Michelle Wilson: [00:00:00] we don’t live in the system of justice. We live in a system of decisions. I wanted to protect other families from having to go through three years of litigation, discovery, depositions, a hearing after losing the love of their life, and then being disappointed in getting nothing. Like what could we have done to prevent that from happening? I actually won a Batson hearing, which for those who don’t do criminal, it’s when the solicitor fires all the black people just ’cause they’re black and not for a legitimate reason. And it made the solicitor’s office so angry. I they scheduled three trials for the next week in a row. We all become better as humans because of all of the rich experiences we all have pulled together and shaken down. How are we supposed to help other people learn if we aren’t willing to share that?
Welcome to the Founding Partner Podcast. Join your host, Jonathan Hawkins, as we explore the fascinating stories of successful law firm founders. We’ll uncover their beginnings, triumph over challenges, [00:01:00] and practice growth. Whether you aspire to launch your own firm, have an entrepreneurial spirit, or are just curious about the legal business, you’re in the right place.
Let’s dive in.
Jonathan Hawkins: Welcome to Founding Partner podcast. I’m your host Jonathan Hawkins. Really excited about our guest today. We’ve got Michelle Wilson, who is an attorney here in Georgia. She has Wilson Legal, and she’ll explain better than I will, but she’s got an elder law or elderly law and elder law and estate planning practice. We had a little joke offline. So anyway, sorry about that. Couldn’t resist Michelle. You know, actually we didn’t hang out, but I think you were like a year behind me or or so at, at Georgia Law School, so, you know.
Michelle Wilson: It’s true class of oh four for me.
Jonathan Hawkins: I three for me. So, but it was good to connect recently. And, you know, we will talk about your book, which I really [00:02:00] like that’s really something cool. We’re gonna get into that and your firm and all that. So I hand it over to you. Why don’t you introduce yourself. Tell us about your firm, where you’re located and what you do.
Michelle Wilson: Sure. So we’re located in Cumming, Georgia, which is a short, if it’s no traffic, 35 mile drive from Atlanta North, a little bit northwest, near one of the bigger lakes. We’ve been here since 2008 is when I opened the firm and I grew up here. So I am, I guess a little bit of a classic hometown attorney, but with a specialty.
We specialize in elder law estate planning, special needs planning. We also do business succession in our estate planning and then uncontested probate cases. And our goal is to help 10,000 individuals, families and businesses by 2035. So 10 years from. Last year, 2034. And we’re still 9,500 or so from reaching that goal.
But we’ll be keeping track and we just really enjoy helping our local community and the families in it.
Jonathan Hawkins: Well, it’s sister, you grew up in Cumming, which [00:03:00] now is a, a really good place to be, I think for estate planning. But when you grew up it was a lot different, right? I mean, you’ve probably seen a lot of change, you know, and for those not from Atlanta, a lot of, you know, there’s a lot of wealth that has moved up that way.
Michelle Wilson: yeah, so it, I don’t know if you remember Shell Silverstein’s where the Sidewalk Ends book
Jonathan Hawkins: Oh, yeah.
Michelle Wilson: from like elementary school. That was Forsyth County back in the 1980s, like the sidewalk ended. We had two neighborhoods, polo Fields and Aberdeen, and we lived, we mom and dad built a house in 1981. And I remember my grandpa, my dad will tell you.
Made fun of him because he thought he would never get his money outta that property that he bought. And they’re still sitting on 18 acres in South Forsyth in between two neighborhoods. And so Forsyth County, for those who aren’t familiar with the area, it basically doubled in size every 10 years from 1981 to about 2001, 2003 was one of the top places that people for people live.
And now it doesn’t grow. It doesn’t double every 10 years, I don’t think, but it’s [00:04:00] still a pretty high growth area.
Jonathan Hawkins: Is that what I know? A lot of those areas up there that just had the super growth, it was like, it seemed like every couple years they’re like building a new 5,000 person high school. Right? It’s just like,
Michelle Wilson: yes.
Jonathan Hawkins: yeah.
Michelle Wilson: Yeah, so I, so just to give you a frame of reference, I graduated from South Forsyth in 97 and we had a class of 204, and I always kind of kid around that 10 people either got pregnant or dropped out. ’cause we originally had 214. My baby sister was born nine years after me, and she graduated in 2008 at the Gwinnett Arena with 1200 kids in her class.
Jonathan Hawkins: Geez.
Michelle Wilson: So yeah, lots of change.
Jonathan Hawkins: Well, let’s, let’s go back. So, you grew up in, you know, Atlanta area. And then at some point you said, I’m gonna go to law school. So what, made you think you wanted to go to law school?
Michelle Wilson: What triggered that? You know, people ask you what you wanna do when you grow up and you just pick a career. And I can’t really, can’t tell you what made me pick [00:05:00] either being a pilot or an attorney when I was in seventh grade, but my dad’s response was, why do you wanna be a sleazy attorney? And by the way, I got my pilot’s license and it cost me like, what would be 40,000 in today’s dollars?
And you could have so many hours before somebody pays you to do that. Shell, let’s not spend the money on that. So, that was kind of put to the side, I guess, right? He wanted me to do something that was reasonable and not those two things. And so I got a speeding ticket my junior year of undergrad. I went to school outta state in South Carolina at Southern Wesleyan and got the speeding ticket when I was home visiting and totally missed the court date.
So I ended up having a hearing date that I missed and I thought it was just, you pay the fine on all speeding tickets. Well, not all of ’em apparently. And so mom and dad made me hire my own attorney and the narrative that I wrote about what happened impressed him and he said, have you ever thought about law school?
And I said, well, yeah, once, but it was kind of shot down. And so I went ahead and applied because I was doing business administration [00:06:00] and I wanted a master’s degree that would be broad and not limit my options. And so I, I went ahead and did the LSAT and applied, and I got into UGA and I kind of think it was ’cause nobody from Southern Wesleyan had ever applied to go to school at UGA and they could add a school to their list of, you know, alumni schools.
But I kind of went to law school, honestly, Jonathan, to prove to my dad that I could do it.
Jonathan Hawkins: And you did.
Michelle Wilson: You spites a motivator.
Jonathan Hawkins: So, so did you avoid jail time on that ticket that you uh, skipped out on?
Michelle Wilson: Oh my gosh, that’s an embarrassing story. So I was a little naive and in South Carolina the number on the ticket that you call was for Forsyth County’s Most wanted, and I feel like they got the scariest guy on the force to record the voicemail for that. It was like, thank you for calling Forsyth County’s most wanted.
If you have information about anybody who’s, you know, I have a speeding ticket. I’m not one of Forsyth County’s most wanted, but I ended up just going down and like turning myself in to take care of the ticket. So I spent like four hours in the holding cell and had to make that [00:07:00] embarrassing phone call to mom and dad, Hey, can you come get me outta jail?
And of course they were less than impressed with their eldest daughter being the one who’s doing this. Right. But I mean, it all turned out okay. It was back when you know, Georgia now doesn’t do this, but they used to expunge. An arrest or a charge for people who only get in trouble once. And so it’s expunged.
Now. It’s not on my record, but yeah. I know what the inside of the gel cell looks like you had to disclose it on your character and fitness, didn’t you?
Michelle Wilson: I did. And, you know, I, my fingerprints were taken and Yeah. Yeah.
Jonathan Hawkins: You know, I, it is funny, I’m, I’m like applying to a couple jurisdictions now to wave in and so I’m going through it again and it’s like, they’re like, have you ever, blah, blah, blah. And they’re like, you know, air on the side of disclosure.
Michelle Wilson: Right.
Jonathan Hawkins: And I, like, one of ’em is asking about tickets, you know, moving violations.
And I know I got one, but I can’t remember when, and I know it was when the last 10 years since to the point now where I’m too damn old to remember these things and I’m just gonna say I got one some somewhere.
Michelle Wilson: So pull [00:08:00] my driving record. You have permission, right. And just let ’em check it out. You know, we all have these lessons.
