202: The Six Friction Points Slowing Law Firm Growth with Tricia Warren, Fractional COO and Principal of TLW Integrated Solutions

If there's a lack of an SOP or a lack of a system, how do you develop those systems?

Absolutely. So, from a standard operating procedure perspective, the one question that you should ask yourself is, should I be the one that's doing the work on this repeated task, so if you have a task that you're a part of your regular work day, should I be the one that's doing that? And if not, that means that it's broken, that means that it's not end to end. It may be a portion of a process, but it's not end to end. The way you fix that is you truly walk yourself through what do I want my people or my clients to experience in this particular process, and you take it box by box, and the reason I mentioned intake is because it's the most highly touched process in any business, as well as law firms, as well, and so you go in and you really map out what that looks like, and the experience that you want to have with that process. It's not just about putting the process on paper, but what is the experience that you have there? And then you just marry your tools to that.

Welcome to the 10 Golden Rules of internet marketing for law firms podcast featuring the latest strategies and techniques to drive traffic to your website and convert that traffic into clients. Now here's the founder and CEO of 10 Golden Rules, Jay Berkowitz.

Well, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, whatever time you're listening or watching this fine podcast. Welcome to the 10 Golden Rules of Internet Marketing for Law Firms podcast. We have a great guest today. You'll meet Tricia in just one minute. Sometimes you meet really interesting people and you get inspired, so today's one of those inspired moments, and I wanted to do a quick commercial, as I always do it today. It's for the 10 Golden Rules YouTube channel. Now, if you're watching this on YouTube, and you've already subscribed to the channel, you get it. We get some amazing guests, and every month we do a really incredible topic on our webinar series, but if you're listening on Podbean or Spotify or iTunes, check out our YouTube channel. We've got some great content. We've got monthly webinars, some of them have had almost 100,000 views, over a million views on the entire channel. And when you're there, do us a favor, click subscribe, and then

you'll get a notification every time we do one of these great events. Without further ado, I want to introduce you to Tricia Warren, and she is the principal at T L W Integrated Solutions. She's a fractional COO, and a quick shout out to Katherine Hunter Blyden, who introduced us. But sometimes people make an introduction. They're like, "Hey, you just got to meet Christian. She's really amazing. She consults with businesses, and she consults with law firms. So, it's in our, our normal space. Actually, I meet some other businesses that aren't law firms. It's rare these days. We had this really interesting conversation, and we came up with what she calls friction points, and said that there's six friction points in every business. Now, as we started talking about them, performance and people and SOPs and systems and strategies to scale. I said, Trisha, this is great content. We got to talk about this on a TGR 10 golden rules, internet marketing for law firms

podcast. So, without further ado, Trisha, welcome to the 10 Golden Rules Internet Marketing for Law Firms podcast.

Thank you so much, Jay. I am excited to be here this morning.

Yeah, after that intro, I mean, you got to be fired up, right?

Exactly.

By the way, I just kind of say that a little bit tongue in cheek, because people come up to me and last week I was at one of the big legal conferences in the industry and people come up to me and they, they try and do the intro, I love that 10 golden rules internet marketing podcast,

yes, so it's

become a little bit of a meme, anyways, welcome, and I'd love to start out as I always do to learn about your journey, and how did you become an operations excellence expert for attorneys and others?

Absolutely, and Jay, I'll take you back a little bit and start from the beginning, just to help you understand a little bit about me and how I move and how I think. So my journey really starts with one word, and I call it resilience. I was born and raised in Atlanta by my mom in a single-parent home, and then just days after she dropped me off at college on a full ride, she unexpectedly passed away. So very early on at

seven, so sorry to hear that double. Tough.

Thank you, thank you. But you know what, it gives you resilience. As I talked about Jay, so as I began to navigate this life completely on my own, I went back to school because I wanted to honor her, and not only honor her, but become the first person in my family to graduate from college, which I did, and I have a degree in computer science, followed later by an executive MBA in marketing, but what's interesting, Jay, is that I never thought I'd end up in operations, even though I'm completely built for it. I thought I would either be like a criminal investigator or a fashion designer, and honestly, parts of my personality still kind of lean that way, but I started my career as a software engineer, and then I spent the next 28 years in corporate business leadership across seven different industries, and while working with very big global companies, Ernst and Young, McKesson, ISG, all of what you've probably heard of, but over time my work evolved from that engineering

