The Video
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Brian Glass, Attorney and Host of the Time Freedom For Lawyers podcast, joins Productivity Gladiator to talk about Life Balance Mistakes & Best Practices for people that work in a billable hours career, and passive income strategies.
Episode Content
For Employees
Best Practice: Bring in business and look to get “Origination Credit”, meaning you bring in the customers. In most situations origination credit means you’ll get a small piece of all the billing toward that client.
Best Practice: Be their guy. Make sure YOU’RE their lawyer. You’re providing so much value that they will think of you, not just your firm. This means for all future things, the customer isn’t just referring people to your business or firm, they’re referring people to you personally.
Perspective: There's three ways to make more money in billable hours.
1) Work longer hours,
2) work for more dollars per hour, or
3) figure out a way to originate the clients, getting a piece, even if it’s a small piece, of everybody else's hours, billed on that client down the line.Tip: Look for business to business opportunities to connect with people that have your potential clients
(example: If you’re looking for people who have been in auto accidents, advertising to the general public, 99.9% of people have NOT been in auto accidents. Find businesses that serve people who have been in auto accidents (Dr Offices, Physical Therapists, etc) and help those businesses, they’ll connect you with that audience by referring you.Best Practice: Be the hub, the person they’re referring to when they say “I know someone”
Be known among your circles for what you do, and actively seek to help people with what you do. By helping people, they’ll remember that you’re the person that helped them on a certain topic. That’s your way to become “the hub” or “the guy”, and seek to expand your hub.
For Front Line Supervisors and Middle Managers
Best Practice: Get into management and out of the “doing”. Stay out of doing the small dollar tasks, even if they make mistakes. Every time you do your employees job, that just will perpetuate more of the same.
Reminder: Good managers take the blame for screw-ups and highlight the employees for the wins. It’s HARD to do that, to let someone fail knowing you’re likely going to have to take some of the blame for some of that failure, but you have to manage, not do the work, so let them do the work.
Passive Income
The lie of passive income - I see posts on Instagram and TikTok and YouTube where like, oh, I bought 18 Airbnbs and now I'm retired. No, you're not retired. You manage 18 Airbnbs. You just do something different, right?
Real Estate Syndications - Investing in somebody else's deal, where I fund the deal with money. Typically, the minimum investment is $25,000, $50,000, $100,000 into these deals. And then somebody, the general partner goes and operates the deal. And then every month or every quarter, depending on the project, there's a check that just shows up back in my bank account.
Books & References in This Episode
BOOK on being a good manager:
Liz Wiseman - Multipliers
BOOK on syndicated real estate:
Hands Off Investor - Brian Burke
WEBSITE for syndicated real estate deals
Crowdstreet.com
Today’s Guest
Brian Glass - Attorney
Host of the “Time Freedom for Lawyers” podcast
Brian Glass is a personal injury lawyer in Fairfax, Virginia. After a decade of practicing law across town from his dad, he joined Ben Glass Law in 2019 to run the auto accident section of the practice.
Brian’s greatest hits as a lawyer include a $3.4M medical malpractice verdict (2019), the record-setting settlement of a minor’s wrongful death case in Virginia ($5.5M in 2020), and the largest auto accident verdict in the state in 2022. ($3.4M in compensatory damages and $1M in punitive damages). He is highly skilled at distilling complex problems into simple, understandable solutions.
Brian is the rare trial lawyer who is as comfortable building a business as he is in the courtroom. Over the past four years, he has quadrupled the revenue of the auto accident section at Ben Glass Law and has big plans for the future. Brian credits this growth to hiring the right people into the correct position, running the firm on EOS/Traction, and alignment of vision between he and Ben. His business acumen has led him to be interviewed on the Tribe of Millionaires, Law Firm Movers and Shakers, and Millionaire Mindcast podcasts.
Brian runs Time Freedom for Lawyers, a podcast dedicated to teaching other lawyers and high income professionals how to win back some of the their time by running more efficient businesses, investing in real estate, and crafting the vision of their own perfect life.
Brian’s perfect life includes coaching his three boys in soccer, baseball, and whatever other athletic endeavor they want to pursue; travelling the world with his wife of 13 years; and competing in endurance events. Brian is a finisher of the Umstead 100 Mile Endurance Race, the Laurel Highlands 71 Miler, and about two dozen other ultramarathons. Lately, parenting has cut short his training timeline and he focuses on Crossfit and Spartan races, with a 2023 goal of traveling to Sparta, Greece to compete in the Spartan Race World Championships.
Brian is available to speak about:
Vision Building – How to Design and Achieve the Life You Want
How to Hire, Support, and Manage Great Staff
Rethinking Retirement – Why High Earners Should Create Passive Income Streams to Make Work Optional
Managing Your Law Firm by the Numbers
Find Brian on:
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fairfaxpersonalinjury/
Ben Glass Law: https://www.benglasslaw.com/bio/brian-glass-fairfax-auto-accident-lawyer.cfm
Great Legal Marketing: https://greatlegalmarketing.com/
Time Freedom For Lawyers: https://www.timefreedompod.com/
Productivity Gladiator highlighted on Time Freedom For Lawyers
Why Subscribe To The Email List: Brian does special zoom events and shares hacks and tips exclusively for his email subscribers. Topics like “13 alternatives to checking social media on your phone” or “2 email rules which will cut your email inbox in half” and more. Sign up to start receiving the tips from these exclusive events!
About The Creator/Host: I’m Brian. At age 4, I was diagnosed with insulin dependent (type 1) diabetes and told that my life was going to be 10-20 years shorter than everyone else. As a kid I took time for granted, but now as an adult, time is the most precious thing that I have. I teach overworked project managers how to level-up their life balance and pump up their practical productivity through my Productivity Gladiator training system. If what you’ve seen here intrigues you, reach out, let’s chat! Time is the currency of your life, spend it wisely.
