Women face unique challenges in the workplace, particularly in male-dominated industries like law. For female law firm owners, these challenges can inadvertently impact their efforts to efficiently scale their business, leaving highly capable attorneys to grow their firms at a slower pace than their male counterparts.
In this episode of “Spill the Ink,” host Michelle Calcote King invites Davina Frederick to weigh in on the conversation and share how she’s helped lawyers grow their firms. Davina is the owner of Wealthy Woman Lawyer, a strategic growth planning and coaching company that helps women law firm owners turn their businesses into million-dollar enterprises. Davina shares personal anecdotes and insights into overcoming these challenges and empowering female law firm owners to achieve accelerated growth.
Here's a glimpse of what you'll learn
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Who is Davina Frederick and what is Wealthy Woman Lawyer
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The unique challenges faced by women-led law firms
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How to scale your solo law firm in a million-dollar enterprise
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Shifting your business mindset to that of a CEO-level thinker
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Key components of marketing for scale
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Why a systems-driven business model is ideal for law firms
About our featured guest
Davina Frederick is a Florida-licensed attorney, law firm growth strategist, and business coach for women law firm owners. She is the founder and CEO of Wealthy Woman Lawyer®, a strategic growth planning and coaching company that helps women law firm owners scale their law firm businesses to and through $1 million. She’s also the founder of the Wealthy Woman Lawyer® League, a community and program designed to support women law firm owners who want to scale from solo to CEO of a thriving law firm business.
Davina is the host of the Wealthy Woman Lawyer® podcast, a top podcast for women in law in the U.S., and a two-time author of books on law firm management and marketing.
Resources mentioned in this episode
Sponsor for this episode
This episode is brought to you by Reputation Ink.
Founded by Michelle Calcote King, Reputation Ink is a public relations and content marketing agency that serves professional services firms of all shapes and sizes across the United States, including corporate law firms and architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) firms.
Reputation Ink understands how sophisticated corporate buyers find and select professional services firms. For more than a decade, they have helped firms grow through thought leadership-fueled strategies, including public relations, content marketing, video marketing, social media, podcasting, marketing strategy services and more.
To learn more, visit www.rep-ink.com or email them at info@rep-ink.com today.
Transcript
[00:00:00] Davina Frederick: It's really tempting. What got us here as high-achieving women was doing everything ourselves. We worked our butts off to get here, we got those multiple degrees, we hung out the shingles, we've done all the work for clients, but really, the scale step is learning to leverage those resources and shifting your role from being the doer to being the one who is managing and leading.
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[00:00:26]: Welcome to “Spill the Ink,” a podcast by Reputation Ink, where we feature experts in growth and brand visibility for law firms and architecture, engineering and construction firms. Now, let's get started with the show.
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[00:00:43] Michelle Calcote King: Hey, everyone. I'm Michelle Calcote King. I'm your host, and I'm also the Principal and President of Reputation Ink. We're a public relations and content marketing agency for law firms and other professional services firms. To learn more, go to rep-ink.com.
Today we're going to talk about scaling a law firm. Scaling a law firm is essential for long-term success and growth, but it can be a complex and challenging process.From developing and executing a strategic growth plan to finding the right balance between expanding firm services and maintaining the quality of existing offerings, firm owners and stakeholders must navigate a range of obstacles to scale effectively.
We're especially honored today, to discuss this topic, we have Davina Frederick. She's the founder of Wealthy Woman Lawyer, a Florida licensed attorney, and a seasoned law firm growth strategist and coach. Davina is also a published author and she's a podcasting pro. She's the host of the “Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast.”Through that, she's helped many law firm owners successfully scale their business. Thanks for joining me.
[00:01:51] Davina: Thank you. Thanks for having me, Michelle. I'm so excited to be here.
[00:01:54] Michelle: Yes, I'm excited to talk about this. Tell me a little bit more about Wealthy Woman Lawyer and how your career path led you to this place.
[00:02:04] Davina: Oh, well. I'll give you the abbreviated version of my career path. I started out— I have a degree in journalism and I thought I was going to be a foreign correspondent traveling the world, which is hilarious for those who know me well because they know I get motion sick if I walk too fast.
[00:02:18] Michelle: That's funny.
[00:02:19] Davina: Yes. That would not have been a great career for me. I wound up, as one does, getting a job, and the job turned out to be in marketing. For 15 years, I worked in professional services marketing first as a technical writer, and then as a copywriter helping with proposals and things like that that engineering firms do. Then I went to work for the largest law firm in Central Florida. I was their PR manager, and did that for several years, then found myself in an agency.