lens, going into transformation execution, and then where I land today with operational excellence. So, what I kept seeing everywhere, regardless of the industry that I was in, was that businesses weren't failing because people were lacking talent or ideas, but Jay, they were really struggling with friction, which we'll talk about those six friction points later, but a lot of it is around unclear processes, poor alignment within a business, and just trying to scale without the right operating model to support the growth, so in late 2024 after a very defining experience, is what I'll say in corporate leadership. I decided just to walk away from corporate America and build something that I felt like was more in line with my values, my faith, and also just the way that I believe work should function. And during that transition, I wrote my first book, which is excellence in motion. It's a business leader's guide to operational success, and what I call the endless pursuit of

betterness. And then I launched my consulting company, which I do today, where I help people and businesses fix the friction that's slowing them down.

I love it. So, there's always crazy stories in corporate. I'm going to put you on the spot, and I'm going to say, tell us a crazy story from your corporate life, or maybe tell us a great story from your corporate life. How you develop this insight into operational management excellence.

Absolutely, so luckily for me, early on I had the ability to be able to move pretty in an agile way across different industries because my skill sets were always core to any business, so the one story that I talk about is when I was with a global firm and we were looking to stand up product marketing organizations and kind of get the operational rhythm of how the team would move and progress in this new way of working, and so the team was comprised of you had people that were in the planning area, people in enablement, sales, you had marketing people, product people, and we all spoke a different language, but honestly, it was the same language at the core, and so what helped me develop a lot of the skills that I use with my clients today, which is around listening, understanding the need of the customer, and understanding where they are at a particular point, was born during that time as I was building teams and connecting teams together, we had disparate tools,

we had disparate ways of working. Our operating models were all different because we were coming from different areas, but the gist of it is we as the people and humans had the heart to do the work, and so when you look at that and you talk about how do you come into an organization and leverage your skill sets and influence people to move in the operating way that you would want them to move. It really starts at the human factor. A lot of my work is very people focused, even though we get into the nuts and bolts of data processes and all of those things, but I'm a firm believer that you invest in your people first, and that's what I did in that particular situation. I understood the needs of the people, where they were coming from, and then help them understand, hey, we're one team moving forward as one team, and now we have to bring our systems and our processes and the way we operate into one consistent way of working,

you mentioned your faith, and I always love it when people are faith driven, particularly as it pertains to making business decisions. Maybe just give us a quick snippet on how your faith helped pick your path.

Oh gosh, I don't move without consulting. Team, my higher being above, and I say that because I talked a little bit about my journey in the beginning. I would not have survived that if it would not have been for faith. I've always had a strong foundation. My mom had me in church very, very early on, and even though your belief systems kind of morphs and change as you grow. I've always known that someone has had my back that was higher than me. I've always known that when I hit the brick wall, the door opens, because someone there is looking out for me, and I always consult my higher being, because if I move in a way that is not for good, and in good stewardship. Then I know I'm not moving properly, so I always do a check-in. I always check with my gut, and I always lean on God, who is my higher power, to help me direct my paths. And so far, I think He's been doing a pretty good job, Jake.

So I threw you a curveball, and you did pretty good. You did great, actually. I was asking a question, I was like, well, what? How would I answer this question? There's a story I love to tell. People say, you know, why 10 golden rules, and I say one of the things is, I always loved top 10 lists, and when I worked at Sprint, and we were doing all these technology products, I said, you know, let's, let's get focused here, and let's, let's make a top 10 list, and let's make sure that we're investing in time and resources. And then I moved to this great country, I was actually Canadian, I sponsored by e diets.com and I came to this company, and the founder owned over 110 patents, and he was an inventor, and every day he was inventing new things we could do, new marketing tests or new technology things, and every time he showed up on Monday morning, there were three or four ideas on your desk that he'd worked on all weekend, and actually most of us showed up on on