Episode Transcript
I'm Brian Nelson Palmer. On this show, I talk about life balance and practical productivity. And in this episode, I wanted to dig into two things that my guests could definitely speak to. And that's life balance in a billable hours career and truly passive income, which I'm fascinated with. So on the show with me today is Brian Glass. He's a personal injury lawyer and at Ben Glass Law and also the host of Time Freedom for Lawyers, the podcast, which
My gosh, me being the value of your time guy and talking with Brian about and his name's Brian too. And it's time freedom for lawyers. My guy, it's like that this is like my brother from another mother here. So Brian, thanks so much for joining me today. Brian, thanks so much for joining me today.
Brian Glass (01:41.186)
Brian, thank you for having me.
Brian Nelson-Palmer (01:43.48)
Absolutely. Now, what's the, uh, so talk about a little bit about your background. Obviously, we're going to talk about billable hours and stuff for people that aren't familiar with you or bang glass law. Talk, talk about that.
Brian Glass (01:56.194)
So I actually don't bill by the hour, which is the greatest thing about my legal career. So I'll give you the background. Ryan, so I graduated law school in 2008 into the teeth of the great recession. When I went to law school, the promise was if you do well and you're in the top third of your class and you graduate, big law will come and offer you a job. So big law is firms that have upwards of 2,000 lawyers across the country, many, many, many more than that.
Brian Glass (02:23.346)
And then in 2008, the starting salaries were like $160,000 for first year associates, which is in retrospect crazy. But as somebody who went to law school in 05 to 08, it was like, man, you just get to the end of the rainbow and there's going to be a big pot of gold for you. Well, in 2007 as the housing market started to correct, and then in 2008, when all credit froze, all of these big law firms canceled their summer programs, which is how they were recruiting new associates.
They canceled entire classes of hiring. And so, you know, my friends and I, um, you know, more me than them, we're faced with the prospect of like, all right, maybe we're going to start at a job where we don't have a one in the front of our salary and we're actually going to be paid more in line with what we were worth. So my first job coming out of law school, I was making $60,000 a year at a general practice firm where I was billing by the hour and I hated every minute of billing by the hour.
Brian Glass (03:21.398)
Because especially as a young lawyer, you go through in your mind this question about that thing that I just did where I was researching the basic principle of law where most lawyers who operate in this arena, they probably know it. Can I really bill a client for that? I struggled to value my time and say, okay, that thing that it took me three hours, well, really it probably should have taken me like an hour and a half. I lasted at that firm for about six months before I decided that I was going to be a
Billing by the hour really wasn't for me. And I left to go do really auto accident injury work, which is all contingency fee based. So I get paid now a third of the recovery on any case that we settle or that we take to verdict. And so the only math that I have to do, a joke is just divide by three. And I can divide just about any number by three, right? But what that taught me, Brian, is that the accelerator on my career
is not working harder, it's not working longer. It's figuring out how can I devote all of my time to high dollar value cases where I have a high likelihood that I'm going to get paid, and almost none of my time to low dollar value cases, and certainly none of my time to low dollar value cases where there's a contest about am I going to get paid at the end of the case or not. So that's really a long-winded way of getting to like, I actually don't bill by the hour. The vast majority of the legal world.
does, but I've worked my way into this niche where I can be valued for my time really based on how good am I at working on a case and not how long did it take me to achieve a certain result.
Brian Nelson-Palmer (05:03.292)
All right, I want to come back to that more because that the concept of almost commission based versus billable hour based is really interesting. But I want to talk just a little bit about you and your background first. So Ben Glass law, Glass is the same name as you. So what's the relation there?
Brian Glass (05:19.682)
So it's my dad and I joined that firm four years ago. So from 2009 to 2019, I was working really for a competitor across town and became a partner at that firm. And then a couple of things came up in my life. We decided not to expand in office space next door. We had a key employee leave that we decided not to replace. And then my wife had a very tough third birth of our third baby boy.
And it made me realize like, if I don't leave now and go work with my dad, I might never have the opportunity to. And so in 2019, I left the firm that I was at, joined his firm, which at the time was a medical malpractice and, um, ERISA long-term disability appeals practice, I brought the auto practice really to this firm and we've grown it ever since over the last four years.
Brian Nelson-Palmer (06:10.904)
And is that, it seems like you started out trying to avoid going into the family business or what made you, I mean, you started out talking about a billable hours firm and then you mentioned being at a different competitor firm. So what made it finally come full circle for you?
Brian Glass (06:25.558)
Yeah. So I, I, you know, always in the back of my mind was this idea that we would work together. And I think in the back of his mind that was also, but I certainly wanted to get out and make my own name and make my own friends and my own way of doing things before I came and, and just, you know, came under his wing. Like I have a very strong, um, sense that people think that I'm born on third and thought he hit a triple. Right. And so I wanted as best I could to avoid doing that.
by working for as long as I could and achieving some results on my own and outside of his umbrella.
Brian Nelson-Palmer (06:59.872)
That makes perfect sense. And I admire you for that. Nice, Brian. It's good to get that experience outside of just jumping into the family business. And at the same time, that's awesome that you jumped into the family business because there's a lot of family businesses that just die after the jet because the next guy doesn't want it. So that's cool.
Brian Glass (07:18.074)
Well, that's exactly right. That's the biggest problem facing not only law firms, but small businesses today is like, okay, mom and dad have grown a laundromat for the last 35 years, and the laundromat is the last thing that their adult children now want. There's going to be this incredible turnover. I read some statistics somewhere that 70% of small businesses in America are going to turn over as the baby boomers age out and retire.
Brian Glass (07:45.278)
And like, where are they going to go? Because the kids have gone off and maybe gotten a white collar professional job and they don't want to manage, you know, the dirty laundromat or the, the, the doggy daycare or whatever it might be. And so creates real opportunity for entrepreneurs that come into the market and figure out how to add a bit of technology to those practices and really, you know, really launch them. So that's, um, it's, it's a distraction for me is thinking about all of that stuff, but yeah, that's, that's, uh,
Brian Glass (08:12.886)
And one of the things that we're thinking about doing at the law firm, just as an aside is we're trying to acquire books of business from other lawyers because most lawyers have the same thing. Most lawyers get to the end of their career and then don't really know what to do. Right? If you have a hundred cases that you're working on and you don't have an associate who you can transition those cases to, um, like what do you, what do you do as a hundred becomes 75 becomes 50 becomes 25.
and you still want to maintain your staff and your own salary and your profit, like you've got to have somewhere for that to land. So one of the things that we've been thinking about in 2023 is how can we position ourselves as attractive to somebody that might be in that 60 to 70 year old cohort who might like want to slowly age out of the practice of law by bringing in all of the technology that the young people, the young people know about, right?
