Brett Trembly is the Founding Partner of Trembly Law Firm, a law firm based in South Florida specializing in business, franchise, employment, and trademark law, as well as litigation and general counsel. Brett’s decade-plus experience at the firm has contributed to its award-winning reputation. In addition to his legal practice, Brett is also the Co-founder and CEO of Get Staffed Up, a virtual staffing company helping lawyers delegate their way to freedom. The company has become the largest virtual staffing solution for lawyers in the US. On the community front, Brett is a former President of the Miami Kendall Bar Association and former Vice-Chair of the Florida Bar 11th Circuit Grievance Committee 11 “I.” He has earned multiple Super Lawyers and Super Lawyers Rising Star distinctions and is the author of 24 Months to Freedom, a book outlining the roadmap for law firm growth through strategic staffing.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• Brett Trembly shares Trembly Law’s specialties
• How Brett knew he wanted to be an attorney
• What were the early days like at Trembly Law?
• Why business owners hesitate to hire their first employee
• Brett shares what inspired Get Staffed Up
• The process of providing lawyers with virtual assistants
• The benefits of delegating tasks and conducting periodical delegation evaluations

In this episode…

Are you stuck in the hamster wheel of your law practice, constantly fighting fires instead of scaling up? The solution you’ve been waiting for is closer than you think. Brett Trembly, the creator of a unique staffing solution providing virtual assistants for law firms, is helping lawyers and business owners buy back time. As a practicing attorney, Brett understands the unique challenges and opportunities within the legal industry. He has mastered the art of delegation to achieve success and freedom — and shares how his fellow lawyers can have the same experience. In this episode of 15 Minutes, host Chad Franzen sits down with Brett Trembly, Founding Partner of Trembly Law and Co-founder of Get Staffed Up, to explore the world of innovative staffing solutions for law firms. Brett shares strategies for hiring full-time virtual assistants, why business owners hesitate to hire employees, and the benefits of delegating tasks and conducting delegation evaluations. Tune in to discover how to achieve financial freedom, one smart hire at a time.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Chad Franzen on LinkedIn
• Gladiator Law Marketing
• Brett Trembly on LinkedIn
• Trembly Law Firm
• Get Staffed Up
• 24 Months to Freedom — Listener Exclusive Offer
• 24 Months to Freedom: How Modern Law Firms Use Smarter Staffing Solutions to Fast Track Their Way to Success by Brett Trembly

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by Gladiator Law Marketing, where we deliver tailor-made services to help you accomplish your objectives and maximize your growth potential. To have a successful marketing campaign and make sure you’re getting the best ROI, your firm needs to have a better website and better content. At Gladiator Law Marketing, we use artificial intelligence, machine learning, and decades of experience to outperform the competition. To learn more, go to gladiatorlawmarketing.com or schedule a free marketing consultation. You can also send an email to adam@gladiatorlawmarketing.com.

Episode Transcript

Intro  0:01   You’re listening to 15 Minutes, where we feature community leaders sharing what the rest of us should know but likely don’t. Chad Franzen  0:08   Chad Franzen here, one of the hosts of Share Your Voice where we talk with top notch law firms and lawyers about what it takes to grow a successful law practice. This episode is brought to you by Gladiator Law Marketing, delivering tailor made services to help you accomplish your objectives and maximize your growth potential. To have a successful marketing campaign and make sure you’re getting the best ROI your firm needs to have a better website and better content. Gladiator Law Marketing uses artificial intelligence, machine learning and decades of experience to outperform the competition. To learn more, go to gladiatorlawmarketing.com where you can schedule a free marketing consultation. Brett Trembley is co-founder of Get Staffed Up, the largest virtual staffing company for lawyers in the US. He’s also been a partner at Trembly Law Firm for more than a decade. He’s a lawyer, entrepreneur and author and a delegation expert. Hey, Brett, thanks so much for joining me today. How are you? Brett Trembly  1:03   Chad, I’m fantastic. Thank you for having me on. Chad Franzen  1:06   Hey, yeah, great to have you. Hey, as we get started here, just tell me a little bit more about Trembly Law and what you guys kind of do and specialize in? Brett Trembly  1:13   Sure. So I started traveling a lot in 2011. We’re in Miami, Florida, we do business law, business litigation, employment defense franchise, basically, whatever business owners need to protect them in either keep them out of court, or put them in a good position in court if that if that happens. Chad Franzen  1:33   How and when did you know you wanted to become an attorney? Brett Trembly  1:36   I not tell I was in law school, believe it or not. I knew I wanted to go to law school and get that education. But I wasn’t sure going into law school that I wanted to be an attorney. And then when I was on the trial team in law school, that’s when I figured out that there was something fun I wanted to do. Chad Franzen  1:52   What about the education in law school was appealing? Brett Trembly  1:56   Good