Then I had an opportunity to go to law school, and I took it because I felt like my marketing career had evolved with a path that I didn't set out intentionally to take, but I had evolved because the opportunities were there for me. I went to law school, became an attorney with the intention of starting my own law firm, which I did right out of law school in 2007. Which, if you remember, is just before 2008, and we all know what happened in 2008.
[00:03:24] Michelle: Yes, wow.
[00:03:24] Davina: Fortunately, for me, I was able to leverage an opportunity and that wound up being a boom for my law firm. We really grew very rapidly. We grew successfully. I brought in a partner. We hired people. We were in this for a while. Then finally, I had an epiphany that this wasn't working out the way that I hoped. While we were successful financially, it was not what I imagined it would be in terms of the stress on my body. I gained 30 pounds. All I wanted to do was go home at night and drink wine and eat. It just wasn't what I thought it was when I set out to do this.
I took a step back for a couple of years. My husband and I owned a gym, and so we just ran the gym for a while. Then I started the second law firm, which was virtual, in 2011. It was virtual before virtual was a thing. I got a lot of pushback from that at the time from other attorneys saying to me, "Well, your clients aren't going to like that," and they did. I began a coaching business in 2013. We are celebrating 10 years this year of this coaching business.
[00:04:46] Michelle: Congratulations.
[00:04:47] Davina: Thank you. I started out going back to my background and all of my experience, and working with professional service businesses and helping them. First, I started out helping them in marketing in a real tangible way, and then I shifted. I realized they were doing things and they didn't know why they were doing it. So they really needed to step back and do some strategy. Really, it evolved into me taking a more strategic position, which, as my experience, not only in marketing, but as an attorney, a business attorney in particular, and real estate attorney, I was able to bring those strategic skills to bear for my clients.
Over time, I just niched down my brand. I found that the people who were the best fit for me were law firm owners who saw what I did, and they wanted to do something similar. Then over time, it just became really niched down to women law firm owners, and hence, Wealthy Woman Lawyer was born. It is the same company. It just was rebranded. We rebranded a few years ago to speak specifically to women law firm owners because I found that the needs of women law firm owners are a little different than men law firm owners.
Their approach to business is a little bit different, and the kind of support they need is a little bit different. That's how Wealthy Woman Lawyer evolved. The podcast is a service that I provide, but Wealthy Woman Lawyer is a law firm growth strategy business and business coaching service. We help our women law firm owners scale their law firm business from mid-six figures, low-six figures into and above $1 million dollars in annual gross revenue.
[00:06:33] Michelle: Love it. What a great background. You're in such a similar, but complimentary area to us. This is exciting to talk to you.
Let's talk about some of those differences. That was going to be my next question is, why the focus on women, and what are those unique challenges that women face?
[00:06:52] Davina: If you've heard other podcasts then you may have heard me say this before, but the realization really hit me when I was back when I was holding in-person events, which was pre-pandemic. I realized that the conversation was different when it was just women in the room, as opposed to when it was men and women. Women would be more free to talk about things that they probably would not talk about if we had men and women both in the room, because there may not be an understanding of the lived experience of the women that were in the room.
That was where that came from. Also, my career has— I live in the deep south, and there's a really strong good old boy network here that still exists to this day. The businesses that I worked for in the '90s when my marketing career was evolving, were all male-dominated professional service businesses. I didn't see a lot of women-owned businesses at that same level. It became me seeking what I wanted to see more of, and that's why I started my own law firm, and that's why I encourage other women to start their own law firms.
I say if two bros can graduate from law school and say, "Hey, let's start a law firm and grow it to a multi-million dollar law firm business, why aren't women doing that?" I think a lot of times, women aren't doing that because they haven't been given permission to dream about it, first of all. They have a lot of life constraints that men don't have. Women, by and large, still do the majority of the mental work at home, and a lot of times the physical work. Taking care of the house, taking care of the kids, even if they have a big old career, right?
We need to find ways to give ourselves permission to say, "It's okay for me not to try to do everything myself," but to get support, like men do.
[00:08:54] Michelle: Yes.
[00:08:55] Davina: I'll just give you a quick example of that. When I set up my own law firm, I was working just by myself. It was still new enough, I hadn't hired people. I was getting volunteered—because I joined a lot of organizations, the whole marketing thing. I was getting volunteered to take on a lot of leadership positions because they're like, "Oh, fresh meat, yay."
[00:09:20] Michelle: Right.