Brian Glass (09:06.99)
In a time where like chat GPT and AI is quote, coming for lawyer's jobs, like there's a Goldman Sachs report that 44% of the tasks in legal can be replaced by chat GPT. That's really scary. And in a time where Google SEO and pay per click and all that stuff is becoming more and more difficult, like, so that's, that's just what we're iterating on is how can we position ourselves to other law firms locally to be the place where.
Brian Glass (09:36.638)
I'm happy to be your retirement plan. Right.
Brian Nelson-Palmer (09:39.656)
Right. That's an interesting strategy there. So I guess that feeds into my other question on so what would you say makes Ben Glass law different per se?
Brian Glass (09:48.162)
Hmm. Yeah. Um, what may, here's what things, here's what most lawyers think makes them different. Most lawyers think that they are God's gift to law and to clients, right? Lawyers, we have enormous egos. And so honestly, Brian, I don't try to compete on I'm the best lawyer in the town because I don't know how you would ever judge that. Like how would we ever empirically know whether I got you a better result than the lawyer down the street got you.
And so the space in which we compete is customer service. So I want my firm to be the best customer service business that you interact with, not customer service law firm, but you know, you might only interact with three to five law firms through the course of your entire life. So you're not comparing me to that. You're comparing me to Panera and Kohl's and Amazon. And how can I incorporate all of the little things that those companies do well?
in terms of updating you on the status of your case, proactively telling you what the next thing that's gonna happen, getting a little bit predictive about, okay, when clients cross into this stage of the case, here's the five questions that they typically ask. And so let's see if we can give them those five answers before they even think to ask it. So that's the space really that we're competing on. And the other half of that is that we've over invested in the staff because the staff is the one
who's going to be fielding 90 to 95% of those questions. I really just want to be applying what we call a very fine icing on an ice cake, polishing the cases off. We are good lawyers. Don't get me wrong to think that we're sacrificing the quality of the law, but I don't, in an advertising and a marketing way, compete on that because you have no way to judge whether I'm number one or number 15 or number 130.
Brian Nelson-Palmer (11:47.312)
Right. That makes perfect sense. Okay. It's interesting to branch out outside of just, yeah, you're right. There's no way to possibly know who would give you, could you have gotten $30,000 more in your settlement versus somebody else? So that's smart. I like that.
Brian Glass (12:01.33)
Yeah. And I always, I, I always feel like I have to follow that up with like, it's not an excuse to not be a good lawyer, right? But it's, but it's not a marketing differentiator because everybody says that they're the best lawyer. Like the super lawyers ratings just came out in Virginia and all of my friends are quote, you know, humbled and honored to be super lawyers. Well, I don't know anybody who didn't make the list, right? So, so how, how do you, how do you judge?
Brian Nelson-Palmer (12:23.532)
Right. Is it a money grab? They gave everybody a trophy. It's the everybody gets a trophy thing, right? For lawyers.
Brian Glass (12:31.774)
It is. Well, in fact, in fact, I didn't, to be honest, I didn't make the list as you said, I didn't respond to the email. So I got the, I got all of the emails offering to sell me the decals and the plaques and whatever, but I didn't actually make the print list cause I didn't verify my information. So maybe that's maybe in retrospect, that was a poor time management move on my part. Um, but you know, it is what it is.
Brian Nelson-Palmer (12:52.171)
There you go.
Yep, totally. Now I want to jump into billable hours, but one, I did have two funny questions for just about you as a person that I stumbled across. One is apparently you're like a big runner or something. What are, what are you running from? Where does that come from?
Brian Glass (13:06.014)
Yeah. Yeah. Right. Everybody asked that question, right? No, I'm in, you know, past life about six years ago, I was a big runner. The, having the third, third baby boy sucked all of my training time away. Um, but no, I've, I've finished, um, you know, probably two dozen ultra marathons, which is any race over 26.2 miles. I finished a hundred mile
Brian Glass (13:35.838)
You know, my fitness is, is confined to the CrossFit gym and Spartan racing, which you can finish in about two hours. Uh, but no, I've done, um, 24 I've done a hundred miles in just under 24 hours and I immediately fell asleep.
Brian Nelson-Palmer (13:54.661)
Good gracious. All right. So lots of lots of running and then something about so apparently with three kids, little league is a big part of your, uh, your life too. What's, what are you coaching and what's the, what's proudest coach moment that comes to mind?
Brian Glass (14:05.154)
Yeah, I'm the head coach of my 10 year old soccer team and I'm an assistant coach on my eight year old's baseball team. I'm not coaching the five year old because that age doesn't really agree with me as much. I don't know that I have a proudest. I'll tell you what I enjoy the most in soccer is coaching the all-star teams because the all-star teams, everybody wants to be there and everybody's pretty good.
and you can actually coach, right? It's less time spent telling kids which line to stand in and more time like actually standing on the field and positioning them and showing, okay, here's how to open up passing lanes. And it's really the same thing with baseball. Like what I really enjoy about that is making like two suggestions to a kid while he's in the batter's box and he makes both of them and then he hits the next pitch after missing the last 10.
Like I really enjoy that. I don't know that I have any special skill at it, but it really makes me feel good when you make those two or three little tweaks and then they connect.
Brian Nelson-Palmer (15:15.696)
awesome. It's the improvement piece, which sounds a lot like what you're trying to do to the customer experience. And you seem like kind of a coach kind of guy with the, the podcast and all the stuff you're doing. Brian, this makes perfect sense. So let's shift, shift gears onto our topic for today, which is first about billable hour careers. And so I like to look at the, the, I like to look at the topic from the perspective of the employee and then as the supervisor or the manager.
over those employees. So is there any, what advice or thoughts would you give to people in billable hour contract, billable hour careers that are employees in those careers?