Saturday, because we had to keep up with this guy, and the problem with the company was we were all paralyzed because so many people had so many projects that came directly from the CEO, so I gathered all my fellow directors together and I said, let's make a list of all the projects and get them in on one sheet of paper, and we had 107 projects that were all different, and they were all came from Dave was the founder, and it was really paralyzing company, because everybody had a project directly from the boss, but if you were the director of marketing, you couldn't get the project designed or built, because those directors had projects directly from the boss, and if it involved HR, they had a project, and the CFO had three or four projects, so we made a list, and we prioritized things, and this was a company called E Diets, and at the very top we put the Atkins diet, because this was 2003 and Dr. Atkins had written this book that was number one on all the bestseller lists, and it was

like everyone's like, oh my god, if I could lose weight by only eating steak and chicken, and you know, when you actually read the book, the first week was induction, and it was steak and chicken, and then after that it was, you know, small pieces of steak or chicken with lots of salads and vegetables, like every other diet, you know, then we did the zone diet with Dr. Barry Sears, it was exactly the same without the induction week trick, you know, that made ack, anyways, so the first project we did was was Atkins. We said that's going to be number one. Number two was e fitness, which was like diets for men. Number three was the zone diet with Dr. Barry Sears, and we went to Dave and we said give us a chance. If we just prioritize these projects, you know, we'll get them done very quickly. We actually launched the Atkins diet in 45 days from that moment, and then we launched E Fitness, and then we launched the Zone Diet, and the company really took off once we had agreement on the

prioritization. So that's my corporate brain success story.

Love it.

Awesome. And thank you for sharing, and thank you for being so open with

us. Absolutely.

So let's get into six friction points in every business. This is going to take a little bit of time, because you got some good stuff there. So, when you're consulting with firms, and when you start seeing these, you've recognized that every business has the same issues, and the five of the six, or six of the six,

yeah,

three of the six. How do you identify that? What's that initial process?

Absolutely. So, when I go into a client's environment, I'm always asking around three things: it's around people, process, and technology, i.e. tools. And so, when I go in and I look at those. I'm looking at those different things to understand how are they performing today. Do we have any thing around them that helps people in your organization understand how they perform in your environment, and that always leads me back to what you were trying to allude. To before are these six friction points, so let's dive a little bit into each of those. The first one is around performance and people, so I've talked about people being one of those core pillars. Jay, I have spent years watching what I consider incredibly talented people work inside of environments that are filled with unnecessary friction. Defining friction, it means basically unclear expectations, broken processes, any type of constant overwhelm you feel when you're in environment, poor communication

from leaders, and then lastly, leaders really carrying far more than they should, so when I look at the people component, I look at all of those elements, but I also look at it from a performance perspective. Do your people know their role? Have you clearly outlined what their job descriptions are in your operating model and in your environment, and then once you've done that, How do they feel in that environment? Do they have room to grow? Do you have a way to talk to them about performance through an official performance management framework, so that they understand your expectations, how you're capturing KPIs and metrics around them, and then how they're going to end up at those touch points as you're managing their performance throughout. So, I see a lot of areas there where people a lot of time don't understand their role, and the thing I like to say to leaders all the time is, make sure your people are in the boat with you, don't be in the boat by yourself paddling, and then you

look around, and your people are still on shore. You absolutely need your people to be there with you. So that's one.

Let me refund that a bit, if I can, because I

want this to be

a little bit back and forth, because I've learned so many of these lessons with having my business for 23 years, and in particular, we've really, we've really sharpened the saw with EOS, the entrepreneurial operating system, and I know you're a fan and not a devotee. Is that a fair assessment of EOS? So you know one of the things about EOS, we've been using EOS for about five years, and if you're not familiar, it's the Entrepreneurial Operating System book called Traction by Gino Wickman, and we've talked a lot about it on this podcast. You can find entire webinar on EOS, and we've interviewed a lot of the experts. So one of the things that we've honed in on our company, and part of it is like I think five years ago we were seven people, now we're 21 or 22 and so we really evolved from a company that Jay could manage one to one with, with, you know, you can handle seven direct reports, more or less. We evolved to having a leadership team, and so we addressed a

lot of these things, and the first thing, especially as you grow quickly, we realized that, you know, we were pretty good at hiring, but we weren't as good at training and onboarding, though that was super critical. You said job descriptions, clarity super important around the role EOS actually does away with the organizational chart, and they bring in the accountability chart.

Absolutely,

you forget the people, and you say, 'What do we need everyone in each seat to do? And then one of the things that's been super valuable for us is the right person, right seat, which is the evaluation of a person in EOS, and right person is, does that person align with your core values? Absolutely, core values are expect excellence, make it fun and easy, own it, and solve it, and lead the trends around innovation, which we'll talk about, and so it's relatively easy to figure out. Okay, is that person in alignment? We go through that in the hiring process, in the review, and then the right seat is, do they get it, want it, and have capacity.