Jonathan Hawkins: so, so you end up at Georgia, you go to law school. So what did you do after law school? I saw in your, your bio that at some point you worked at the public defender’s office. Did you go straight there after law school or was there something in between?
Michelle Wilson: No, and it’s, it’s kind of an interesting story. So I, I wanted to open my own practice, but I don’t know if you remember Mary Radford who used to write the treatises and she’s now passed that on to someone else. And she also taught the trust and estates course at UGA. She actually told her class, don’t try to be just a trust, an estate’s attorney.
You won’t make enough money to make a living. So that scared me enough. I said, all right, I’ll go get a job. So I went back to my hometown of cumming and I practiced with the guy who said I should go try law school. Same guy. We did what I called door law. Have you ever heard of door law? If you walk in the ch in the front door with a check, we take your case.
Yeah. So basically general [00:09:00] practice, right? So it’s like 40% domestic, 40% criminal. I did some panel work ’cause that was before PD offices and then contracts, some probate that kind of thing. So small claims. And then about a year and a half after that I got recruited to Atlanta to work for a high-end divorce attorney who ended up having a bit of a addiction habit.
We had to force him into rehab and close his practice. So we were handling phone calls from really angry clients who didn’t have anything done on their cases. So I went to go work as a contract attorney for an insurance defense and corporate firm for about six months. Tried a, a couple of insurance defense cases.
And then from there went to the public defender’s office in Douglas County because I just needed a job I could do without having to think very hard for a little while. ’cause I was a little burned out at that point. Um, So yeah,
Michelle Wilson: So of the journey.
Jonathan Hawkins: I don’t know how much you can say about this, but, okay. So you went to work for this family lawyer that you ha, you said you had to get, who was we, I guess, first of all, who, who.
Michelle Wilson: Oh, so it was me and an [00:10:00] associate and like a secretary and a paralegal who worked from home and would take documents and put ’em in his mailbox ’cause he didn’t like to come in the office. And you know, I, I kind of commend the bar on this a little bit because they really showed through that experience that they support attorneys that are dealing with addiction because he didn’t lose his license.
And I don’t even think he went through like the reprimand or hearing process, I think as long as he was moving towards doing rehab. So like that was a non-negotiable. You have to go, even if you don’t wanna go, because you do have this issue in order to keep your license.
Jonathan Hawkins: So how did he take it when you guy, I guess, did you guys have an intervention? Is that, is that how y’all handle it?
Michelle Wilson: We did and we had to end up changing the elevator code so that he couldn’t come up to the office and take money outta the firm. And I wasn’t a part of that, like right next to him interaction. I was more support staff I guess, during that process. So, yeah.
Jonathan Hawkins: Wow. You know, I’m sure [00:11:00] there, you know, addiction is a big issue in legal and I’m sure there are people out there that might find themselves in that situation. So, any
Michelle Wilson: So I would say just be honest with the bar. Be honest with the bar. Ask for help. And there was another attorney that we did a lot of shared cases with that was on the floor above the firm where I was at, and he stepped in and helped out a lot. So I think there’s something to be said for. Creating those relationships with other attorneys, whether they do the same kind of work you do or not, because you never know where an attorney’s story, or maybe if somebody’s looking to retire soon and they’ve got some extra time, could help with supporting somebody that might be going through something like that.
Jonathan Hawkins: Yeah. Well that’s crazy. So you get out and then you go through that and then get burned out, which I understand. I, I, I, that was crazy. So then you end up at the public defender’s office for a while. So how, how was that? You know, what’s that
Michelle Wilson: That was actually my easiest interview because the person they fired actually pulled a [00:12:00] gun when his really fancy SUV got repoed in the courthouse parking lot. So the threshold for getting that job was, well, I don’t think she’s gonna pull a gun on anyone, so we should be okay.
Jonathan Hawkins: So in that position, are you trying a lot of cases or do you.
Michelle Wilson: Oh, all the time. Yeah. I actually won a Batson hearing, which for those who don’t do criminal, it’s when the solicitor fires all the black people just ’cause they’re black and not for a legitimate reason. And it made the solicitor’s office so angry. I they scheduled three trials for the next week in a row
Jonathan Hawkins: For, for you just to,
Michelle Wilson: For me. Yeah. Happy weekend prepping. So yeah, lots of cases there. But you know, honestly, after doing general practice, I had been trying cases for several years. I was in court when I first got outta law school, probably three or four days a week from the beginning. Like it was that old trial by fire.
Here’s your file, Michelle. Go look up the rules and then show up at your hearing. You’ve gotta go on Thursday, right?
Jonathan Hawkins: Did you wanna be a trial lawyer [00:13:00] or was it just sort of that’s where you ended up.
Michelle Wilson: I did, I actually did the third year practice act at Hall County and tried two jury trials before I graduated law school for uh, the DA’s office up there.
Jonathan Hawkins: Well that’s cool. Well, you’re not trying cases anymore, are you?
Michelle Wilson: No, I’m not. And the reason, well, two reasons for that. One, I had a case that almost made me quit probably about, I don’t know, six years after getting my license. And it was this insurance inter pleater case that involved a fellow who worked for our local train station. And he had wanted to change his life insurance to pay off the mortgage on the house and his new truck, so his second wife wouldn’t have to go get an another job.
They’d been married for probably more than 10 years at that point. And she was another like tough. Police officer type person, and the daughter from the first marriage claimed that the insurance was supposed to go to her. And so in that case, the insurance company says, I don’t know who I’m gonna pay.
We’re gonna put the money in the court. You guys duke it out. Right? And the [00:14:00] judge, even though we had an overt act and we had evidence of intent with his handwritten note, so I had a canary copy of his signed change of beneficiary form and his handwritten note, the judge said, because the Marta looked at their files three years after the form was lost.
That that was adequate. Well, when I appealed it, the court of appeals gimme a one-liner and said, you haven’t given us a legal issue to review, so we can’t. We can’t review it. So all the money, and it wasn’t a huge policy, but it would’ve made a big difference for her, right? And this daughter from the first marriage had not talked to him in half of her lifetime, had never used his last name, did not show up to his funeral, had no communication.
Her mom sent flowers, right? She was, her mom was a chiropractor, had, you know, wealth. It, it really made me lose that romantic, idealistic impression of a legal system. And so now I tell people we don’t live in the system of justice. We live in a system of decisions. And the decision makers, the judges, they’re impacted by their own biases and their [00:15:00] own political opinions.
And you don’t know how that’s gonna affect you and your family. And if you don’t do planning, then you’re running the risk that you might not have the result that you are looking for, that you want. So I’m, I call my practice at Disney practice, Jonathan. So I come to work every day to make people’s wishes come true.
Jonathan Hawkins: Well, that’s so, okay. So the practice that you have now, is it a result of sort of that case or were you already sort of interested in, this area?
Michelle Wilson: So I’ve always been interested in this area since working really for that first attorney, because he was using the same five page will form he’d used for 30 years back when he learned how to be a lawyer on cassette tape because he was an Eastern pilot, and of course Eastern went belly up, right?
And I think he even became an attorney before the bar was required. So, and I asked him like, why didn’t, why don’t you improve this will to better protect the clients? Like it’s, there’s not a whole lot here. We could do more to protect the clients better. And his response was, and it was the same as a lot of attorneys in this area, I don’t make any money on the will.
It’s a loss leader. I make the money helping people go through the probate [00:16:00] process. So I don’t, I’ll do the will almost for free because I want them to come back and ask me for help to go through this court process. And I just feel like we can do better. Like we can do better for our clients than that.
Jonathan Hawkins: Yeah.
Michelle Wilson: Right. And so, but as far as planning goes I wanted to protect other families from having to go through three years of litigation, discovery, depositions, a hearing after losing the love of their life, and then being disappointed in getting nothing. Like what could we have done to prevent that from happening?