Brian Glass (15:57.65)
Oh, as an employee. So, you know, taken with the grain of a grain of salt, that even when I was an employee, I was an entrepreneurial employee. And so I'm always trying to understand how I can add more value to the company's top line that will translate into more value to Brian's bottom line. Right. So I was always looking for an, in the law, we call this origination credit. If I go out and I,
find a new client or customer and I sign them on to the law firm, even if I'm not the owner, I typically in most firms, I'm going to get a certain percentage of the revenue on that case and if we're like a general practice firm on all cases. For instance, if I went out and I signed up like a corporate client to draft the contract for, and then they later had a sales agreement and went south and they went bankrupt and we fulfilled all those practice areas.
under the right scheme, I would get origination credit for everything that we did down the line. That's the avenue that I approached it from. There's really two ways to make more money. It's work longer hours, raise my rates. There's three ways. Work longer hours, work for more dollars per hour, or figure out a way to originate the thing, originate the client.
and get a piece, a small piece even, of everybody else's hours, build on that client down the line. I'm not sure how many industries that translates into out of law because I've only ever been a lawyer, but that's what I would be thinking about is how can I best leverage my time in soft skills like client acquisition and follow up with that client and keep them down the line. The thing that I tell young lawyers is...
Even if you were not the one who's necessarily originating the case, you want to be the one that's dedicating the time in a soft skill way so that it ultimately becomes that the client thinks that you are their lawyer. No matter when they came in, you want them to, when they think of lawyer and legal problem and legal solution, you're the picture that comes to their mind. What can you do in terms of client communication, handwritten thank you notes?
Brian Glass (18:24.094)
all of those little things that they don't teach anywhere in law school, where the client is thinking of me first and referring not to my firm for their friends and their future cases but straight to me. So that's how I approach that. Right or wrong. And the flip side of that. Yeah, yeah. I was good at that.
Brian Nelson-Palmer (18:41.933)
Were you successful at that? How did that go? Like, tell a story about that, where you were, that happened.
Brian Glass (18:50.91)
Yeah. So one of the things that I started doing early in my career is anytime we resolve the case with a doctor or a medical practice that had an outstanding bill, I just made a point of hand delivering that check to the doctor or to the medical practice. And so why do you do that? Number one, it's like the most efficient way to market, right? It's
I think terribly inefficient for me to be marketing to people who've been in auto accidents because most people weren't in an auto accident in the last week, month or year. Like 99.9% of the population is not looking for an auto accident lawyer. But if I can go kind of in a business to business manner to people that have herds of people that were in auto accidents, now I'm leveraging my time.
can make friends and make referrals within the medical practice, or maybe at a collision repair center, or at a rental car center. Like, those are people who are already in front of audiences that I wanna talk to and can refer to me. So, just at a very low level, I just started calling doctors when I had the check and say, hey, I'm about to put this check in the mail. Rather than do that, like I'm gonna be in your neighborhood next Tuesday, can I just swing by, say hi, bring you a couple of our informational books that you can then give to the rest of your clients and say, hi to you. And what I learned during that is that most doctors don't like lawyers and they don't like lawyers. They don't like most lawyers because most lawyers are again, ego driven and arrogant and are always, you know, the only interaction they have with the doctor is, is along the lines of, I've got to get this case settled. And in order to get this case settled, you need to take a 33 or 25% reduction on your bill. I was coming with a different message. I was coming with, if you in the future refer me any cases, then I'm going to do my best to make sure you get it paid 100% of the bill, and I'm going to make sure that you get it paid faster than most law firms. Because a lot of firms that I saw were waiting until the end of the case, until closer to the statute of limitations, to do anything on the case, which I never understood. The only way that we get paid in these cases is the conclusion. And so why...
why wouldn't you be running as fast as you can after the medical treatment is done to try to wrap this thing up? But files sit and everything that we do is driven by deadlines. And so my pitch to doctors was not, I'm gonna send you clients. It was the clients that you send me. I'm gonna make sure that we maximize the number of dollars that are going into the client's pocket and therefore into your pocket. And then we do it as fast as we can because a lot of these medical practices,
will hold off on getting paid until the end of the case. So you might treat somebody for 12 weeks and then not see any money for 18 months, which I think is a crazy economic way to practice. I don't understand it, but they do it. And so my pitch was, what if I can reduce that 18 month period to nine, right? And that resonated with a lot of doctors. So it's all marketing and figuring out what your customers' points of pain really are.
Brian Nelson-Palmer (22:03.152)
Well, that's a really good point for, I mean, and we're talking about, you know, lawyers are on billable hours, but so are consultants. And so are a lot of folks out there. And so if you're bringing in the business or if your relationships are generating business, that does immediately put you at a, at a level above your other folks that are just hustling really hard to finish their busy work or their administrative work or whatever it is that
that if you're the connection that generates the dollars for the firm, that immediately, I mean, that's the difference between the first three, five year associate versus once you're up here at partner level, you are bringing in the business and that's your goal. So start young, even if it's smaller clients. That's a fascinating concept.
Brian Glass (22:48.494)
And it gives you security in times of recession. So I don't like, are we in recession? Are we coming up? I don't know, but it gives you security. Like we see tons of layoffs at big companies and the people who are generating the business aren't the ones getting laid off. It's the people doing all the work, right? Because if I lay off the person that's generating the business, well, they can just go start another firm and take my clients with them. And so, just from a job security standpoint, I think if you're in one of these companies and you are just an operator and you do really good work, like doing really good work is not a differentiator. It's being able to originate the work and being able to bring dollars in. Once you get past a certain level of number of years that you've been at the company, because nobody expects the guy on his third week to be generating business. But if you're...
three, five, 10 years in, and you don't know how to find a client, I have some worries for you from a job security standpoint.