[00:09:20] Davina: I would take on this leadership in the inner court and in the association for women. I was doing all of these things, plus I was a baby lawyer, trying to figure out how to be a lawyer. I was running a law practice, and I didn't have any help. One of my mentors pointed out to me, she said, "You know, so-and-so, who happened to be the president of the inner court at the time—a man—has a secretary and she's the one who does all this stuff for him." And it was just a light bulb moment for me. I've seen this pattern play out over and over again.
I have clients who have built million dollar multimillion-dollar law firm businesses. They may hire eventually, they may hire paralegals, they may hire legal admins for the firm. They do eventually have to hire lawyers. Once they start working with me they're hiring lawyers. But they do not have executive assistants for themselves. They never do. A lot of them are mothers with teenagers or young kids at home, and they're running all of that business, and they're running this successful law firm business, and they do it without an assistant just for themselves.
These are some of the mindset issues. It doesn't occur to women to do that, and then, of course, there's the whole dynamic between hiring a woman, being a boss to another woman. That still believe it or not is an issue even in 2023, that a man may say something to his assistant and it won't be taken any kind of way, but a woman may say something to her assistant and it's like, "You think you're better than me?" Those dynamics still exist even though we don't talk about them, but we definitely are living them because I have conversations with women law firm owners all the time who have these experiences.
I'm encouraged as I'm seeing younger women come in and and and the new generation come in, and how their mindset is a little different from Gen Z or even older millennials, to see some of these things evolving and resolving themselves between men and women. The dynamic between men and women, and between women and women there's a lot more collaborative attitude. The reality is in business, these things still exist. Then of course that doesn't even get into things like equal pay, sexual harassment and all of these things.
As you become the owner of a law firm and a leader, what I'm doing is I'm encouraging women to instead of trying to climb the corporate ladder inside of a law firm that already has an existing model that's built on traditional male roles. Men who could work 100 hours a week because they got a wife at home. Basically, it's what the legal industry was built on. Women through my generation have worked up the ladder in those, and they're oftentimes finding themselves in their 50s walking away from it all.
The ABA actually wrote a report of that title, Women Walking Out the Door because those models do not serve women and the lives, and the roles that they play and want to play.
[00:12:40] Michelle: All of that resonates so much, and obviously we work with law firms so we see it a lot, but even in a marketing and PR setting, we have those same conversations. We've often will have a client that's not responding well, and there'll be an internal, "Well, maybe we should have a male on the team e-mail him." Those things happen. They still happen, and we openly discuss it or the way women communicate. It's often very different because we are dealing a lot of times with what we specialize in male-dominated industries, so fascinating stuff.
What do you see law firms in particular, what are their challenges with scaling? What are those unique challenges that law firms have when looking to scale?
[00:13:32] Davina: So to be clear about the differences, my clients are usually solos. They start out as solos and they're wanting to become a million-dollar law firm business where they don't have to work in the business all day, every day. If they leave the business to go on vacation or heaven forbid gets sick, that business can still operate without them. When clients come to me, they're in that solo, or they may have a partner they may have a few staff people, but they really haven't created a business that is separate from themselves, in a way that frees them up and also generates wealth for them.
This is a foundational piece of building wealth and having a wealth-generating business that can operate without your daily input. Or without you at all. When we're talking about scaling at this level that's what we're talking about. We're talking about a lot of— We teach a framework. There are a lot of pieces and parts to that. Overarching that though, is the shifting of the mindset.
It's really getting solopreneurs whether they're lawyers or somebody else, this will apply in whatever business getting them to think, to shift their thinking to be thinking like a CEO of a business.
What I see is a lot of people who say, "Well, my business is my baby," and so it's like this. "My business is my baby." I say, "No, you're separate from your business. You're over here and you are a steward of that business. It is your job to make that business, if you've taken this on, to be profitable and sustainable for all the people who rely on it." That may be shareholders, that maybe your staff, your team, your employees who are taking care of their families based on what you're paying them.It may be your clients who've made commitments to use your services, and so you have to keep your business profitable and sustainable to continue to serve clients at the level that they deserve to be served.
It is really about shifting your mind around me doing the doing to me as a CEO-level thinker, and applying those strategic skills I learned as a lawyer, not only for my clients but applying them to my business. That is really the basis for scaling, and I think that as you get to million, multiple million, and beyond, you again are dealing with shifts in your thinking.