In that case, we could have done planning ahead of time, and we actually have a funding concierge at our firm that holds our clients accountable for changing and updating their insurance policies and their bank accounts so that their beneficiaries are the people they want them to be, and so that their wishes do me about that this person at your firm. What, how do, what’s the mechanism, how, what’s the process? How does that work?
Michelle Wilson: So funding is a problem for a lot of estate planning attorneys. So all of our estate planning attorneys listening are gonna be like, yeah, that’s a problem for me too, because it’s common. People get their documents done and they just want there to be some [00:17:00] magic wand that magically makes everything work the way that they, we talked about, and that doesn’t work.
You have to align all of your assets with your trust, and your trust has to be named as a beneficiary or an owner in order for the bank to know where that money goes when you die. Right? And if the bank doesn’t know you’re going through probate. So I have tried several things in October of 2023. I said that’s it.
I need to hire somebody to hold clients accountable and that needs to be somebody other than me. ’cause an attorney doesn’t need to say, Hey, you said you were gonna add the beneficiary for your checking by Wednesday of last week. Have you got that done yet? Right. So I actually had, you know, when you have kids, you become friends with their parents.
And one of my daughter’s friend’s moms was standing in my driveway and she was saying, you know, I’ve been a stay at home mom long enough. I need to find something to do while the kids are in school. ’cause we need to earn, we need to have some more income coming into our household. She manages her spouse and her three kids and holds ’em accountable for all of their different [00:18:00] activities in school assignments and is super sweet to talk to on the phone.
So I said, I might have an opportunity for you. Do you wanna try coming to work for me now? She had to learn all of the Microsoft Suite stuff, Excel, word and I also hired my neighbor and my friend that had been trying to get to work for me for a long time, like four years to come work for me part-time as my billing clerk. Cause I was out for surgery last year. So I needed someone who could do the me stuff on the financial side. She also was able to educate my funding concierge, stay at home mom about what the word beneficiary meant, right, and what pay on death and transfer on death means at a bank so that she could talk to our clients about that.
So basically at the end of our process, when the documents are done and we deliver the documents to a client, we have a spreadsheet called the personal asset spreadsheet that divides the assets into categories, cash accounts, investments, IRAs, life insurance, real estate. Businesses and we go through each category and we [00:19:00] talk about what we’re gonna do to connect the trust with each asset.
Is it gonna be an owner or a beneficiary? And then we ask the client, do you wanna be responsible for that change or would you like Kristen to help you? She’s our funding concierge. And by help you, I mean for our, really, our older clients who are in their seventies, Kristen will meet them at the bank and sit down at the bank and hand the certificate of trust to the banker and the copy of the power of attorney.
So they have everything they need to know who their agents are and who their beneficiary will be, and then makes that conversation and that change really easy.
Jonathan Hawkins: Wow.
Michelle Wilson: And when I say easy, when Truist did their merger, Truist banker that we met with did not know how to print confirmation that the trust was the beneficiary from his new computer system.
He had to get the bank manager to help him with that, and our client would’ve given up on it and walked out. But we were insistent on getting something to confirm the change was made. So that’s what the funding concierge does.
Jonathan Hawkins: Well, I mean, shoot, as you describe it, I mean, I mean, hell, I’m a lawyer and if you told me to do this, I guess [00:20:00] I could probably figure it out, but I. I’d probably get confused. Gonna the bank too. I mean, I can’t imagine if I’m a, you know, 80 something year old non-lawyer. I’m gonna get real, really confused.
That’s actually a pretty cool service. I, I’ve never heard of anybody doing that. Is this, do other people do this? Do other.
Michelle Wilson: There are actually people you can outsource to. And if you have any listeners that want, I can share with you the information of the vendor we use when we wanna outsource it. We have a vendor who will get the forms from the life insurance companies and the investment companies and fill ’em out for the client and send them back to us.
And we just call the client and say, time to come in and sign your documents. And then we send them in for ’em. And for busy people like you and me to get this financial alignment, when you do a trust-based plan, you have to take a PTO day and just you and your wife go to the banks together. ’cause you gotta show up together on joint accounts and just go someplace nice for lunch because it’s a hassle. it’s not so much that we can’t figure it out. We can, we’re capable. It’s that there are other things in our life we need to spend time on. And the question the client [00:21:00] needs to answer is, what’s more important to you? How valuable is your time? Would you like to spend 150 bucks per account and we’ll do it for you, and all you have to do is come in and sign, or do you wanna do it yourself and we’ll just hold you accountable?
Jonathan Hawkins: Yeah. Okay. Well, all right, well, let’s go back. So you had this case that made you almost want to quit being a lawyer, and instead it sort of led you down this path. So how long after that did you decide, I’m gonna go start my own firm and it’s gonna be a elder law, trust, and state firm?
Michelle Wilson: So yeah, that case it, so that case made me think, it doesn’t matter how smart I am or how right I am, I even hired another attorney to second chair me on the hearing and I did absolutely nothing wrong and we still lost. So I was basically like, fuck it. Like if I can’t get the reward of actually succeeding when I’m right, like what?
Why bother? So that was when I was doing contract work for another firm in Atlanta, Gorby Reeves and Peters. So then I was a public defender for a year and a half, and at the end of that year and a half at the public defender’s office, I was getting ready to be promoted to the felony court level.[00:22:00]
And I was 29. I was not being paid enough to really make living in my Buckhead apartment feasible for the long term, if that makes sense. And I wanted to do something big before I turned 30. And my dad was a little bit of a, too much of a slow mover. So I found this real estate investor from South Carolina and I decided to uproot, move to South Carolina, partner with him, and create what we called an armchair real estate investing business.
So back then you could set up a call center and take leads on people who wanted to get rid of their real estate. Buy the real estate, but with wraparound financing with like a wraparound trust and basically they keep the first mortgage, but you fill the house with a tenant after replacing carpet and doing paint, and then you find a private lender to be the first mortgage holder and then get the original owner out and then you just build up a book of business and either flip the house or the investment or keep it and, and have it be part of your, your bankroll.
Right. Well that was in January of 2008
Jonathan Hawkins: Yeah.
Michelle Wilson: and [00:23:00] we all know what happened in April of 2008, so it took me four months to get $40,000 in debt and be living off of my partner’s food stamps. And I will never forget the day I was sitting in front of Kroger in South Carolina and I couldn’t even afford to go in and buy a coke.
Jonathan Hawkins: Mm.
Michelle Wilson: And I had not asked for help from my parents at this point. Right. Like I was super stubborn. And then my friend Emily said, if you do not come back, I’m gonna come up and get you. You have until like a week or two from now. So it’s good to have friends like that.
Jonathan Hawkins: Yeah. So you came back and that’s when you opened your shop
Michelle Wilson: Well, I came back and I was living with my parents, 29 years old. No job. 40,000 in debt, no prospects. And the same guy, my dad who said, why do you wanna be a sleazy lawyer? Came up to me and said, why don’t you try starting your own firm now? And so that was, you know, I, I started researching, I called like probably six or seven estate planning attorneys in Atlanta.
I found out you actually can make a living just doing estate planning. [00:24:00] That was a relief. And I ended up getting connected with wealth Council, which is a national network of estate planning attorneys that offers a lot of educational courses that are pretty good. I. But usually connected to their software.
So you kind of need their software to understand what they’re talking about. And then I also got connected with Eden Rose Brown, who’s an estate planning attorney on Oregon, who’s really successful. Used to be a big speaker. I called her outta the blue, you don’t know me, this is what I’m trying to do. She offered to let me stay at her house and shadow her at her firm for two weeks.
So I went to my granddad, borrowed $10,000 bought airplane tickets to the Wealth Council Immersion course in Texas, and a set of CDs to their basic trust immersion course. And then flew to Oregon and shadowed Eden for two weeks. I bought her business model. So she had like a, a practice model with like engagement letter samples and like client relationship management stuff.