Absolutely,

does the person get the role? Okay, yeah, they, we, they totally get it. Do they want it? And sometimes actually don't like, sometimes people would rather be in another role once they get into the company, and then capacity, like a lot of times people fall down because I think we're guilty at 10 golden rules, and everybody's guilty at most companies, when someone's really good,

yes,

the first thing you do is you give them something else, give them something else, and give them something else. Generally, at the fourth job, you give them the fourth full-time job. Even your A players fall down a little bit. Absolutely, those would be some of the headlines that when you talked about performance of people that we've gotten better at and gotten more honed in on as leadership team.

Jay, I was one of the A players in corporate, the one that was sitting there, get my work done, and I will always have 10 extra things stacked on the side as well.

Yeah, I know what that's like. Like, I was at Sprint, you know, the technology company, we were cell phones and it originally as the director of marketing, and it was going great. And so then they gave me events, then they gave me. Corporate training, then they gave me the President's Award, and the sales conferences, and stuff, and it was like I was doing great with three and four, they broke back. That's a mistake that we all make as managers. So I know that one from the, you know, manager side and from the employee side.

Absolutely, absolutely. Jay, let's talk a little bit about processes, so the SOPs and the systems that support the people, because it's not only about the people, it's about the processes that are around them as well, and that's the second leg, is what I'll call in that three leg prong, but the second friction point, so when I talk about operational friction, and we talk about SOPs and systems, there are tons of inefficiencies, breakdowns, and bottlenecks in processes today, and it slowly kills the organization, because you may have player A over here that is trying to find their way, because they're going to find a way through and get it done, no matter what. And then you may have player B over here that's trying to follow the brokenness of the process and may not be able to maneuver in the same way as your other individuals are able to do in law firms. Specifically, the impact is real, and I know that you know this as well, intake is the most critical

process when you're speaking about a law firm, because it's the first point of contact for your customers. It's a lot riding on that. You're talking about customer experience, you're talking about whether or not you're going to actually get the customer in based on your response time and how you're dealing with the customer. So, I think when you have your processes and systems singing in harmony, as I'll call it, that's when you've nailed the game and you've eliminated that friction, because now your people, you fix them, and now they're operating in an environment with tools and processes that support them and also makes you have a good outcome with your client experience.

We called it SOPs and systems, SOPs being standard operating procedures.

Yeah,

if there's a lack of an SOP or a lack of a system, how do you develop those systems?

Absolutely, so from a standard operating procedure perspective. The one question that you should ask yourself is, should I be the one that's doing the work on this repeated task? So, if you have a task that you're a part of your regular work day, should I be the one that's doing that, and if not, that means that it's broken. That means that it's not end to end. It may be a portion of a process, but it's not end to end. The way you fix that is you truly walk yourself through what do I want my people or my clients to experience in this particular process, and you take it box by box, and the reason I mentioned intake is because it's the most highly touched process in any business, as well as law firms, as well, and so you go in and you really map out what that looks like and the experience that you want to have with that process. It's not just about putting the process on paper, but what is the experience that you have there, and then you just marry your tools to that. I know

a lot of people go out and purchase tons of different tools in their businesses, because it may do one thing very well, but you've got to be strategic about that. You want to make sure that your systems can marry to your processes, because they should be embedded in your systems when you talk about efficiency processes. Do not sit outside of systems, they should be inside of a system, and if there's anything that's outside, it should be very quick and then go back into the system to complete the overall process.

Trisha, do you know how to make toast? I'm sure you're laughing because you've seen the TED talk on how to make toast, and there's a great, I love this video on how to develop systems and processes, and we do this all the time. So, first things have the team watch this video, and there's a group of people fumbling through how to explain to people how to make toast, but the second part of the video, they use this process where you just basically map out every step in the process, and they use yellow stickies, and they do it on a whiteboard. Yeah, move things like, well, wait, we can't, you know, we can't do this

till

we've done that. You can't write the copy till you've done the keyword research and written search engine architecture in our SEO business, and so remote company now there's virtual yellow stickies software that you can move the stickies, and so every one of our SOPs is documented and goes into a software called Clickup, which is our project management software, and so every business should have SOPs, and the other. Almost, it seems like every second podcast, when I ask people the best business book, they refer to E-Myth. So, if you don't, haven't read E-Myth, it's a book about systematizing your business, so that you can make the same Big Mac in Boston and Bangkok, if you're McConnell.