Brian Nelson-Palmer (23:52.284)
Totally. Yeah. That's a, that's a really good point. So what about, so that's employee, employee perspective. That's a really good idea is bring, bring the dollars, right? Or, or look at that, bring the relationships. It's not even about the dollars. It's about who do you know, or if they, you know, you know, somebody, sometimes oftentimes I feel like a lot of what you might do, Brian is helping connect people to other people. And by being the connector, you become the person that they go to and being the guy.
Like everybody says, oh, I got a guy. Well, my guy's Brian. Well, that immediately at some point in the future is gonna pay off for you, even if it's not right now. And so that's consultants, lawyers, that seems to make sense for everybody. So.
Brian Glass (24:31.546)
And so the great story about that is I have this phrase, it's called be the hub. Like how can I be the hub of any of my circles? And I didn't do this because I heard about this after law school, but there's a brilliant tactic for setting up a study group of people that are smarter than you, which is like you send a note around to your circle of friends and you say, I'm putting together this study group, here's the thing. You have to have like a B plus average and above in order to be a part of it. And so, you know, whatever applicants you get, nobody else is looking at your stuff. Right. So, so if, if you're not, if you don't have these groups in your network, then just start one, just start a, you know, I'm a consultant at, at this firm and my niche is whatever your niche is. Right. Like, you know, 10 people that'll come to a brown bag lunch once a month and, and share ideas. And the problem is that most people approach that from scarcity mindset and they think if I give you an idea, you're going to take it and steal. There's no monopoly on good ideas, right? The monopoly is on executing the ideas and how do we, how do we speed up or compress the amount of time from idea generation to execution? And so all you got to do really is find five people that'll come and sit down and transparently share ideas. The best groups that I'm in for that are folks that are in different industries or different locations. Because people who are in your industry, in your location, yeah, there is some scarcity mindset there. But if you can get outside of the mental block that my business is different or my area is different, and you can talk to people who are in similar roles in similar level trenches that you are, you're gonna find that everybody has the same problems and the same opportunities.
Brian Nelson-Palmer (26:27.964)
That makes perfect sense. Connecting with where the opportunities are, not necessarily with, like there's something to be said for your peers because they can relate to you, but realistically in billable hour careers, most of the business does not come from your peers, it comes from potential clients, which are, so finding, find the clients and go hang out where they do. It sounds like a, yeah, it makes perfect sense. What? Right.
Brian Glass (26:49.334)
Yeah, yeah. How skate to where the puck is, right? How can I find out where the clients are and go there?
Brian Nelson-Palmer (26:55.476)
Exactly. So what about now that that's great advice for like from the employee perspective, you're starting out that kind of thing. But now what about for the, the frontline supervisors and say the middle managers of people who work on billable hours, what do you, what advice do you have for them on, you know, managing people and maintaining life balance and practice? Like, you know, the whole quiet quitting thing, and then there's the whole turnover and all that stuff. So what are your thoughts for the frontline supervisors and the middle managers?
Brian Glass (27:26.402)
I love all these terms that we have from the pandemic, like quiet fittering, quiet quitting. Isn't this loud firing one? There's some opposite of quite quitting. But then there was also this whole, there's this whole subset of people that just went out and got a second job. Like that I think is amazing. Which like if you're meeting the KPIs of both jobs, good for you. And why should either employer care? So, but what advice for the middle managers? I think it's really hard as a middle manager to draw boundaries around your job and to get into management and get out of the doing. I think so many of us, and I'm kind of in this evolution now, is we're hiring associates to come in under me and do more of the legal work and elevate me to really the high level thinking and to the running of the business.
I have to mentally remind myself to stay out of doing the small low dollar power tasks because if I don't let somebody else do them and screw them up every once in a while, then they're never going to learn in the same way that I learned by doing and screwing them up. And so you have to kind of let go of the vine and let the people who are underneath you make mistakes within whatever your comfortable safety net looks like for you, but you've got to get out of the habit of solving all of their problems.
And so, because if you don't, you're going to be doing two jobs. You're going to be doing their job and then you're going to be managing them and you doing their job. So that's a hard place to be. The middle manager, I think that's one of the toughest positions because you've got somebody on top of you holding you accountable and hopefully you're holding the people below you accountable. And you probably are still responsible for some of the day-to-day operations in your business.
Brian Nelson-Palmer (29:21.996)
And that's one of the hardest things too, is like now on top of that, the good managers, you have to stand up and take responsibility for the mistakes of your people. You don't hang your people out to dry. So you need to stand up for them and take it. And then when there are successes, they get the successes and you get their failures and that's the good leader. And man, that really sucks. Sometimes that's hard to do. But if you jump in there, like you said, and you're correcting all the
the errors and you're jumping in and you're doing the job for them, well, then there's not much of a job for them to do. They're only going to do what you tell them to do. And then you're not like ultimately the long game. That's that's the short game, not the long game. And that that sucks.
Brian Glass (30:04.398)
There's a great book by Liz Wiseman called Multipliers and it talks about multiplying leaders and diminishing leaders and how some managers make everybody else around them smarter by virtue of their management style and some managers diminish everybody. The more that you maintain this kind of parochial empire where you're the one that knows how to do everything and all the decisions have to come through you, the less and less your people are going to do.
month after month, year after year. But the more you create an environment where you're listening to new ideas, inviting them and setting people up with, here's the end result we want. And I care less really about how we get there within, you know, whatever legal and ethical and regulatory bounds are in your industry. The more you can be towards that end of the spectrum, the better off you're going to be. And yeah, I mean, you're going to have,
You're going to have to give up a little bit of the glory sometimes, but as long as you have a good corporate structure and a good manager on top of you that incentivizes you to stay there, then they're going to recognize that, that you, you know, with a, the, uh, what is it? The, um, the director of the orchestra, right? They're going to know that, that your subset of people is outperforming everybody else because of you, not just because you have the five best people in the company.