I came home, spent about $8,000 on letterhead and the document envelopes and the software. And I started in the upstairs room above my parents’ garage. That was not [00:25:00] heated in September. So September, October, I was typing with the tips of the gloves cut off because there was a an inch gap under the window and an inch gap under the door.
And so you couldn’t keep the heat on in there. And it was cold in the first fourth quarter that year. I think we had our first client and made our first $1,500.
Jonathan Hawkins: And that was so sweet, wasn’t it? Probably.
Michelle Wilson: Yeah,
Jonathan Hawkins: So what year? What year was that?
Michelle Wilson: 2008.
Jonathan Hawkins: Wow. Well, you’ve come a long way, so, so it was,
Michelle Wilson: You like it?
Jonathan Hawkins: so a couple things there. So, you didn’t give up you invested in yourself. And it’s turned out pretty well, it sounds like. So let’s talk about, you know, from those humble beginnings with the cutoff gloves in the cold room to now.
So what, what does your firm look like now?
Michelle Wilson: So right now well, we are a million dollar law firm. We were under a million last year, but we did a million in 2023. We have a team of 15 people. Seven of those are [00:26:00] professional witnesses, so we, we actually give our retired clients jobs of 20 bucks an hour to come in and be signers at our signing meetings, which allows our core staff to stay busy with what they already have on our plate.
We’ve got a core staff of about eight. And two attorneys, including me. We’ve got two reception, intake and one of my virtual assistants, like she’s actually an assistant manager of the company now. She’s been with me three years. They’re in South Africa and a drafting assistant in the Philippines.
They’ve all been with me for over three years now, a paralegal, and then my funding concierge and then my part-time billing clerk that works about a day and a half at the office.
Jonathan Hawkins: So yeah it is. And, and I was looking at your, your website and it’s a little different than most lawyer websites I’ve seen. and what I mean by that is like, I mean, you’re there, but you know, most lawyer websites, it’s all about me. It’s all about me. And, and you’re, it. Yours appears more about, it’s about. Team and the, the entire firm. And so what was your thought process behind [00:27:00] that? I, I assume that was by design.
Michelle Wilson: I love. That’s a great, that’s such a great question. Yeah. And that was absolutely by design. I do everything very, very deliberately in life. Which doesn’t bode well for me if I ever were like, tried for a crime because I am so deliberate about everything. So everything would have men’s rea, right. Um,
Jonathan Hawkins: Get away with it ’cause you would’ve planned it all right?
Michelle Wilson: Right. Maybe so. But I digress. So the website is based on a book and you’ve probably read it before the StoryBrand book, which is based on the hero’s journey. So I actually hired a company to keep me from saying too much, ’cause I tend to put too much content on a website. I wanted to simplify the message and I want it to be team oriented because my definition of business success.
Has nothing to do with me being the center of attention. It has to do with me owning a business that runs without me because I have so many other ideas and dreams. I need to be able to be out of production and out of having to be involved [00:28:00] in the day to day in order to be able to achieve everything I wanted to achieve.
So I most, up until probably 2018, even 2022, probably, I was most easily found online if people searched my name, not if people searched estate planning, because people would go to my website to credit check me and make sure I was a real person and somebody trustworthy. Well, then they wanted to come in and only talk to me.
Well, it’s important for me to be able to provide service. To be able to provide service for 10,000 people in 10 years. I need to be able to have people who are not lawyers help with parts of the process. And by allowing a team to help and having that team approach, we can respond faster, we can answer questions faster.
We can. Efficiently and effectively complete estate plans. Even if I’m sick, like I was out for surgery this last year. I was out emergency contact only for 40 days and my firm had its highest grossing month in its history the month that I was out. So that really speaks to the systems and the processes that you set up.
Right? But to me, that’s business [00:29:00] success. Business success is having something that runs without you.
Jonathan Hawkins: Well, I, think it’s brilliant. I noticed it for sure, and I, I always tell, I tell everybody to listen, you know, law firm owners, at least, you know, the less your firm depends on you, the more valuable it’s, and
Michelle Wilson: And can I share with you, Jonathan, the joy like. When I hired my two South African virtual assistants, and my Filipino assistant, it was in 2021. And I couldn’t find people to come in person to answer my phone, and I felt like I didn’t have any help. But after I hired the three of them, I started focusing on developing my team and encouraging them.
And we would read self-development books like the Four Agreements, for example. And then we would talk about the ideas in it and being able to pour into a team to help all of us be better people. It’s so rewarding, like at the end of the year when you have, ’cause I was really worried at first, you know, I have these people on these other continents that I’m not even seeing.
How do I create a culture that doesn’t make them feel left out? Right? And at the end of that first [00:30:00] year my assistant from the Philippines came to me and said, thank you, Michelle. I feel like I’m a part of a team that’s doing something and I, feel like. he felt like he had buy-in even though we’ve never met each other.
And being able to do that and see people grow, it’s amazing. I think every attorney who’s starting their practice don’t stop at just being a solo because I, did stop for a long time ’cause I had a really bad partnership experience. I don’t mind trusting anybody with anything. I lick my own envelopes for eight years after opening this firm, but I would’ve missed out on so much if I didn’t hire a coach to help me grow faster and help me do things that scared me.
Jonathan Hawkins: So let’s talk about the culture and the team building. So you, you’ve, you do this book thing. What, what else do you do? Especially, you know, now nowadays more and more you’ve got these overseas VAs and overseas people. Or it certainly, I. Virtual, maybe not
Michelle Wilson: Mm-hmm.
Jonathan Hawkins: So what sorts of other things do, you do to help sort of generate that culture of the team? All that.
Michelle Wilson: So for the last couple years I went through a, a staffing workshop. And in [00:31:00] the staffing workshop, they recommended that you do a one-on-one meeting every month, which is a 30 minute meeting, and it’s directed by the employee. The employee gets to talk about what they wanna talk about, but the idea of that is checking in with them on their personal goals so that you can make sure that the professional goals are still in alignment.
Because what I like to tell people is, I don’t expect you to be with me forever. Like three to five years would be awesome. More than that would be amazing. But at some point, if your interests diverge from our interest, I wanna help you get to that next stepping stone and have enough notice so I can actually hire somebody that you can train to replace you.
And do that on an amicable basis. Amicable basis, right? Instead of, usually the situation is they stop doing their job as well, and then you fire them because they’re messing things up, right? And then it’s a cleanup phase for 30 days, and then you spend the next six months finding somebody to fill in the spot, right?
So the one-on-one helps you stay connected with your team and what their personal situation is, and it lets them get to know you a little. And then we do a 90 day review, [00:32:00] performance review. And I don’t, I should do more on those than I do currently. Right now it’s a self-evaluation that we discuss every 90 days.
But for my intake and reception staff, I should be listening to calls before their 90 day performance review, in fact, every week and having suggestions and additional trainings I can offer them. The other thing I wanna find out in the performance review is what are your interests? I. Because if the firm needs a marketing manager like you do, and I’ve got somebody who’s interested in doing parts of what would be included in that job description, maybe I can divide that job description task list among two or three people I already have on my team until I can find the right person to take on that role full time.
Right? And so it’s a way of managing tasks to keep people feeling that they’re growing and that they have a future and that they’re making progress. And I think that’s how you retain people. It’s not just pay. I’ve seen people just pay people more and their employees leave after a few years. And so you invest all that time and extra money and you’re not retaining people, but if you can [00:33:00] help them grow personally and help them still reach their goals, even if it’s a little divergent from their original reason they were hired, you keep ’em happier
Jonathan Hawkins: I and challenged,
Jonathan Hawkins: like that you need to teach a class on this. I like that.
Michelle Wilson: I’d be happy to.
Jonathan Hawkins: You need to do a to do a workshop. I’m serious that that’s
Michelle Wilson: And I’ll tell you, I stopped doing one-on-ones for like three months last year. ’cause I got too busy and I felt the disconnection, Jonathan, like do it, like try it, test it for a quarter. Yes. It takes a whole day out of your schedule, which, yikes. It’s a lot. Right. But do it and make sure that your employees, if they’re in a office with other people, have an office they can go to where they can talk to you privately, like with headphones or something, without being overheard.