question. I just don’t think I was ready to grow up and go into the real world yet. And I wanted to have a bigger fun school experience because I went to a smaller school for college. And I felt like a legal background would help me in business. And that has been very true. Chad Franzen  2:15   So you said it was the debate club or debate? debate competition? That got you interested? Brett Trembly  2:22   No, no. The trial team, it’s a mock trial. Chad Franzen  2:26   Oh, the mock trial? I’m sorry, mock trial team. What about that was appealing to you? Brett Trembly  2:31   Well, it was mental warfare, you know, it’s preparing arguments, finding, you know, connecting the dots, in fact patterns and putting together a better story than the opposition. And I just thought of it. It still is very fascinating. Very fun, very stressful, but very fun. Chad Franzen  2:47   So you, you graduated from law school? What did you do once that happened? How did you get started in the legal industry? Brett Trembly  2:55   I worked for a small law firm in South Miami for about three years, and I learned good things. And I had a lot of things to not do, frankly, they practice door law. So it was different every day. And it was very hard to be good at anything. But I enjoyed my time there. And I’m an entrepreneur at heart. So I always knew that I would do my own thing. And eventually I did. Chad Franzen  3:17   Is that when you started for those after those three years, is that when you started your own law firm? Brett Trembly  3:22   Exactly. That’s when I started Trembly Law. Chad Franzen  3:25   How did the early days go? Brett Trembly  3:26   They’re not great. Very, very humbling, very challenging, very stressful. I, I’m sure like a lot of people had always been a high achiever, found success in anything I had done. And I thought, Well, I’ve always bet on myself before and it’s worked out. And I hit a ceiling early on, and I couldn’t get past it. And I it’s a long story of how I got there. But through a lot of reading books and getting coaches and mentors, I found out I was, I had a fear of failure, which goes back to your ego that most people don’t connect those two things. And and I had to just get over it and start making moves. It’s it’s easy to start a law firm. If your lawyer you just you just say it one day, hey, I’m starting my law firm and you do it. But it’s more challenging to put yourself out there and try to grow your law firm. Because if people see that you’re trying and then you fail, and people associate that with failure, which is silly and absurd. You know, there’s always micro failures along the way. And so, hiring, taking risks, that’s the real challenge of growing a business. Chad Franzen  4:37   So you’re certainly not the first attorney who’s told me like, you know, I was an expert in the law. I was a really good lawyer, but I started my own firm and I was surprised by you know, such and such difficulties, but what would you say was your key to kind of overcoming the challenges that you talked about? Brett Trembly  4:53   It’s gonna sound self serving because now I have a staffing company for lawyers but but it really was hiring it was, I made my first hire. And I doubled my law firm revenue the very next month with not just one person, because it was just me, myself and Irene, you know, for the first few years, and then I made one hire, and I doubled my revenue. And the reason that happens chat is because the average solo lawyer bills about an hour and a half per day, but only collects about an hour per day in revenue. So all you have to do is double that. But you’ll never double it, when you’re just like, you can’t work, you can’t run faster on a hamster wheel to double your time doesn’t work that way, you’re already running at breakneck speed. So if you take things off your plate, your email the phones, or turning messages calls, then you give yourself enough time to do more of the legal work and early on that you should be focused on because that’s the highest and best use of your time. So it’s, it’s very, it’s mathematically speaking, it’s not hard to to double your revenue when you’re very small and at that size, but it only comes through hiring. And a lot of people just have such a hard time with hiring, there’s such control freaks, and they’re afraid to turn things over when, frankly, people that are doing the 10 to 15 to $20 an hour task or gonna be better than us that in any way. But again, it comes back to the ego and just getting over that. Chad Franzen  6:20   Would you say that the hesitancy to hire especially for a new firm like yourself, where you’re where you were just a solo person? Would you say it was it was mainly ego or your or your desire to control things? Or was it a fear of, you know, I don’t want to waste money, or, you know, I want to stay lean, what would you say is most common for most people? Brett Trembly  6:37   Probably an unhealthy relationship with money, right? Which means you’re, you know, I didn’t I didn’t have a nest egg, I didn’t have family money. I was in student debt, credit card debt. I mean, not not like exorbitant amounts, but I couldn’t get a loan because I didn’t have any assets. I was underwater as a human being. And the thought of spending money is terrifying. So you know, I got an office and I had to cover that. And some software and that was about it. So adding an employee was such a huge expense comparatively, at the time, that you convince yourself like I can’t afford it. When every second you spend doing things other than legal work, it costs you money, that’s a proven fact. And you can shake your