Brian Nelson-Palmer (31:32.292)
right? Well, and people want to be on the teams where the supervisors let them shine. And I mean, it's, it's, it's a self, it's a, it's, it's perpetuating. It gets better and better as it, as it goes. So, um, all right, Brian, I want to switch gears because the other thing that you really is a fascinating topic to me. And that's something that is certainly interesting. And you talk about is let's talk about passive income, but the key is let's talk about when we say passive income, or in this case, what I'm interested in is truly passive income. Like people have been talking about passive income for years. You might've read the four hour work week or some of these other books and like, okay, so you've got a portfolio of Airbnbs that you own or something, or you have a rental property or something like that. But even though that is sort of passive income, what I'm interested in like truly passive income, because if you've got to spend every weekend cleaning and rebooking your Airbnb,
then that's going to be a whole job in and of itself, even though it's not 40 hours a week or something. So, so, so I want to make sure when we're talking about passive income, yes, to an extent, it's something you don't have to show up and work billable hours for, but also let's dive into the truly passive income stuff too.
Brian Glass (32:50.046)
I call this the lie of passive income. So, because there's so many, there's so many influencers and I see sponsored, you know, whatever on Instagram and TikTok and YouTube where like, oh, I bought 18 Airbnbs and now I'm retired. No, you're not retired. You manage 18 Airbnbs. You just do something different, right? So I got interested in passive income in a roundabout way. A couple of years ago, I was really heavily into the financial independence retire early movement. So there's all these influencers writing about on blogs or on podcasts about how we can accumulate enough money. And if it's something like, if you accumulate 25 times your annual spend, okay, you're financially free because that's the 4% rule.
You can bleed down your portfolio at 4% a year and you won't have to do anything else. You won't have to generate any other income that allows you to retire. I was playing around with that idea and I was like, man, it's going to take me a long time to get there. There's another part of the equation, which is what if I can generate some additional income that either is truly passive or that I'm working not so hard at? My wife and we have an Airbnb at the beach. We are hourly rate on that. If we were tracking, it is really, really high. Um, and there's some tax, tax stuff that I won't get into that allows you to write off a lot of the income that's coming in from that real estate. I have somebody else who's paying down my mortgage. The thing is appreciating, um, at a certain percentage each year. So, so real estate tends to be a pretty high leverage, um, vehicle. It also tends to be a fairly time consuming vehicle. And so when we.
We first bought it in October of 2021, and I looked at the pro forma and I was like, man, all I need is four of these, four of these, and I'm set, right? That would generate enough income to pay all of my costs of being alive, even with kids in daycare. But it turns out that managing four Airbnbs in a place where you don't live is pretty time consuming. Like there's a lot of phone calls, especially during the heavy season.
And so, Brian, I've pivoted away from that. And the chief investments that I'm looking for now are syndications, investing in somebody else's deal, where I fund the deal with money. Typically, the minimum investment is $25,000, $50,000, $100,000 into these deals. And then somebody, the general partner goes and operates the deal. And then every month or every quarter, depending on the project, there's a check that just shows up back in my bank account.
for a preferred amount, right? So the last deal that I did is a housing deal. It's like 48. is a 48 unit deal somewhere in Kentucky. And the deal is I gave them $25,000. They're gonna send me a check for 7% per year, once a quarter. And then when the unit sells in six years is the pro forma plan, then we're gonna split. I'm gonna get 75% of the proceeds from that. They're gonna get the other 25%. Now, they don't bring a lot of cash to that deal.
And so they're earning their money by the work that they're putting in on it. And I bring all the cash, but after I vetted the deal, I don't have to do any of the work, right? I've now created an income stream that's showing up 7% of my money for the next six years and then the equity on the backend. So that's really the kind of things that I'm looking for now. You can do it with dividend stocks on a little bit. I don't know. You might call that less risky. You might call it more risky depending on which side of the equation that you're in. But almost nothing is truly passive except for these syndications. They're a little bit riskier because you have to trust the operator, but you get compensated for that risk in terms of the return. So if you're listening and that's kind of interesting to you, a book that I would recommend is something called The Hands Off Investor by Brian Burke. That's a really good guide to investing in your first couple of deals like this, questions that you should be asking syndicators. There's a lot to learn out there. And one of the things that we're learning in 2023 is as interest rates have gone up, which in retrospect, everybody should have expected, but in reality, almost nobody was planning on having a 5% Fed funds rate in May of 2023. That's making a lot of these deals go bad. And so there's, there's risk there and, and you, you need to approach it conservatively. But if you look at enough, you'll find stuff that fits your, your deal criteria.
Brian Nelson-Palmer (37:56.088)
So we talked about dividend stocks or that kind of thing. And that's true, right? It's fully passive income. So you find some of those deals. I'm heavily into that part. I've got it. I will say it's a comforting thing to know that like, for example, if I was able to, like if I were to win the lotto tomorrow or something, I know exactly where I would put that money to be able to not have to work again.
period. And so there's a, there's a comfort in like at least having the plan. I don't have the cash to do that. I'm still here hustling with everybody else, but over time, like that, that's the hope is to move toward that. So I like this, the syndicated real estate deals. Is there a certain website or something that you, is that like, Oh gosh, they're, they're, Oh, it was fund rise.
Brian Glass (38:40.714)
Now, so Fundrise is a, they may be doing something like that. I thought Fundrise was a little bit different. The website that I did my first couple deals on was CrowdStreet. And CrowdStreet, the great benefit of CrowdStreet is that you can go and you can watch 12 webinars in a day on different deals and you can get yourself an education. through no other means than listening to the questions that investors that are smarter than you are asking at the Q&A portion of that webinar. You know, I think especially the part in the market cycle that we are now, that the deals that are being crowdfunded, like you need to be a little bit wary of, right? There's a reason that those deals didn't get funded by sophisticated investors and that they've trickled their way down to crowdfunding sites.
And so, you know, the advice that I would give anybody who's, who's looking at those deals now is you find somebody who's already doing it and get a list of people that they trust. And most of these operators are really small and are doing one or maybe two deals a year. Um, but if you, my, my goal right now is to build up a portfolio of people that I trust that I will do deals with in the future so that I don't have to go and look for them.