All

right, next up, the third friction point in every business is

leadership and management. So, you heard me talk a little bit about my little example of you're in a boat as a leader, make sure your team is in the boat with you. What I find a lot of times across businesses is that even though they may have defined roles for what their people are to do. Leadership and management is still very involved in the day to day, the weeds, the task, and as a leader, you're responsible for guiding the ship, setting the pace, helping people understand your expectations around how you would allow them to operate in your environment, and what's best for your end result with your customers. So, the friction point here around leaders is get out of the weeds, trust your people. We talked a little bit earlier about hiring on the right seats. You want to make sure you have the right people in the right seats, so that you're actually leading, and you're the person that they can come to for direction setting. The other piece I'll say around leadership

is don't flail on your decisions. Decision making and leadership is so critical. If you're bouncing around and you're changing your mind every time you have a conversation with someone, guess what, your people are trying to adjust to that, because at the end of the day they want to do what's right for the company and your expectations, but if you're not even clear and the way that you speak is not with clarity, then that rocks the boat, and some of your people are probably in the ocean because you've not been clear on the direction that you want to set for them to move forward.

Yeah, I'm going to defer back to a couple of EOS principles, but these are general business principles. And the first one is the visionary integrator duo. And so I learned, and actually got a lot of relief by understanding that there's a lot of people like me. I thought I was unique. Go to a conference and come back with 10 ideas, and try and instill in everyone the same excitement for all 10 ideas. You know, everybody's busy. Everybody had a 40 hour or 50 hour work week before Jay went to some conference last week with San Antonio, the week before it was DC, and came back with all these ideas. So, what I found out is that the visionary is the idea person is typically the front person for the company, typically does the big strategic relationships, does the high-end sales, and that's very common in the CEO or the visionary. And then what you need is you need a great integrator or operations officer or fractional operations expert like Tricia, if you want to start

fractional and maybe go full time down the road, and that person is responsible for developing the systems, and one of the great things is when you bring back the 10 ideas from the conference, my integrator, Nikki, will take the list of 10, she'll write them down, and she'll put them in our management software called 90, and she'll say, "Jay, these nine ideas are great. We're going to prioritize them in our next quarterly meeting, which is coming up. It's not too far away. It's started July, but this one idea is great. This is going to solve one of our quarterly rocks, which are our big projects, and she'll take care of that right away, and she'll, you know, integrate it into one of our SOPs, so the most important thing I've learned is that I have a role and it's very, very clear, and then I need to put great people in the other seats who are great at what they do, and fascinating, there's an exercise in EOS which is called delegate and elevate, elevate, and delegate,

and there's four quadrants: things you're great at that you love, things you're good at but you don't necessarily love, things that you know you can do but you don't like doing them, and things you you're bad at and you hate doing, and instilling systems and operating processes is in my bottom quadrant, I don't like doing it. I'm not great at it. Well, guess what? Nikki, my integrator, loves doing

like, hey, put

me a checklist and let me up, get it into operational and create Loom videos, and make sure the team executes every single time. She loves doing that. You got to get yourself into the seats that you're good at and you love doing, and get out of the seats that you're not as good at.

Love it.

I'm rambling a little bit today, but hopefully it's good. Number four, the fourth friction point in every business:

data and decision making. So, we talk a little bit. Yeah, it is. And that we talked about decision making with leaders. Is which is different than when you're having that data decision making across your organization, so a lot of times when my clients come to me, my first question to them is, Do you have data, is it clean, and do you have a place to store it, and a lot of times I get these blank stares, of you know, I get reports. Okay, reports are different, though, because you can create 15 different reports, and the data within it is, are old or stale, or doesn't give you any type of vision into what you need to do. Data is critical, and the reason why I have it on the list as a friction point, is because a lot of companies and businesses do not make sure that it's clean. It is critical to your decision-making process, not only from a leadership perspective, but from your people as well. Data lives at all different levels. There's leadership data for leadership

reports, there's reports for team managers that they need to manage your teams with. There's also data on your clients and how they're experiencing your services. So it is critical that you have a system to store it in that it is integrated with your other systems. Data lives in all systems, not just one, and all of it comes together to help your leaders and your teams with good decision making, and it sounds like Jay, you have an amazing team on your side as well, and I'm sure you understand the criticality of what data and decision making means, not only for a small business, but for medium and large size businesses as well.