But yeah, I’m happy to do a class if we wanna, if you want me to do one,
Jonathan Hawkins: You know, maybe we’ll do a webinar. I’m serious that’s really cool. I mean, I like what I’m hearing.
Real quick. Thanks for listening. If you’re getting any value out of this podcast, please take two seconds to hit the subscribe button and leave a [00:34:00] five star review. It would really mean a lot to me. Now back to the show.
Jonathan Hawkins: So let’s, move to something else that I like. So, when I met you, you gave me a copy of your book. It’s right here. You got one there.
Michelle Wilson: Yep.
Jonathan Hawkins: So I really like, I like the concept.
I’ve started it. Really cool. So why don’t you tell us about the book, what it’s called. Tell us sort of the inspiration for it and, what is it?
Michelle Wilson: So the book is called, so I Can Love You Longer, A Mother’s Message to Her Daughter. I wrote it because in 2017 I did the Brocom One test, which is a test for women to be able to find out if you’ve got a genetic marker for different kinds of cancer. And basically, if the marker shows up positive, what it means is you have a much higher chance of getting cancer.
So I’ll give you an example. If you have a marker for breast cancer, instead of the normal 10 or 15%, everybody else has as a chance of getting it, you have an 85% chance of getting it. And if you get it, it’ll be the aggressive kind that you might not survive. Right? [00:35:00] So I’m a single mom and I’m self-employed.
What happens if something happens to me? My daughter now has to live with her dad, who I divorce. For reasons that I feel were legitimate and it would make life difficult for her ’cause A, she wouldn’t have her mom. And B, she’s got a different house to be in, right? And maybe less interaction with my family as a result.
So basically what I decided is I would plan to do the surgeries intentionally and have the support staff at the firm so the business could still run. Because, you know, if you’re out sick, unintentionally, it causes chaos in the firm. You gotta reschedule appointments. People are angry, stuff doesn’t get done.
You lose money ’cause you’ve gotta refer stuff out maybe, right? Or people leave and go somewhere else and maybe you get bad Google reviews. Like it’s not fun. So I figured if I planned it. I could get the surgeries done and I did the book so that if the second big surgery, which was the breast reconstruction sur surgery went wrong, that she would have a piece of me to hang onto.
So I basically made this list of all [00:36:00] the things that I would wanna tell her and I’m sorry.
Jonathan Hawkins: Take your time.
Michelle Wilson: I found a really great writing coach and I basically gave her the list and she said, Hey, Michelle. I was like, I don’t know how to rate this, but here’s what I wanna say. And she said, we’ve got about 12 topics here, right?
We can divide that up in months. And then we’ll make a spreadsheet. And then basically what I did, Jonathan, is I scheduled two hours on Sunday nights and two hours on Thursday nights. And I wrote two letters each time. And I would take myself to like a, a wild wing and I’d be the nerdy dork with the laptop on Fri on Thursday night at five 30 on the patio table with a blue moon, beer and wings that I had to eat and then wipe my fingers up.
’cause you can’t type with wing sauce. But and I’d just sit out there and I’d listen to music and I’d, hear, well, I’d listen to music or I’d just hear the ambient noise of people. Right? So you wouldn’t be at home alone. And I’d just type for about two hours
Jonathan Hawkins: Wow. Michelle Wilson: and then I would go over it on Saturdays.
She would [00:37:00] help me edit. And then she helped me get connected with a publisher. So I figured out how to save the money for the. Okay, here’s the other thing. If you write your own book, make it slightly littler than this one, because this length was like $6,000 extra because of the page length. But anyway, so the editor helped me go through the publishing process.
That was a year long experience. And then I also recorded it on Audible, so it would be in my voice. Um,
Jonathan Hawkins: That’s cool. That’s cool. I did not know that.
Michelle Wilson: Oh it is, and it was definitely a challenge. So the recommended place was my master bedroom closet, right? ’cause it’s full clothes that absorb the sound. And I had my Yeti Yeti microphone that I, that isn’t working today.
And I learned that you have to sit, like not speaking directly into it and that you should drink lemon water to keep, to help with phlegm. ’cause your mouth and throat make noises. You don’t realize they make until you speak into a very sensitive mic. And it was in two hour sessions, so we did. Ten two hour sessions that summer.
And it was the year we did a million. And I was like, I don’t have time for this. Right? Like [00:38:00] how am I gonna in the morning during the business day? You can’t do it after hours, you can’t do it on the weekends. And there are a lot of people in my neighborhood with big trucks and there happens to be a stop sign right at the corner where my master bedroom closet is, are you here?
Are you seeing where this is going? And so depending on the time of day, the trucks would come and stop. And then they would, right? And you’d be doing your chapter and then you’d have to stop and rerecord it. So I had to rerecord probably two thirds of that
Jonathan Hawkins: Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. I don’t know if my, did your voice give out? Did your voice give out? I mean, that’s a lot of, that’s a lot of sustained talking.
Michelle Wilson: it was two hour increments, two or three times a week. So it wasn’t continuous for that reason. ’cause your voice has to recover. But yeah, there were a couple days where I was like, I had a cold or something and it was just hard. And there were just a couple days where I just, I didn’t wanna do it anymore.
You know, like, do you ever do projects and you’re just like, I’m not sure. I won’t have it in me to [00:39:00] finish this.
Jonathan Hawkins: Yeah, well it’s, you know, I, I think I mentioned to you like I am beginning the process for a book.
Michelle Wilson: Don’t you already have one
Jonathan Hawkins: well, well, Michelle Wilson: the contract? One?
Jonathan Hawkins: got that small one that I did some years ago. It’s, sort of legal, it’s like a legal book. Small, but it’s legal book. But I wanna do like a real book. And it’s, you know, it’s a little scary.
That’s why I’m, in terms of the amount of work. I mean, yours is almost 300 pages, and I’m like, dang. It’s, it’s a big, hire a publisher, Jonathan, you are expected to read through it to review it in a weekend, like they want it back.
Jonathan Hawkins: yeah. Wow. So let’s talk about the book a little bit. So how did you, you know, you, said you you knew sort of what you wanted to talk to her about. You know, there’s a lot of letters and, and I, I love the, I love the format. I love how you did it.
Michelle Wilson: Oh, good.
Jonathan Hawkins: it’s, it’s really cool. I mean, what a gift to her and your grandkids and anybody else. I mean, really. I mean, it’s,
Michelle Wilson: Yeah. My mom doesn’t like how she was portrayed. She feels like she, I made her into like an like a drill sergeant is what she calls it.[00:40:00]
But I mean, it, I feel like it, it turned out well, and I feel like the experience was better with the publisher because I had the writing coach, so a lot of the editing that was basic was already done. So I definitely highly, highly recommend that. But yeah. What’s your question about content? Do you have any specifics?
Jonathan Hawkins: so, you know, just for people who hadn’t seen it, you know, it’s, you have it broken, like you said, broken into months with, with sort of a general topic or theme, and then you have letters,
To your daughter within it. So how did you pick the big themes? well, let me back, back up. Did you pick the big themes first, then do the subtopics for the letters? Or did you have all the subtopics and then you said, all right, this is how we’re gonna put ’em
Michelle Wilson: It was a mishmash of both. Like I don’t know about you, but I’m the kind of person when I’m reading a magazine article, I typically start about a third of the way from the top. Like, I always start in the middle. And so we created the big topics in some instances out of the smaller topics that I wanted to talk about.
So there was some rearranging, and [00:41:00] that’s where another person’s perspective is helpful. Right. And then I did have to fill in, there were definitely some chapters that were harder to write, like the December, faith and Hope. It’s actually about death and dying and how to explain that to an 8-year-old
Jonathan Hawkins: Yeah. Well, the other cool thing about the format is that you can just pick it up anywhere and just read.