head and I can shake my head but people still like, like, they won’t quite let those things equal, you know, it’s like two magnets both plus they get close and then they do this like i i probably logically know that it’s cost me money not to hire someone but now not me, I do things better, I can do things faster. It’s it’s too much to train it’s too much to do this and we just make up so many reasons. So I think hiring someone and not most of us will wait until we have this magic number magic number like an amount of money in the bank like when I get to 20,000 then I could afford to hire someone you just got to figure out how to pay them per week. And if it’s you know like what with what I do now because it’s so inexpensive offshore compared to domestic hiring is helping people get over that fear factor a lot more you know, a lot sooner. Chad Franzen  8:18   Is the you know, incredible increase in revenue that you saw what triggered you to start Get Staffed Up? Brett Trembly  8:27   Partly, it was that I was my business partner found some people offshore and I was very intrigued by the idea. My business partner now right all just a lawyer, a very good friend lawyer. And I said hey, I need someone to you know, in my marketing team, so he found me someone and I was I just saw the potential and years before I had laid out what I wanted in my next business certain criteria. And I applied that to an offer staffing company and it met all the criteria so I’m really the one that said hey, we can do this we can do it, you know laid out the business model that we have and we just kept talking about it and decided to do it together. So it was it was motivated by finding a solution was identifying hiring, maintaining, training, keeping promoting domestic you know, staff members, right is so difficult you cannot expect people in the US to take a $10 an hour job and be with you for years and years and years. It’s not a comically feasible for people and like it will once was you know, you you you once were able to find lifetime secretaries for example. Now you can only do that if it’s someone who’s retired and they’re bored and so it was really like there’s this amazing solution for business owners number one problem because employees are our biggest assets but also our biggest challenge and headache and liability and those those kinds of things and and this was like I once we started digging into it, it made so much sense to me. And so I’m glad I was right on that because, you know, with the proof is in the pudding with how much we’ve grown. Chad Franzen  10:08   So tell me about kind of what you guys do for a typical client like somebody, somebody comes to you. And then what happens there? Brett Trembly  10:15   Yeah, so So we rely on like most staffing companies who are out of the Philippines, probably like 99%. Well, we recruit out of Latin America, you have to speak amazing English, have to be educated college degree, and willing to work, you know, long time, there’s not short term positions. And we do full time placement only. So law firm owner, you know, Mary Jane, we walk her through, you know, how we work, and the positions that we help staff, which is seven main positions, meaning executive assistant, which is the first you know, and we haven’t mentioned my book, but I’m learning to do better plugging myself. So I just came out with a new book called 24 months to freedom, how modern law firms use smarter staffing solutions to fast track their way to success. And I lay out over 24 months how you can go from really broke and miserable like I was to, not to retiring not to, you know, swimming in pools of money, but to a point where you, the business no longer owns you, and you’re free to make good decisions, because you have money coming in and you have you have help. And that always starts with the first hire that I made, and that books and books and books will tell you to make it’s an executive assistant to put a bunch of time back in your plate, you’re buying your time back. And then from there, it’s like a full time receptionist, which can greatly change your business instead of the shortcut. And the mistake most people use when hiring, you know, call centers, a marketing assistant, and then an intake specialists to take you out of the consultation process. And it would be like if you call the doctor’s office, and the doctor answered the phone or got on the phone, they were like, This must not be a very busy Doctor, I’m going somewhere else, right? A legal assistant, a billing assistant, because attorneys were so bad at sending bills, putting them together, then we delay and then we rack up hundreds and I’m not exaggerating hundreds of 1000s of dollars in AR Because we feel bad. And we’re always writing things off. And they’re big bills. And then a legal assistance and a client concierge to really separate your firm in terms of customer service. So it’s all laid out in the book. It’s it’s a proven process. And the books doing very well and getting a lot of good feedback on it. So I’m just very excited to share the message because we’re growing. But you know, I really wanted to share with other people if they don’t hire us, like I wanted to share the game plan of how you can go from where I was just very miserable Even I wouldn’t admit it. And most people won’t tell you they’re miserable, to a place of real financial freedom to make really cool decisions, like what do I want to do with this firm? And who do I want to become? Chad Franzen  12:58   Is it usually a process? I mean? Like, could you have hired all seven of those people when you decided to expand from