Brian Nelson-Palmer (40:05.368)
Yeah. When you, when you look at the, you talked about 7% back or whatever is that, is it, do you approach that the same way? Are you evaluating that the same way you do? Like, well, I could put it in this savings account and make 5% or this one would be 7% or do you look at it as more of the equity on like, how do you like think to the equity on the back end? How do you compare them?
Brian Glass (40:30.602)
Yeah. You got to think holistically about the deal. Most of these deals are underwritten somewhere between 14 and maybe 18% internal rate of return IRR. The 7% back is only a piece of it. You're going to get the other 75% in the equity, which, okay, if everything bears out translates to something like 14 to 18% while the money market account is getting 5%.
stocks historically eight to 10. But the benefit is, and again, I don't want to go too far into the woods on this, the depreciation that comes with the real estate rules. And so as you build up a pool of depreciated assets and then your passive money is coming back in, then the IRS doesn't recognize that passive money that's coming back in as income. because you're offsetting it by the depreciation. So as you are buying more and more deals and accumulating more depreciation, then that 7% that's coming back is not taxed in the same way that your dividend stock or that your capital gain will be taxed. Now, on the back end, there's a tax, right? On the exit, you get taxed on the whole deal, plus the depreciation recapture. There's a couple of ways to get around that. It's called a 1031 Lake Kind Exchange. If you're selling one unit for another unit. you can roll that forward really until you die and then your errors get it at a stepped up basis. But all of these rules were things I didn't totally understand when I got into it. I was like, okay, great, depreciation, I'm gonna write off $20,000. And then I was like, oh, you can only write off the $20,000 against the income that was coming in from the asset, which is like 500 bucks. So that didn't work out the first year. But that's why I started small and diversified and I've learned a lot along the way.
Brian Nelson-Palmer (42:26.66)
Sure. Absolutely. That makes perfect sense. Gosh. Well, fascinating, fascinating one there. I'm going to include the links to you said the hands off investor by Brian Burke and you mentioned Liz Weissman to all. I'll include those links in the, in the, in the show notes for everybody so that they can, they can check it out. Um, for you, the one last thing I wanted to ask you is about, are any of these, is there, what does this mean to you?
Brian Glass (42:37.366)
Yes. Luz, yep.
Brian Nelson-Palmer (42:55.572)
And I'm stepping back here to talk about billable hours and passive, the past truly passive income. What does this mean to you personally? Is there like a personal connection for Brian Glass himself instead of this, you know, the business thing and the entrepreneur and the teacher? What does it mean for you?
Brian Glass (43:14.73)
Yeah. So, so what I've, what I've learned in this journey, um, is that nobody who has gotten themselves to a place where their passive income replaces their active income and pays all of their costs actually then goes and retires to the beach. So, you know, I heard you say, okay, I know what I would do if I, if I won the lottery, like you might know what you would do with the money.
but do you know what you would do with the rest of your life? Because if you went and just sat on the beach and drank my ties, like your health would go downhill really quickly and your mind would start to go too, because you're not intellectually stimulated. And so, so that's a roundabout way of saying, for me, it creates a sense of financial security where if I can get to a place where I know that all of my costs are paid for by something that I'm not working on, it really frees me up to say no to things that I don't want to do. To say no to the kinds of cases or to the kinds of clients that lawyers say yes to when we're financially stressed. The demanding clients, the more difficult, more risky, lower value cases. Because you can get to this point where, all right, I haven't signed up a client in two weeks, a kind of a C plus case calls and you go, well, I got to take it because the phone might never ring again. Right. But if you can build that portfolio to the place where you don't have those financial stressors, well, now you can go and concentrate really on the things that are the best use of your time that you're uniquely good at, that really, really make you happy. And so for me, it is coaching. It's it. I love talking to people, especially lawyers who are like three to 10 years behind where I am. So you know, I, again, I graduated into a recession. It looks to me like a recession is coming. I've been posting a lot of stuff on LinkedIn and just inviting law students to reach out to me and do zoom calls about like, how would I find a job? My career services office is no good at hooking me up with a small or a midsize law firm. Like how would I even approach somebody like you to find out if they had a job that I could have? Um, so, but I couldn't do all of that. If I was stressed about the next case,
and the next dollar. And certainly if I were billing by the hour, I wouldn't have the flexibility to have those calls for free without dipping into time that I would rather be spending with my family. So that's what it is to me. It's building up that stream of income for stuff that you're not working on so that you can go and do the things that you're really passionate about.
Brian Nelson-Palmer (46:02.752)
Absolutely, that makes sense. And I on a side note, I want to pivot and just ask this sort of maybe it's an obvious question to me and to no one else. But the question that I'm curious about is at what point do does someone approach someone like you, Brian, as far as if you've got a case or you were just in an accident? I they jokingly call you guys ambulance chasers because you can always leverage something for a settlement or something like what if you were giving advice to people who would be potential clients? Like what? How do you look at it and go?
Yeah, that's a case or no, I wouldn't take this on and that any thoughts there?
Brian Glass (46:34.574)
I wish I could always leverage anything into a settlement. I think that's the perception, but it's not reality. Yeah, so in my world, in auto accident cases, really I only want to talk to people who were not at fault, number one, who have good insurance coverage, number two, because that can really .. If the world's greatest $10 million value case walks into my office, but there's only $25,000 in coverage, the case is worth $25,000 because there's nowhere to get extra money from. So I'm going to talk to good crashes, good insurance coverage, and somebody who's probably already started a course of medical care. You've been to a hospital, you've seen your primary care doctor, and you're already in physical therapy. I really don't want to be talking to people who were in a crash yesterday, haven't seen a doctor yet, and are calling me to say, what do I do next? I tell this story from time to time. I got a call once in my career from a guy.
who'd gone to a Korean barbecue place and gotten food poisoning. And he'd gone home and gotten sick, but he didn't have any medical costs. And so I said, I can't help you because you didn't get any medical care. He said, well, I know that they don't wash the dishes very well at that place. And so I'm probably like, if I go back and I get sick again, what do I do next time? I was like, this is where we've gotten with thinking that you can leverage anything into a settlement. So.