Yeah, a couple things I've learned about data is one is a cadence, like there's certain data that you need to look at every week, and certain data you need to look at every month, and there's a great tool for data within EOS in this management platform I talked about, called 90, but there's there's a lot of ways to do it, we used to just have a spreadsheet and we'd look at it every week, but in every department we have defined the KPIs, the key performance indicators, and every person has has a number. Now, some people have three, some people have one, and they, they have to enter that number every week in the scorecard, or every month if it's more of a monthly data point. And then they're responsible for that number, and then the way this scorecard works is we see the past six or eight weeks and the target number for each week, and if we're red, like the system goes green and red if you hit your target number, so obviously greens are go and reds are not good, if we

see two or three reds in a row, you got a problem with that data that result, and there's a great term in the US called drop it down, and what that means is we're going to drop it down the agenda to the issues, and we're going to make it an issue. We're going to talk about it, and when you talk about an issue, you identify the issue very clearly. What are we talking? Then you discuss, then you solve within 10 or 15 minutes. You solve these big data point issues, and any other business issues, and I just love the, I love the simplicity and the structure of that, that this methodology has brought to our business.

Absolutely. Friction

point number five.

This is about how do you scale and scale strategically, so we have a lot of businesses that are out there that may just be starting up, but you also have businesses that are in the throes of it, as I would say. So you've built this business, you started off with the foundational rocks that you needed to start off with, but then you notice, whoa, wait a minute, something's feeling not right, I'm growing, wow, great, but that also means that I need to scale internally to be able to grow effectively, and all that means is as you grow, your needs change, so the system that got you from point a to point b, and the people and the processes may not be the same people process and technology that gets you to point B, and so it's always critical to have an eye on your organization to, as you grow, understand what's changing. You're going to feel it, you may even feel it before you see it, but you must be aware of what those nuggets are, so that as you're scaling,

you're fixing things along the way, and you're being strategic and intentional about it. And Jay, I'm sure when you were scaling your business and growing, you probably had some of these challenges as well, and you can understand that as a smaller or medium or even large size business that's grown, you must be intentional and you must have strategies around how do you scale effectively operationally, and that's always again keeping a pulse of people, process, and the systems that you're using, and making sure that it's scaling with you as you grow. I

love what you said about the integrated nature of scaling, because when we set our goals and we talk about our. Sales and marketing goals. The operations team is always like, oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, you know, like, you know, if you guys bring in four new clients a month, how are we going to handle that? It's like, no problem, we got a plan for that. It's called the hire ahead of need. We hire an account manager and a strategist. We always have an extra great candidate in training and slowly learning our systems for three to six months, so that if we achieve our sales and business goals, we can accommodate that again. Back to the numbers, like one thing we've learned, and I learned this from my mastermind called Seven Figure Agency, which I often quote on this podcast as well, that if we have 25 sales marketing leads a month and 15 qualified meetings, meaning that it's someone who's actually looking for some marketing improvements, they might not exactly specifically want

to hire us or an agency, but something's broken and they're trying to figure out how they're going to fix it, and if we write, you know, six or eight proposals and sign three or four clients, that's an awesome month for us, and it all comes down to the numbers, and again, when you come back to the data points, like if we didn't have 25 meetings last month, I'm pretty sure that I'm not going to write six or eight proposals, I'm not going to sign three or four new clients, so the math, the data tells exactly how our business is doing, and then we've got to go back to the strategies to scale, there's five different categories of where we get our marketing meetings. There's the qualification of those meetings. Everything has a defined system in our sales and marketing process.

Makes perfect sense, and it sounds like Jay, that you have a good model that other people could use as well, just being intentional about it, and thinking about it, and not only that, knowing your business, that's what's huge too. So, Jay, you know, as we talk about the scaling of it all, you know, we're at our sixth point now, and that's around innovation and AI. Oh, the buzzword of AI, right?

We can't do any, any conversation these days with two business consultants without bringing in AI. Right.

Oh boy, we would not have done our job if we did not talk about it. But let's talk about how it's critical and why it rounds out to be that last friction point. So we've talked about people, we've talked about process, we've talked about making sure that your systems support your people and your processes, and that they're integrated together, so that the data makes sense as you're looking as a leader to make decisions about moving forward, and as you're getting comfortable with the way that you're growing and scaling. Here's where AI innovation comes in, and I know it's a term that a lot of people are a little afraid of, because people are, oh my gosh, is AI going to take away my job? Remember, I talked about earlier how I am a people-centered person, I go in that way because people are important, humans are important, and humans are needed, even in AI, but specifically when you talk about operations, once you fix all of those three areas of friction, now