just yourself? Or is it usually a process like I added an executive assistant, and then go from there? Brett Trembly  13:10   That I know it’s a huge process that when we lay out the 24 month roadmap because you onboard seven people at once, train them all at once. That’s going to just take up all your time and you’re going to just your your law firm is going to flounder because you like you have to do the legal work. If the train allocates the time to train and then you know, then your time is freed up and then that person keeps doing well and you get momentum you get more money so now you do your next hire and you train and then your next hire onboard train, you know get better and that’s that’s the smarter process now 24 months I get a lot of like, like 24 months well, it’s not a gimmick, it’s not seven minute abs and then we’re gonna come up with six minute abs, right? Somebody comes up with like, 18 months to freedom. Well, yeah, sure. On the faster and you can do it in 18 months, but this is real life. You know, real real results in two years in the business world is nothing. Chad Franzen  14:07   So with Get Staffed Up is typically a 24 plus month relationship where you kind of take them through that process that you lay out in the book. Brett Trembly  14:17   Yeah, yeah, most of our clients have been with us longer than that. I mean, that’s not true. We’re making sales all the time and new clients but what we’re trying to do is get people to the point where they they hire and work with their team for longer than two years because turnover is tough on a business and most people just don’t hire because because it’s it’s exhausting to continually rehire and retrain. So we have it gets wrapped up as a replacement guarantee. If you’re one of our clients and our people leave for any reason and you want to replace them. We replaced them for you within days. Chad Franzen  14:49   Well, that’s great. So how did you guys kind of come up with this, this business plan and how did your early days you know having given you’re already experienced As an entrepreneur with your own law firm, out of your early days with this compared to that? Brett Trembly  15:06   Well, I knew a lot more this time, right? So my experience and going through the pains and the struggle, we hired early and took our own medicine, we have 180 of our own internal full time employees that gets staffed up. And, you know, yeah, it’s hard. It’s hard to compare the two, but you can’t. Without the law firm first, this would never have existed. And without me putting in hours and hours and hours and joining entrepreneurial groups, and getting mentors and coaches and learning, it would have never happened. Chad Franzen  15:38   Tell me more about how people can find out about Trembley Law and Get Staffed Up and also your book. Brett Trembly  15:46   Absolutely. So what we did is we created a landing page for your listeners with a little offer, if you will, a promotion just for being one of your listeners. But if you go to getstaffed up.com/rise25, then it’ll take you to a landing page. And it has a link for the book. And it has a little promotional offer, if you do want to work with us, which we would love to work with more and more lawyers. And you know, our business is by lawyers for lawyers. That’s what we’re geared towards. But both of the co founders were both lawyers. And that’s who we like working with and who we know and understand. So the principles of the book, cross over into other service areas, of course. But if you’re interested in the book, you can also just go to Amazon and type in 24 Months to Freedom and books that will pop right up. Chad Franzen  16:38   Last question for you, given all you all that you have going on, although you probably have less going on now that you’re delegating, what are a few of your daily rituals that you find most important? Brett Trembly  16:47   My morning routine is super important. And I’m not a get up at 4am guy that’s just not, you know, I admire the heck out of you, I really, really wish I could pop out of bed at 4am and then just get really tired at nine 9pm. And just do that every night that would be awesome to have all of that work. I mean, writing books would be easier, you know, because once the day starts, you’ve got to constantly avoid falling into the trap of just fighting fires all day. And that’s what delegation is about. And that’s what hiring people is all about. Because lawyers we could spend all day on email if we’re not careful and just feel tired. Like, oh, I worked really hard today, I must have done good. No, you’re on the hamster wheel and you just ran a little bit faster. And so, you know, it’s important to not fall into that trap. And to constantly delegate and every quarter I do a delegation exercise where I analyze what are the new things that have crept in? And what do I need to get rid of. And that’s just a constant ongoing thing for and it should be for lawyers, for entrepreneurs, for everybody who’s is in control of their time is making sure that we are focused on being thoughtful and analyzing what else is popped up. And what else do I need. Chad Franzen  18:08   Right. Sounds great. Very good advice. Hey, Brett, it’s been great to talk to you. Thank you so much for your insights and for your time and best wishes with everything. Brett Trembly  18:17   Chad, thank you so much for having me on. I really appreciate it. Enjoyed it and we’ll do it again sometime. Chad Franzen  18:23   Sounds good. Thank you. So long, everybody. Outro  18:27   Thanks for listening to 15 Minutes. Be sure to subscribe and we’ll see you next time.