There's more focus on how do I become an inspiring leader? Those types of things. How do I pass off management? Scaling is different, as you go up. You have different needs at different levels. Where I work is really in that part of working with women and saying, “Okay, you can do this thing. You can go and create that business that feeds your family for generations to come maybe. Also, other people you can be a job creator. And you can be the change you want to see in the world. You can come in and take your perspective and your ideas and create a business…”
I have a client who is a multimillion-dollar earner. We started working together, she was in high six figures, and she was worried about working with a coach because she said, "I have a certain model that I want to do, and I'm doing, and I don't want a coach to come in and tell me I have to do a different model." Her model is all distributed. Everyone, all of her workers including her lawyers all work from home, they do not have an office, and she also doesn't require the billable hour that your typical big law offer firm requires.
She's able to make millions of dollars, pay all of her attorneys well, pay all of her staff well, and also provide them the opportunity to work from home. They're still a team. She still works on that, they're locally remote, so they're not remote all over the world. They're locally remote. So they could still attend team-building exercise and stuff like that, but she's able to develop this culture for them and most of them are mothers or want to be mothers. They're looking for that way of being able to structure their day in a way that supports that.They are in a consumer-based law practice so litigation. So they must litigate. It's interesting she's been able to do that, so that's an example of how you might see women changing.
[00:18:07] Michelle: I love it. As an owner of a remote agency and we've got people spread all over, it is a huge benefit to honestly both mothers and fathers who want to have that better life balance. It's not for everybody but for the right people it's an invaluable thing, and it's fun to be able to offer that and to enable that.
[00:18:32] Davina: In her case the billable hour requirement is much lower than what Big Law usually requires. That I see a lot with women law farm owners saying, "We want to make money but we don't want to make money by breaking the backs of our employees." The philosophy is different. It goes against that traditional law firm model. If you got to work 2,000, 2,500 hours a year. Well, and I'm seeing clients saying no we want to get down, less than 1,500, 1,200, 1,500 a year.
I'll have more employees, we’ll still make money, but I am not going to do it by breaking people, and it's going to help me keep people around longer, and I'm going to be able to have women in the workplace. Quite frankly, women if they are mothers still have that experience even if they have—
I have another client who's very clearly the breadwinner. She's got three children, her husband is really the focus on taking care of the kids because she's working and she's just driven to work. She loves it. She's always got new business ventures and things, a very successful multimillion-dollar law firm. That's a different, they have a different dynamic in their relationships but this serves them both in the same way, looking at what could be different.
[00:19:55] Michelle: Since you have the marketing background, tell me about some of the key components of marketing for scale. How are you helping firms, and what are some of the—? I guess, tell me about your model within the marketing realm for scaling and growth.
[00:20:15] Davina: As a strategist— I wrote a book, this one over here. It's TheWealthy Woman Lawyer's Guide to Marketing in the Virtual Age.
[00:20:23] Michelle: Oh, love it.
[00:20:24] Davina: The reason I wrote the book was because just the story I told earlier, when I started working with professional service businesses. I found that they didn't have strategies. They didn't understand why they were implementing. They were reaching out to me to help implement tactics, but they didn't understand why they were implementing those tactics. I said, "You got to back it up. Let's look at your overall strategy. Is this the right tactic for you to be doing?"
I wrote my first book as a gift to small law firm owners because we have a lot of marketers coming at us from all different—and they're very different. What they do is very different, but they call themselves marketers. You may have people coming who are selling ads calling themselves a marketer. You have people who do SEO, they're marketers. You're getting all these different marketers. For lawyers, it's confusing. How is this different? What is this? Because if it's not our area of expertise, then we're just confused, and people are convincing. "You should do this, you should do that, you should do that."
I wrote this to help lawyers develop a strategy, help them think through what is a strategy. So with marketing, strategy is always starting with the client. Who's the client we want to serve? I'm always encouraging my clients to not just look at their current clients, but really think about when they get that call, they hang up the phone, and this client has hired them, they're doing their happy dance because they are just so excited to work. I said, “That's the person who's your ideal client, and you need to create a client avatar around that so that we can then craft messaging to attract more of those types of clients and to repel all others.”
It really starts with that, and then looking at your core values, and your differentiators, and what it is that sets you apart from other lawyers who offer similar services. We're looking for that right fit. We're looking for that match. The platform itself, whether it's traditional methods like public speaking in person on a stage, or it's writing an academic article, or it's more modern methods of social media, whichever channel you choose, that platform is secondary to the strategy.
We first have to look at a strategy, and then in the book, I give some modern-day platforms, not all social media. I give some different platforms that I recommend, but I give key considerations like you need to look at this and see is this a good fit for me? Is it a good fit for my law firm? Is it a good fit for my personality? Is it a good fit for where we are in our growth right now? As my clients get bigger and bigger, we're scaling, we're adding team, maybe they used to love being on social media, and doing their videos, and putting them out there, but now who's got the time for that?
