does spend when he’s actually working his rot is huge. But where, once you become a certain level of success, you realize that the real money is in those quiet moments where you can sit back and you can think, yeah, Warren Buffett, he makes his money when he sits back and he thinks a lot of the billionaires and whatnot out there, where they make their most amount of money, if you ask them, What is where do you create like that huge wealth? If they’re gonna say it’s in the moments of silence when I have nothing but my thoughts, a pen and paper, and I just thinking about what’s next. We think we have to work in order to make money. But the reality is, is when you get to that next level of wealth, it’s the work takes a different shift. It’s in those moments when you can actually start thinking about what’s next. What can I do next? What is the other strategy? And so forth.
Steve Fretzin [31:30]
Yeah. Well, listen, man, we’ve cooked through this 30 minutes. Let’s take one minute for Charlie’s big mistake.
Charlie Gaudet [31:38]
Well, I have a lot where do you want to start? Pick one. Hey, if I was going to say the one mistake that has cost me more money than anything else, like it’s all It’s cost me over a million dollars every time I did this mistake, it was being comfortable. It always happened after a period of rapid expansion, when I made a lot of money, I took my foot off the gas pedal, I convinced myself I just needed to just relax and just enjoy it. And momentum is funny when the moment Tony Robbins told me this, when I travel the world with him for a while, Tony Robbins told me this, when you stop growing, you start dying, the moment you take your foot off the gas pedal, momentum will slide backwards. We’re always climbing. You’ll start sliding backwards, and then when you start sliding backwards, you know, Pareto is no, not Pareto. It’s one of the other guys rule. An object in motion stays in motion. An object at rest stays at rest. But when momentum is moving in that direction and it’s moving backwards. You just can’t decide one day I’m going to stop that momentum and start like it takes a little while. You got to work. You got to change that direction, a lot more time, effort and money to change that direction and bring it back up again. See my lesson in that is embrace discomfort. Embrace discomfort, and just, you know, continue to lean in and and continue to deliver a challenge. We helped a client. He made almost $20 million in a very short period of time. And immediately I pick up the phone call, and I said, Hey, you got to get to work tomorrow. Yeah. And he says, What do you mean? You got to get to work? I need to challenge you. We got to go on that big thing. The other, last example I’ll give you is I went to Dan gables house in Iowa. Dan Gable was he won that Olympics without ever getting a point scored against him in wrestling. And I had dinner over at his house. And one of the things that he said to me was, he was the reason why he was able to do something nobody else did, is he goes his mindset when he won the Olympics, while everybody else went out there and started partying. He got up at five o’clock in the morning and started training again. He embraced that discovery and kept leaning in. And so.
Steve Fretzin [33:50]
Charlie’s so excellent man, everything, every little nugget of wisdom, was as much as I’d hoped for and more. So I really appreciate you coming on the show. Take a moment. Thank our wonderful sponsors, rankings, io and the law, her podcast really killing it. Awesome. And if people want to get in touch with you, they want to hear more about predictable profits. They want to grab more information about you, books, etc. What are the best ways to reach you?
Charlie Gaudet [34:13]
So predictable profits.com. Again, that is predictable profits.com. We got other resources, and my book and everything all there. So, yeah, just check us out there. Predictable profits.com.
Steve Fretzin [34:23]
All right, man, well, thanks for coming on the show again. I just, I don’t want to stop, like, we’re at 30 plus minutes, and I’m like, I just want to keep going for like, another hour. And I know that that’s not the format, but maybe we’ll have to do another one. So just thanks. I’ve just appreciate you being on the show and sharing your wisdom. So much good came out of this and some really great clips and excerpts that we’ll use so really amazing, together, we’re better. Thank you for having me, yeah, and thank you everybody for hanging out with Charlie and I for the last 30 plus again, helping you to be that lawyer, confident, organized in a skilled Rainmaker. Take care. Everybody. Be safe. Be well. Talk again real soon.
Narrator [35:00]
Thanks for listening to be that loyal, life changing strategies and resources for growing a successful law practice. Visit Steve’s website, fredson.com for additional information and to stay up to date on the latest legal business development and marketing trends for more information and important links about today’s episode. Check out today’s show notes.