you're ready to start talking about AI or automation, which are two different things. But specifically around AI, it will expose anything that is not working right very, very quickly, which is why it's so important for you to fix that foundation first, but once you fix it, your next step, when you're talking about AI, is to look at what type of use cases do I have in my organization. Don't just go out and buy an AI tool because it's nice and sexy, and everybody's talking about it. You need to make sure you have a solid use case around it, you also need to make sure that you have some goals. What are you after? What are your problems that you're trying to solve with AI? And then after that, put some guard rails around it and do a pilot. Just pick one friction point. One friction point could be your people, it could be your one process that you use on a day-to-day basis, or it could be a system that you want to integrate more into your environment, but pick one thing, do a use case

around it, put some goals around it, and then run a pilot. If your pilot is successful, guess what, you fix that friction point, and now you're ready to move on to the next more efficient way that you can work in another piece of your business. Jay, I'm sure, like we talked about with AI, I'm sure you're experiencing some of these things as well. I would like to hear, what are you doing? I know it's your interview, but what are you doing around AI in your law firm? How do you feel about it? A

couple notes I made on this topic, you know, the first one is 10 golden rules. Golden rule number 10 is called Lead the Trends, and not surprisingly, one of our core values is Lead the Trends. Core to 10 golden rules is innovation, but a big part of that is like we're in the technology space, so when. And you know when we started the business, I wrote the 10 golden rules of online marketing. There was no books or courses on internet marketing back in 2002 and when we, we did our first blog, almost nobody knew what a blog was, and we did a blog for 10 golden rules, and it was a lot of technology to get it up and get it, get it running, and then we figured out how to do it, and what to blog about, and then we taught our clients how to do it. Same thing with podcasts, same things with video when they first came out. And today it's, it's a part of AI. So, the tips I have for people, the first one I always say is, follow Jay's rule of three. Trisha, have you heard of that

before?

No. Tell me, what is Jay's rule of three?

Basically, it's just, you know, keep your ears open, and when you're listening to podcasts, and you're at a conference, and you're hearing smart people, when you hear about something three times, it's probably legit. You probably have to check it out, like if everybody's buzzing about, you know, some new technology, you know, you're going to go check it out, and then you're going to decide, is this real, is this legit,

and then

it's super important, and the lead the trends golden rule says that when something's legit, you heard Trisha talk about it, you heard Jay talk about it, and then you're at your conference, you heard about it, like now it's it's the rule of three, I got to check this out, so obviously everyone's talking about AI, or whatever, or a specific type of

AI,

the opportunity when you decide it's legit, like this thing's going to change our business, it's a business opportunity for ourselves or our clients. Then I immerse myself, like a few months ago it was everyone was talking about open club, open claw, and I heard about it on a podcast, I heard about it in my, in my mastermind, I heard about it. I read about it in a blogger. And then, okay, so I've got to get Open Claw. So the guy who talked about it had a guy who set up a computer, and I have a separate Mac here, and it's a whole separate computer that's running Open Claw. And I did that for a couple months, and fortunately, what happened was Perplexity or Claude kicked out Open Claw, more or less, they developed Cloud Cowork.

The

great news is now it was a lot easier because Openclaw, you had to write some code and it was really complex, and so the next evolution is Cloud Cowork. So, but I'd already done all this experimentation and developed some systems for doing new business prospecting, which is the one area I'm using it personally a lot. So, then the next step I need to get this tool people also call AI agents. I need to get it into my company. So, how do we do that? So, what we do is we formed a cross-functional team. We've got two or three people from each team, and we're all experimenting a little bit. I got everybody access to cloud cowork teams, which is important, by the way, you got to use the paid version of these products. Absolutely not sharing your data, so they're not using that in their learning, they're not using our data, more importantly, our customer data publicly. And so we formed a cross-functional team that's executing on this new skill.

Excellent, excellent, and bless you, Jay. And you know what? What you've done is the proper way to do it. You took a use case that you needed. You've heard about this buzz. You've taken a use case. How do I apply it inside of my own environment? And then you got your people involved, right? So that not only are you learning, they're learning, and once you all become what I call masterminds in the AI space, then you all have the ability to create and be able to bounce things off of each other. That's the power of it. And figure out how do we become more efficient together versus us operating kind of separately. So, I love that you've done that with your team, and you've brought that in, and you've made it a part of your environment, which is very critical when you talk about structure and alignment within teams.