I might recommend then outsourcing that, or I might recommend doing some advertising. Once we figure out where their clients hang out— Where do your ideal clients hang out? That's where we need to be. Then we need to get help to execute on that. It's not a DIY thing because even if you are an expert in marketing— a lot of people would call me an expert in marketing, a 30-year career—
[00:23:50] Michelle: Absolutely.
[00:23:52] Davina: — but I don't do all my own marketing. I'm there for the strategy—
[00:23:58] Michelle: Same. Hire a marketing firm, I outsource something.
[00:23:59] Davina: —but I hire people to help me execute because who's got that kind of time? Nobody.
[00:24:05] Michelle: Yes, absolutely.
[00:24:06] Davina: Not if they're successful.
[00:24:07] Michelle: Yes. Well, and marketing itself is becoming more— There's a need for niching down in certain disciplines because of the complexity of the world, and the internet, and how fast things. There is a need for those specialists to help you, but absolutely, you have to start from a place of strategy.
One thing I've noticed is there's a real rise in the fractional CMO model, which I think can be highly valuable for someone to come in and level set before they're approached by all these niche specialist agencies who might niche down by service area, so absolutely.
Davina, I was looking at your website, and let's talk about your systems-driven business model. Talk me through why that's important, and how you help firms accomplish that.
[00:25:00] Davina: Let me give you the big picture. The systems book is there, The Wealthy Woman Lawyer's Guide to Building a Systems-Driven Business. The scale framework is you have to look at attracting better clients. That's your first thing. You got to make sure that you're attracting the clients that pay upfront, pay on time, don't fuss about paying you, so that you're getting that money coming in the door. Once you have the money coming in the door, then you want to take that money, and you want to invest it in leverage.
Leverage are things like working in the highest and best use of your time, delegating everything else, hiring a team of top talent people who can come in and support you in a way that doesn't cause you more agony than it does joy. Then setting up systems in your business. The reason I wrote this book around systems is, first of all, I think it's critical to scale, to set up systems, and to hire a team to help you drive those systems.
People often conflate systems and automation. Systems and automation are two different things.Systems are a mechanism or the way something works, being repeatable, and so you can do it over and over again, so there's some sort of process or documented process that we can follow to accomplish something. Automation may or may not be applied to that. Sometimes it's human manual labor that's applied to that. The systems is the thing that's going to allow you to get it out of your head and stop doing everything yourself because "I'm the only one who knows how to do it right."
Systems really are about you helping other people learn how to do things the way that you would like it or want it done. It's really tempting. What got us here as high-achieving women was doing everything ourselves. We worked our butts off to get here, we got those multiple degrees, we hung out the shingle, we've done all the work for clients, but really, the scale step is learning to leverage those resources and shifting your role from being the doer to being the one who is managing and leading.
You're managing until you get to a point where you can hire other managers, but you're managing in that first stage to $1 million, and you need systems to help manage because you need people to be able to do the work based on your systems. Then you're overseeing, and managing, and seeing where we need to tweak those systems. There are seven essential systems for running a law firm business, and a lot of people think to them—which I cover in the book—a lot of people think of systems as case management.
While there are great case management tools out there that can help with the fulfilling of the legal work, there are systems that occur before you ever get a client on board. There's marketing systems, an onboarding systems and it goes through all the way until the buyer leaves, and then there are internal systems that run any business.
[00:28:06] Michelle: This is great. Well, it's a fantastic niche you have. I look forward to continuing to follow you. I'm going to check out your books, and we'll include links to your books when we publish this podcast.
We've been talking to Davina Frederick of Wealthy Woman Lawyer. Davina, tell me what's the best place for people to go if they want to learn more.
[00:28:29] Davina: Well, if they're podcast listeners, add Wealthy Woman Lawyer podcast to your rotation. That's the first thing I would say. If you like podcasts, just add it in there to all your favorites. Check us out. Maybe we'll be your favorite, maybe not.
Then you can also visit our website at wealthywomanlawyer.com. I am pretty active on Instagram, I have a team that helps me there, and so we are at Wealthy Woman Lawyer on Instagram. Then I have a free Facebook group. If you're looking for Wealthy Woman Lawyer, just look for that. You'll find us. We're everywhere.
[00:29:02] Michelle: Awesome. Love it. Well, thanks so much.
[00:29:05] Davina: Thank you.
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[00:29:08]: Thanks for listening to “Spill the Ink,” a podcast by Reputation Ink. We'll see you again next time, and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.
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