Michelle Wilson: you can.
Jonathan Hawkins: you don’t have to read it in order.
Michelle Wilson: And the other thing that’s fun is there’s activities at the end of each chapter that I think anybody of any age can really get something from. So basically from 2018 or 2017, when I did this BRCA one test 2018, July, I joined how to manage a small law firm, which is a coaching company.
And the, they always do this quarterly meeting every quarter where they go an inch wide and a mile deep on a topic that helps you run your business. And it’s structured kinda like a corporation would be on how to grow. And the owner got on the stage, and I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a church or a big gathering, and the first sentence, the keynote speaker says, it’s like they’re only talking to you like the spotlight could just, you could be the only person in the room.
And he said, you [00:42:00] have a right to be free. And it was that moment that I realized I didn’t have to stay in a toxic relationship and then I could actually do what I needed to do as far as the surgeries. You know, when, so it’s that awareness that you can, that really starts the steps in moving forward. And I read so many self-help books and listened to so many people, podcasts coaches.
And I wanted to put all of that amazing stuff into this book so that she wouldn’t just have my stories, but she would be able to read from all the people that I respect and that I learned from, especially during that five or six year period. Right. So that’s the other thing I think that would be beneficial to anybody who picks it up is there’s books in here, like you’ve heard of Rich Dad, poor Dad, but there’s something called, there’s a book called The Wealthy Gardener that I think is really only a download now.
I don’t think you can get a print book. And it actually includes the idea of financial leverage. Versus regular debt, which Rich [00:43:00] Dad, poor Dad doesn’t get into. So I feel like it, it goes a little further in that financial basics education you would want your kids to have or even you might wanna have, right?
If you don’t feel like you’re, that’s your special, you know, wheelhouse. *So I like it because I think it could help anybody of any age, honestly. And I hope that it gives ideas to other parents, whether they’re business owners or lawyers or non-lawyers on what they could write for their own kids.
Jonathan Hawkins: So how old’s your daughter now?
Michelle Wilson: She’s 11.
Jonathan Hawkins: So she’s read it.
Michelle Wilson: No,
Jonathan Hawkins: No.
Michelle Wilson: not the whole thing. She’s heard me talk. She was at most of the coaching meetings when I was writing it. She’s heard me talk about it a million times. She has listened to a lot of it actually, because after you record the Audible book, you have to listen to all your recordings before they publish it.
And so the only time I had to listen to him was at night when she was going to bed and I would just play him on the laptop and we’d get to the end of the letter and she’d be like, no, mom, do the next one. Do the next one. So she’s probably listened to about [00:44:00] a third or half of it at this point.
Jonathan Hawkins: So is she old enough to appreciate what you’ve done here?
Michelle Wilson: I dunno the answer to that question. I’m not sure if she’d give me the honest answer. That might be something you’d need to ask her.
Jonathan Hawkins: Well, pretty soon she’s just gonna disagree with everything you say and say it’s the worst book ever, but.
Michelle Wilson: Indeed. Well, this is gonna be, this is gonna be part of a series. So the next book is gonna be So you can do, so you can grow up and do big things, and it’s gonna be a book on adulting that’s gonna have a video portion with interviews with my heroes that know how to do the ordinary things. And then the next one’s gonna be so you can take care of me when I get old, and it’s gonna have all of the tips and tricks for elder taking care of elder folks who need that extra level of help and maybe some of, a lot of the stories that I’ve run into and the ways that I think it could be done better than the ways I’d like it done for me.
So there’s two more books in the Hopper that are gonna get started this year. The next one has to get started this year. ’cause the trademark people want or the copy copyright, people want it, but, you know, [00:45:00] my goal was to create it. It’s kind of like, when you take a kid to a restaurant and all they eat is cheese dip and chips, but you feel like as a parent you’re required by some parental law to order them something with protein like chicken fingers or hamburger.
And half the time they don’t eat it. But you feel like you’ve done your job by like actually putting it in front of them and they had the option to eat. I’m not gonna force her to read it ’cause I don’t want to do that. But I hope she does at some
Jonathan Hawkins: She will. She will. So,
Michelle Wilson: and I’ll leave that to her.
Jonathan Hawkins: so you wrote this you know, for a very personal reason to give to your daughter. But I’m curious what the reception has been out in the world. You know, what, what do you do with the book and how do you promote it? Or do you, and, you know, what, what’s reception been?
Michelle Wilson: there’s a different responses, right? Like there’s a scale of responses and here’s the thing. One of my favorite. Poems is the Ralph Waldo Emerson poem on success in life. And that sometimes your success is just having a garden or raising a child or doing something good in the community. [00:46:00] I see people every day and I’ll give you an example.
There was a gentleman, I’m not gonna share his name, he what he played for a symphony orchestra, and he felt like his life wasn’t very valuable because he didn’t really do enough to make the world a better place. And I really wanted to, I really wanted, and I might still do this, talk to his wife and find out who he knew at different levels of his life and get them to write letters about his impact on them.
Every person’s life is valuable and there’s another book people can get if they wanna know a little bit about how this could work. It’s called Humans of New York. There was an amateur photographer who would go around and just take pictures of people and ask them if there was one nugget of wisdom you could share with humanity, what would it be?
And some people shared a little bit, some people shared a lot, and it’s all kinds of diverse people. Like if you look at that book, they’re from all over the place. They don’t all look the same. Right. And Forsyth County, if you know this area, has been accused of looking the same during certain periods [00:47:00] of its history.
And I believe that a lot of my clients sometimes don’t recognize their value. So part of the reason I did this was to encourage people to understand that they are valued. And even if they don’t have a lot of money, that value, if they don’t write it down and give it to the other humans that come after them, that our world is gonna be less valuable because of it.
We all become better as humans because of all of the rich experiences we all have pulled together and shaken down, right? And then applied to other people’s lives. And I don’t want anyone to think they’re not valued.
Jonathan Hawkins: You know, it’s interesting. I’ve discussed this with people before. I may have done posts on LinkedIn, on it or whatever, but there have been times in my life, you know, where someone, you know, someone says to me, you know, 10 years ago we had this conversation and I’ve never forgotten it, blah, blah, blah.
And I, I don’t even remember it. But to them it made a really [00:48:00] big impact. And then
I have been in that same situation too, where I’ve had, you know, a mentor or someone tell me something or say something, whatever it is, and it, it probably was a throwaway to them. They don’t remember it at all
Michelle Wilson: it impacted you for life.
Jonathan Hawkins: life.
And, and some of those I go back to and it’s like you can draw, you know, inspiration, strength,
whatever, motivation from them. You go back to that.
It’s those little moments. So yeah,
Michelle Wilson: Yeah, you never know the impact you’re gonna have. And there’s a story in the introduction about my paternal grandmother. My dad’s, my dad’s mom. She was like my person I could talk to. And she died of ovarian cancer when I was 18. Actually, my graduation from high school was her last public event.
And I grew up Wesleyan Methodist, which is kind of conservative. It’s a mixture of Methodist and pilgrim holiness. So you were not allowed to wear pants to church. And she never wore makeup or had earrings or painted her nails of color. She would only paint ’em clear, right? So, and people would usually wear their hair in a bun and sleeves [00:49:00] below the elbow.
And like her neighbor didn’t discover pants until after her spouse died, made gardening a lot easier, right? So we had a healing service for her at church, you know, where people would lay hands on her and pray. And if you believe in God and miracles, like you ask God for something and he grants your prayer, answers your prayer, you want the answer to be yes, physical healing, right?
That wasn’t the answer for her. And she went through this spiritual struggle for a little while in her journal. She just has a couple notes about what me and my sister are doing. Like one of us is playing softball, one of us is doing this project in class. Nothing about her spiritual struggle. And I think for a lot of us, especially look at Facebook, we all like to talk about just the happy stuff and the successful things, but we learn the most from our mistakes and our struggles.