Great. So, let's wrap up with a summary. The six friction points in every business. Number one

is number one is performance and people,

the two Ps. Number two, couple

S's, S O P S, and systems, and S O P S, we said stood for standard operating procedures.

Number three, leadership and management,

absolute. Number

four, the two Ds,

data and decision making, those are huge,

and you can't make decisions without great data,

that's right.

Number five strategies to scale. What's one tip on scaling that you would share?

One tip on scaling I would say is make sure you're ready to scale, so you should have a pulse of what's happening with your people, your processes, and your technology. Are you ready to scale, or do you need to do some work first? So, make sure you're ready, would be my advice. There,

and number six, innovation in AI, corporate mindset about innovation, and you know, if you haven't really got into AI, and one of my clients called me, Jay, you got to explain this Chat GBT to me, and I said, well, first. Well, it's Chat GPT, and second of all, you know, here's some baby steps you can use for yourself and for your organization, and that's what I encourage everybody to do, is just start doing some Chat GPT searches, and there's a great tip from Jeff Woods, who wrote a book called The AI Driven Leader, and he said, write this down on the yellow sticky, put it on your computer. Can AI do this exactly? You're on the audio. I tore off a yellow sticky from my monitor. Can AI do this? And just start, you know, writing an email, writing even creating a PowerPoint, creating a video, creating an image. AI can do it, and it can do it faster, and if you give it a good prompt or a good direction, it could do it better than you. So, the baby steps is just start

playing around with this stuff in your everyday business, or my friends planning a trip to Europe. So, I said, write a really good description and ask it to help plan your trip to Europe.

Absolutely, absolutely, Tricia.

I knew this was going to be a ton of fun. We're a little bit over time, so we're going to go quick one liners. So every interview we've done for 12 or 13 years,

yeah,

we asked these quick one liners, so what's an app or technique you use for personal productivity?

Canva would be my most favorite one. Obviously, I use a lot of AI apps, but I am a beast in Canva for visual organization and content creation. It is truly a resource for me and a tool, and that's how we should think about all AI tools. They are resources and tools for us to leverage to make us more productive.

Yeah, Canva, or I don't know how our social media team function without

it. Oh God, it's a

great way to make a Facebook image or PowerPoint slides, things like that.

Absolutely.

You have a personal wellness or fitness routine?

Yes, I do. That's how I have so much energy every day. So I prioritize sleep above everything else. And then, besides that, I have my two Ps, Pilates and Peloton, and then I have my faith, what we talked about earlier, and then protecting my peace. All of those things together are a part of my wellness routine.

Yeah, sleep's good. If you don't get those three, four hours, you can be a mess. What are your best business books?

Two books, one is Start with Why by Simon Sinek, and then Atomic Habits by James Clear. Both of those are on my two best books that I like to read, and kind of go back to the refer.

Good one. And we referred to Simon Sinek earlier,

right?

His Start with Why is his book, and his a couple of his TED Talks.

Yes,

the Y TED talk, and also the Toast Ted Talk. What blogs, podcasts, or YouTubes do you subscribe to? And when it hits your feed, you stop everything else and listen to.

So I'm gonna tell you, when I think about blogs and podcasts and things like that, I go for comedy. I know that's probably not the best answer or the best business answer, but I have to find a balance. When I'm scrolling on LinkedIn, it's all about business and trying to figure out what - how do I market myself and be better. But in the time that I'm not there, I'm looking for comedy on some of these blogs and podcasts and things that'll make me laugh, but also things that help you realize that you're not the only one going through what you're going through, so anything that keeps me grounded and keeps me laughing is my feet of choice.

And if folks are listening to this and they're like this, Trisha is super smart, I know someone who could use her operations, you know, training and efficiency and fractional COO sounds just what the doctor ordered for someone. What's a great introduction for you?

So, Jay, a great introduction for me is any business owner or leader that's in the verticals that I serve, so healthcare, insurance, professional services, law firms, or in the manner space, where you know something operationally just isn't working, because again, I talked about you feel it before you see it, but you don't know quite what it is. Then that's when you call me, and I'll help you figure out what it is, because it's definitely friction.

And if they want to call, where can people get in touch with you?

They can actually either get in touch with me on LinkedIn by my name, Trisha Warren, or they can visit my website at The Friction fixer.com

The Friction fixer.com I love

it, and

obviously links down in the show notes. Trisha, this was a lot of fun, and hopefully a lot of value for folks. Thank you so much for joining The 10 Golden Rules podcast.

Thank you for having me.