No, really I'm going to be talking with good, honest people who were hurt and can't figure out what to do with the insurance company.
Brian Nelson-Palmer (48:08.952)
And is it your insurance company or the other party's insurance company or both?
Brian Glass (48:14.29)
Both and. Yeah. Yeah. Depending on what kind of coverage you have, what kind of coverage the other guy has, it might be yours, it might be his, it might be both.
Brian Nelson-Palmer (48:25.188)
Got it. Are you generally able? Is it normally one or the other? Like if you're taking, you're going after one or the other or are there situations where if both of you, both parties have great insurance coverage, then there's a payment from both.
Brian Glass (48:38.73)
Yeah. So it's different state to state. And so in Virginia, if you're hurt, so I know that you're a Virginia resident at least part of the year, you probably have some first party coverage on your policy that will pay you while you're getting medical treatment. Your chief claim is going to be against the guy that hit you until the limits of his insurance policy. And then if you have a case that's worth more than his insurance policy, and you have a better insurance policy than his, then...
We go back to your policy for the under-insured portion of the claim.
Brian Nelson-Palmer (49:12.208)
Got it. OK. That makes sense. So after you've seeked medical care, talk to Brian. OK. This is good. Yeah.
Brian Glass (49:20.054)
Yeah, or in the middle of it, right? Just don't call me and from the side of the road and say what do I do next? There's plenty of YouTube videos that'll tell you what to do that, you know, it's not it's not worth my time to be on the phone with somebody To explain how to get to the hospital
Brian Nelson-Palmer (49:34.664)
Yep, very cool. Well, Brian, here's what I love. I love that you are. I love that you made this pivot to I jokingly call it commission, but I know it's not commission. But at the same time, like you're paid for performance or that kind of thing. So you sort of pivoted away from billable hours to a situation where it's not the hours as much as it's the business in the bottom line. And what I what I love is that you seem to have embraced it and followed it. I know there are some people who
I guess I don't know. I don't want to say talk down, but I feel like there's some people who sort of have this look down their nose attitude toward folks that work like you. And what I see is I see a guy with a family who does good work and takes care of good people and that kind of thing. So I love that you made that business and that you're you made that pivot to that business and you're still you're still doing it. Thanks for thanks for doing that.
Brian Glass (50:28.534)
We've lawyers as a class, we've done ourselves no favors with the billboards and with the TV ads, right? So some of that we brought upon ourselves. Um, but, but yeah, I mean, no, listen, everybody looks down their nose until they need you, right? I'm okay with that. I'm just, just hire me. I don't care what you thought about me last week. That's fine.
Brian Nelson-Palmer (50:53.58)
I love it. Very good. And now you had, you had wanted to mention, so you've got this podcast. Talk about the podcast real quick.
Brian Glass (51:00.906)
Yeah. So wait, so I've got a show called Time Freedom for Lawyers where in general, Brian, I talk about living an extraordinary life as a lawyer. So my profession, we outpace almost everybody else. Like it's us and doctors in terms of stress, anxiety, depression, divorce, and suicide. And, and my message, the message of the traditional bar is that the way to avoid all of those things is like yoga and meditation and doing pro bono work. And my message is the way to avoid all those things is to create the kind of business and firm that you love to work at, because you're gonna be here 40 plus hours a week, right? So it better be with employees that you enjoy, working with clients who have interesting cases and who are nice to you, right? And most lawyers just never even think that that's an option. So we talk about that, and I talk to all kinds of high level
entrepreneurs, including yourself, about how do we best leverage our time in order to live the kind of lives that we want to live.
Brian Nelson-Palmer (52:08.408)
Yeah, absolutely. And I do have to say, shameless plug, I'll put it in the notes, but I did have the chance to go appear on Brian's show. So if you want to check out the episode that I was on, Brian, it was full of good questions. It was the Brian show. Like we got the two Brian's going on here, but it definitely, we talked about some really good stuff about the value of your time and that kind of stuff. So I had a really good time on the show and I've enjoyed checking out his show. So I hope that you will too.
And Brian, for the people that want to get in touch with you after this or want to keep in touch or follow you, what's the best place for them to do it?
Brian Glass (52:40.594)
Yes. I'm going to ask them to link it. And I try to post there once a day. Um, they say something controversial once a week, you know, and, and mostly entertain myself. Yeah. Most mostly, honestly, with my podcast and LinkedIn, I'm mostly trying to entertain myself, which I'm, I'm not ashamed to say.
Brian Nelson-Palmer (52:49.912)
Try to start something.
Brian Nelson-Palmer (53:02.488)
That's awesome. Well, and ultimately, I mean, the whole thing about influencers and you talked a lot about influencers earlier and that kind of stuff, or we mentioned that. And the thing about influencers is that pretty much everything you see online, if it's an influencer, they were probably paid to do that. So they were paid to get you to think a certain way or pay. They might've been paid to say, I think a certain way. And so wading through the message, whether they admitted it or not, getting your stuff on social media is that's, that's such a thing.
to find out what Brian thinks just because this is Brian talking to Brian Glass talking about what he thinks. So that kind of thing. I've, I thought your posts are refreshing. So, uh, so keep it up, sir. And, and for you tuning in one specific quest, if one specific request for you, do you have a friend or a colleague who works on billable hours who are, who is interested in passive income? And if you do would you share the link to this episode specifically with them? Sometimes people say, Oh, I love this podcast and you check it out and there's all these episodes and whatever like start with this one. But if you want to share this episode with them, I know both Brian and I, both Brian's who would love for to, to reach those folks with this discussion. So thanks for tuning in. And for those who are interested in more, actually do more with email along with providing episodes like this, and I provide them in readable form. But if you subscribe now, I also
we'll share my top three time hacks that are the biggest surprise in my discussions in productivity gladiator workshops. So that's something I've had a lot of fun with recently. So thanks for checking out. Thanks for subscribing to the show. And I love sharing productivity gladiator with you. So that's a wrap.