How are we supposed to help other people learn if we aren’t willing to share that? And I really kind of wish, I wish she had written down what her thoughts were, even if she felt like she wasn’t supposed to as a good Christian. Have doubts like that, right? And [00:50:00] have shared that with me and, and maybe one day when I’m in heaven, I’ll ask her, what was that like for you?
Because I don’t have the benefit of her message to me. And I, I can’t go back now and ask her. Right. And how many times do we lose somebody in our family and we go back and look at old photos and we’re like, who is that and who’s that? And why are they in this photo? And what happened here? How many of those stories are we not getting passed down and we’re losing?
Jonathan Hawkins: Yeah. Heavy stuff.
Michelle Wilson: yeah. Yeah. I know. I’m,
Jonathan Hawkins: I love it though. I love it. Well, I, I’m gonna, we’re gonna lighten it up a little bit. I’m gonna, I’m gonna
change topics that, really good stuff. So, for anybody out there, you know, I recommend go find this book, go grab it. You know, it’s got me thinking, do I need to, you know, write down some stuff for my kids?
And the answer’s probably
yes, but,
Michelle Wilson: and Jonathan, if people are stuck at how to start with that, I do a mother’s message workshop and I just did one on Tuesday and we did a Valentine’s Mad Lib. I. Where all you had to do was fill in the blanks and I give you a draft letter that you used to fill in the blanks. [00:51:00] It made it a lot easier, I think, because it is heavy stuff and people don’t remember, Hey, what if you were, had, you had to talk about your values, right?
Where would you start if you’ve been driving the kids to soccer, soccer practice five days a week? Maybe you haven’t even thought about that in like two years. So we do a workshop with it, and then we also I can do workshops for small groups too, like if you wanted to create your own. So I don’t want people to feel like they have to write a book.
Right. There’s also StoryWorth and a bunch of other type of programs and softwares out there people can use. And honestly, the response I’ve gotten is I found out how many people are actually doing this. Some people write a letter or a card to their kids every year on their birthday. So there’s different ways that people do it.
It’s pretty
Jonathan Hawkins: Awesome. Well, maybe now’s a good time, so if anybody wants to
get in touch with you, maybe to get that sheet,
Michelle Wilson: Yeah.
Jonathan Hawkins: a good way to find you?
Michelle Wilson: Oh sure. So a good way to find me is you can find us at wilson-legal.com. So it’s got a hyphen in the middle. Our phone number is (770) 205-7861 is the main number. The website will [00:52:00] have a different number ’cause we use CallRail to track who comes to the website. And then you can also get ahold of us through email and my email or the best email to reach us at.
I’m not gonna give you mine, but is info at. And I have my team watching that email info@wilsonlegal.com. You can email info and my assistant RAA would probably reach out and give you a call and then see what time works for you. And I Thursday nights I don’t, I’m not with my daughter, so she’s at her dad’s house.
So Thursday and Friday is always open. On the other nights she can come with me. If she’s with me, usually she’s my van of white and she hands out the bingo prize if we do bingo or like fun games and that kind of thing. So that’s how it works.
Jonathan Hawkins: Cool. So, all right, well, let’s talk about you. You talked about, you know, your mistakes and struggles and all that. So let’s
talk about maybe some lessons you’ve learned over the years
Michelle Wilson: Oh gosh.
Jonathan Hawkins: firm. So the way I like to sort of frame this
is,
Michelle Wilson: learning. Yeah, because there’s
Jonathan Hawkins: is there, is there anything that, you wish you had done sooner?
Or is there anything maybe you wish you had not [00:53:00] done? And you’re like, maybe, maybe I shouldn’t have done that.
Michelle Wilson: well, there’s a lot of the not done list. So, the done sooner, I definitely had something come to mind right up front. And I would say hire a coach. Hire a coach. And you wanna hire a coach that has a structure, somebody that knows where they’re going, not just this is the next best thing we think you should do, but someone who has the ability to create a plan for you that you can work towards.
I wish I had hired a coach sooner. If I had not waited until 2018, we would’ve been 10 years further down the road of progress and passed my subconscious. You know, boundaries. The other thing I’ve learned is that, you know, personal progress, professional progress and success only comes after personal growth.
So you have to be mentally ready to handle a company that’s a different size or number of people, but which things I hadn’t done. I wish I hadn’t signed a contract for printer leases with a really nice guy at my rotary who didn’t really do the printer leases part of the company and didn’t know that they were gonna lease me machines that were gonna be completely [00:54:00] stopped being produced three months after I signed a five year lease.
Really wish I hadn’t done that. That was five years of tech support. Hell,
Jonathan Hawkins: long term leases, man, you gotta watch out for those in all forms. Yes. Yes. The short
Michelle Wilson: I wish I had.
Jonathan Hawkins: are the way to go if you can get ’em.
Michelle Wilson: Right. Yeah. Well, here’s the thing. I did this last time. I still did a five year lease, but I chose a company that my IT company liked to work with. And because we use, we’re all online now. I have my, IT company knows how to work with them and we could set up like the SharePoint connections and all that, so that helped.
Jonathan Hawkins: Okay, so I wanna shift again. So, you know, you have
the, you have this big mission to serve 10,000 folks. So you gotta go find ’em. You gotta go get ’em. So what is your approach to marketing? How do you get your clients? How are you gonna get these 10,000 or 9,500?
Michelle Wilson: don’t have, I wish I had really good answers for this right now, Jonathan, because I feel like I’m starting again from the very beginning this year [00:55:00] because Google, LSA stopped working for us. We had a 0.6 ROI from November, December, January. My newspaper ad stopped working for us last year. We had, so we’re looking for seven to 10 times ROI, which is return on investment for what we invest, right?
So my newspaper ad I’ve been doing for three years just stopped working. The magazine ads really never gave anything to us. In-person group presentations have always been a great way for me to. Meet people. But when I was last year, I went on vacation to Yellowstone National Park in July, then got covid, then couldn’t have my surgery so it got postponed, but I couldn’t also do presentations ’cause I couldn’t be around other people that could infect me.
So for six months last year, I couldn’t do the in-person grassroots kind of marketing that I’ve done before. Originally I would say it was client referrals and it was professional referrals. 85% of people were, of clients were sending us business before 2018. And it was so many that I actually did a client appreciation [00:56:00] events when my daughter was two to give my clients a chance to meet her.
’cause so many people had close relationships with me that they were kind of following my progress with a pregnancy and asking for pictures and all that. As you get bigger, those client referrals and professional referrals aren’t enough to feed the machine, right? And so you’ve gotta start doing other things.
And I feel like I have bounced between 3, 4, 5 marketing vendors that I’ve actually hired, and probably 15 that I’ve interviewed, vetted, and not hired in the last year and a half. And it’s been a matter of evaluating, asking as many questions as you can, putting in place as many tracking and, and key performance indicators as you can, looking for the results, not getting the results, trying to rehabilitate, not succeeding, finding a new vendor, right?
It’s that same cycle. And now we’ve been in a cash crunch, which means we’ve been negative for so many months that I don’t have the cash to actually do our direct mail. Idea for March. So we are just going back to referral sources and what I’ve done [00:57:00] is I’ve started using my networking events as a reason to reconnect with a lot of people.
So I’m on the board of Keystone Village, which is building the very first independent living community for disabled adults in Forsyth County. And they just got the gift of property in December and now we’re raising money to raise the buildings. And so when I’m asking people to sponsor, or I bought 10 tickets to this event, it’s on February 28th, and I wanna invite 10 women who are growing their business and really excited about growth and you know, working together with other people and creating relationships so that we can do that and have fun at the same time, helping a good charity.
And so I’m just going back to the phones and I’m writing endorsement letters. I’m sending out copies of my book with little cards. I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but. This is a good little nugget for your listeners. If you get a card that’s the shape of an envelope, a number 13 envelope, and you put your business card at the bottom, you can write a thank you note at the top, and all of your information in your photo are easy to see.
And [00:58:00] so the person you’re writing to remembers who you are and now feels obligated to either respond or help you with a referral, maybe top of mind for the next person they see that needs your services.
Jonathan Hawkins: Nice. I like it. So, so lemme ask real quick. So how do you deliver your service or charge your clients? I know in the
estate planning space, there are different business models. I’m curious, do you have a, is it a one and done or do you have some sort of like renewal update plan or subscription?
Type component.
Michelle Wilson: I have been looking at and working on drafts of a maintenance plan for probably the last five years. I have never published one because I’ve never been happy with it, and I think this year I finally discovered why. Which is gonna be good. The reason I don’t like maintenance plans is that people don’t like being incrementally charged for updates and they don’t feel like a lot of updates are necessary.
What I find that my clients are looking for in part is a sense of community. And so I wanna give them opportunities to be together and to get educational components and then to have some access to [00:59:00] the team and the firm as well. And we’ll probably have different levels, right? But when you get a new bank account, you need our funding concierge to reach out to you and make sure that you got your trust added to that, right?
Our clients wanna know how their power of attorney agent is supposed to do their job and usually their agents wanna know that too. Hey, I’ve just been appointed now what the hell do I do? Right? Same for trustees and especially trustees of special needs trust, they really are looking for a lot more direction.
’cause you could really screw things up with Social Security if you do things wrong, or Department of Community Health. So. I think that is what I’d like to put together this year and have that offered and then test it. As far as fees go, we are a flat fee firm and you pay upfront or you pay a two or three pay, and we don’t start work until the final payment is in.
And I’ll tell you why. I have tried a lot of different things, Jonathan. I always regret going away from the flat fee upfront before work has started because just like in other cases, like if you do family law, you can’t take a divorce [01:00:00] back if the client hasn’t paid you, oh, I’m sorry you haven’t paid me, gimme back that order.
Right? You can’t do that. and it’s the same with estate planning, right? You really can’t do that. And then people use that payment plan to manipul, manipulate you. So they’ll delay their signing meetings so they don’t have to bring you the second payment.
And I’ve had that happen. And that messes with your cashflow. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a restaurant and you don’t know what you want to eat, so you make them come back like two or three times and then you finally know, and now you’re out of their cadence. And now they take forever to get back to you because they have these other tables that came in while you were waiting to figure out and decide what you wanted.
Law firms work the same way In order to be profitable, my staff wanna be paid every payroll period, and I need clients every month and estate planning. It’s this many clients every month. And every first of the month you’re starting over again. Right. And I need, I have a, a long onboarding process. So people will call, they’ll schedule and they’ll come in in the first month.
The second month we’ll have, so we have a process. Two weeks when you [01:01:00] come in, we’re gonna schedule your design meeting. Your review meeting two weeks after that, you’re signing meeting a week after that because I want your documents protecting you. Everything we do is amendable. You don’t have to read every paragraph before you sign.
You’re not gonna do that when you buy your house. Why are you gonna do that here? And then I give you two weeks to delivering funding. And then at delivering funding, you have two months after that meeting to review your documents and ask me any questions. Also decide a half a day to an to read you the trust and explain the IRS sections to you.
I’m fine with that, but I don’t want that to stall you out on getting your documents done. And from the delivery and funding meeting, you’re working on funding. So that’s our process. We can get you in and out in six weeks. We can shorten that if we need to. ’cause I now have a drafting assistant in the Philippines, so I have a cobbler in the L situation.
You can give me info today. I can have you a plan ready to sign tomorrow morning at nine. Well, not tomorrow ’cause it’s the weekend, but you know what I mean. And I’m not staying up at night for an hour and a half drafting it.
Jonathan Hawkins: [01:02:00] Well, it’s very clear listening to you, that you’re very business oriented. You, you’ve, you’ve figured this out. So I don’t know if you already had that in you or if it was part of the coaching or maybe both. But yeah, it’s, it’s impressive to listen to. So, we’ve been going a
while and I know you have somewhere to go here soon.
So, just a little wrap up. But you mentioned earlier, you mentioned your vision for your firm, so we know what that is. But you mentioned you had other things that you were interested, interested in. So if you weren’t practicing law what would you be doing?
Michelle Wilson: well, I’ve already started working on that, which is probably no surprise to you. I would like to be a public speaker and a personal and business coach. So one of the things I’ve done is I’ve gone through in. 20, 23, 24. I started going through the IPEC curriculum. IPEC. It’s a coaching curriculum that’s been approved by the ICF, the, I think it’s the International Coalition Coach, foundation Coaching Foundation.
When you finish their course, you have all your volunteer hours done and you can start getting paid to be a coach. I [01:03:00] did it for two reasons. One, I wanted personal growth for myself, and two, I knew I wanted to be a coach, but I wanted to also put together what I was hearing through how to manage all the time.
’cause they’ve used the same ideas. And so it really brought things together. But here’s the third unexpected benefit is it’s really helped me in sales because I, I got a lot more comfortable asking open-ended questions. ’cause you know, we go through law school, that’s a no-no, you, which you only ask, answer, ask questions, you know the answer to.
so I did that the idea is the firm will run on its own. I’d like to set up you know, write two more books, do some speaking. And this is kind of weird, but I feel like there’s an international women’s conference somewhere in another country that has women that need to hear this message. And I’d like to work on becoming a better speaker, like having like a more concise order of things so that I can help women in another country.
So I need to get training as a public speaker and I need to look for opportunities to do public speaking and then be [01:04:00] ready when that opportunity appears. Because what I’ve learned is if you’re not ready, the opportunity shows up and you can’t say yes. Right? And if you read what book was it where opportunity usually shows up in overalls looking like hard work.
So if you keep going in the direction where you think you’re supposed to be going, then I. When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. And you just have to have faith that the right people are gonna come into your circle. Like I have faith that you and I ran into each other when we did for a reason.
Right. There had to be something,
Jonathan Hawkins: Well, we hit it off. We hit it off. Yes. Yeah. It felt very natural. It felt very natural.
Yeah. Well, this has been fun.
You know, again, I like what you’re doing and I, you know, I think you’ll be very successful on that speaking, coaching pursuit. So definitely do
it. And if anybody wants anybody listening says, Hey, why don’t you come speak to us, reach out,
get,
Michelle Wilson: I would love to.
Jonathan Hawkins: know, maybe give your info email again so they can have it.
Michelle Wilson: Sure. Yeah. So it’s wilson-legal.com. [01:05:00] You can ask us for a time or a chance to talk about setting something up by emailing info@wilsonlegal.com, and the number is 7 7 0 2 0 5 7 8 6 1. And I will fly anywhere to talk about mother’s message in the book. That doesn’t, it’s not limited, like my wall license to the state of Georgia.
So we can actually offer that kind of workshop to estate planning firms that are anywhere, which is pretty exciting.
Jonathan Hawkins: Awesome.
Michelle Wilson: Or groups. Yeah.
Jonathan Hawkins: Well, Michelle, this, this has been
really fun. Again, I
love your book. I am gonna finish it and uh, maybe I’ll write one too, so
Michelle Wilson: well, I am here if you have any questions or get stuck or just want somebody to sit at that table at Wild Wings with you so you don’t look like the lonely nerd with a laptop. Happy to be a co-op nerd with you if you’d like one.
Jonathan Hawkins: Awesome. Well cool. Well enjoy the weekend and we’ll be in touch for sure. I appreciate you coming
Michelle Wilson: Thanks so much. I appreciate you having me.
Thanks for listening to this episode of the founding partner podcast. Be sure to subscribe on Apple podcasts, [01:06:00] Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts to stay up to date on the latest episodes. You can also connect with Jonathan on LinkedIn and check out the show notes. With links to resources mentioned throughout our discussion by visiting www.
lawfirmgc. com. We’ll see you next time for more origin stories and insights from successful law firm founders.
