Leah Miller

Kevin Daisey (00:32)
What’s up everybody. Welcome to the show. Thanks for tuning in. Appreciate you being here. Appreciate you listening. Today I got a friend of mine. She’s also a client of mine and just been awesome to get to know Leah, watch her grow. And she specializes in helping law firms with their finances. She’s a fractional CFO. Great resource. And brought her on today. She’s been on the show before.

Leah N. Miller (00:51)
which

Kevin Daisey (00:55)
But we’re going to be talking about budgeting. Super excellent topic. Everyone’s so excited about, but super important. You know, obviously on the show, just try to cover important topics, things that you can apply or things that you can go ask a professional that you’ve learned on this podcast. Say, Hey, I heard about this. How do I do this? Reach out to Leah, if she can be a resource to you. So Leah Miller, welcome to the show.

Leah N. Miller (01:16)
Thanks

for having me back. I’m excited. Talk about the exciting world of budgeting.

Kevin Daisey (01:19)
Yeah, thanks for

budget and Leah is in Florida. She just moved recently. She’s got a farm. You know, I think Florida, I don’t think about farms, but I, I’ve gone through the middle of Florida one time and I was like, man, it’s farms and stuff everywhere.

Leah N. Miller (01:30)
Yeah

Yeah, you can get away from the coast and have a little bit of land and the world of Florida. It’s a fun place.

Kevin Daisey (01:40)
awesome.

I still got to make my way to like the I guess the west coast of Florida I’ve never been to so looking forward to it. Well you know I want to have you at least I give a quick introduction there but always let my guests to kind of tell more about themselves kind of where your journey and what you do now to help law firms.

Leah N. Miller (01:45)
Yeah, it’s a good place.

Okay, awesome. So I started as a paralegal, kind of stumbled into being a legal assistant and realized that the legal field was where my passion was. So I went to school to be a paralegal. I was working at a personal injury firm. My goal one day was to manage a law firm and I thought I would be older when that happened. And I, right place, right time, ended up managing a law firm when I was 27. And I really, my…

My role grew with that firm. So I was litigation paralegal. By the time I left, was CFO, firm administrator, and it was personal injury firm here in Florida. I loved it. Never thought I would do anything else. And then things started happening. like COVID happened and we were home for a while. And I’m like, kind of it was nice being home with my kids. And then a hurricane hit in late 2022 and we were displaced from our office. And I was home with my kids again, working from home.

But my role at the firm really wasn’t like a work from home type of role. So kind of started exploring different things that I could do so I could be home with my kids a little bit more. And I started doing some financial consulting, bookkeeping on the side and worked with some lawyers that I knew and realized that financial help was something a lot of law firm owners need. They’re really great at what they do. They’re really smart people.

But running their business and using the financials to run their business was something that was really lacking in the community. And that’s kind of where I found my passion. I love planning. I love doing budgets. And I love the legal field. So I went out on my own over two years ago. It’s about about two and a half years now and started Firmly Profits. And we’re fractional CFO and bookkeeping firm that specializes in law firms. And so that’s primarily what I do.

It’s all law firms.

Kevin Daisey (03:49)
Yeah, I love it. And,

um, you know, I think we met not too long after you started and, we connected on LinkedIn. I’m pretty sure, or through some other folks on LinkedIn, uh, great community on LinkedIn. If you’re not there, me and Leah almost thought about talking about LinkedIn today. Um, because we could talk about that and, how, how that’s impacted our businesses. Um, but yeah, this is, you know, I have a mastermind of law firm owners that I meet with, um,

It’s all a community and financials, budgeting, taxes. These are things that are constantly coming up in the group that people struggle with because they’re good at being a lawyer. They might have someone that’s doing their marketing. They might be good at a lot of things, but this seems to be the area that needs the most attention. And I know that’s for my company and myself personally is something that’s always a struggle.

And there’s always something missing or something that you could do better. So I always say the budget part, I think the budgeting is really extremely hard, especially for like a contingency firm or one that doesn’t have real great predictability or heads, ebbs and flows, big settlements. Like how do you handle that and predict that and prepare for it? So I’m excited for you to dive in and just give us, give us some tips and what, what law firm owners should be.

thinking about how should they get started with this if they don’t have a budget in place. so yeah, just I’m here to share, know, to listen, I guess, and ask questions along the way.

Kevin Daisey (05:20)
Thank you for tuning into the show today. I have taken things to the next level and I’ve started the Managing Partners Mastermind. We’re a peer group of owners looking for connection, clarity, and growth strategies. So if you’re looking to grow your law firm and not do it alone, please consider joining the group. Spots are limited, so I ask for anyone to reach out to me directly through LinkedIn and we can set up a one-on-one call to make sure it’s a fit.

Now back to the show.

Leah N. Miller (05:50)
All right, so my one thing that I always tell law firm owners, number one, if you do nothing else with your finances, I want you to look at your financial statements once a month. So I’m assuming, you know, if you have a bookkeeper that’s outsourced or in-house, they probably send you your profit and loss, your balance sheet, your statement of cash flows every month. You should be receiving those documents from somebody somehow. And I just want you as a law firm owner,

to look at the numbers and be aware of your revenue, whether it’s consistent monthly or it’s up and down, your expenses and your net profit and just be aware of those numbers. So if you do nothing else from this call, from this podcast, I want you to just get in the habit of sitting down and looking at those financials every single month. I swear it will change the trajectory of your firm, 100%.

Kevin Daisey (06:40)
Yeah. And, you know,

as the leader, and I say the same thing about marketing as a founder, the leader, you need to have your hands in some of this stuff, all of it, you know, it’s maybe you want to let go at some point when you have a C suite of people, but you need to know the numbers. You need to understand these things. You don’t need to know everything, how it works, but you need to educate yourself on it. same with marketing. shouldn’t have marketing just disconnected. It should be.

You understand what’s going on at least to some level. Um, you’d be surprised to be like, I’ll have firms that reach out that want to maybe hire us for marketing and they need leads, right? And then I say, all right, cool. Uh, how many leads do you get right now? Uh, from where, I don’t know. I’m not sure. What’s your revenue? Well, this year or last year or to date. And I’m like, give me anything you got. And they’re like, Oh, I’ll have look that up. I’ll have to look that up for you. Like, okay. I can really immediately tell how sophisticated they are in their business.

Leah N. Miller (07:22)
You

Kevin Daisey (07:28)
Which impacts us, right? If they don’t know how much a case is worth of on average in whatever area of law, then how are they going to know that we’re being successful for them? You know, is it 5,000 per case on average? Is it 20,000 per case on average? Is it low level speeding tickets and it’s 500 bucks? You know, what are we working with here? And it’s really just me gauging, do they understand their business and do they have those financials at hand?

And that makes me really be able to figure out like, are they a good fit? Right? So it’s interesting. I’m looking for that.

Leah N. Miller (07:57)
would assume a lot of times they

don’t know what their marketing budget is either. So that kind of takes us back to, yeah, how much can we spend? so there’s several ways to do it. the really just simple way I start with budgeting is I look at the average spend for last year. So what did we spend on software? just take the average of everything.

Kevin Daisey (08:04)
They don’t even have one.

Leah N. Miller (08:24)
and put it down there and then go through the expenses. your wage expense, what you pay your people. That’s a pretty fixed amount. You won’t really need the average. You’re gonna put in like what you actually spend on payroll and not just wages, taxes with it too. And then from there, yeah. And then from there, you know, go each line item and just put, you know, what you’re spending, what you want to spend.

Kevin Daisey (08:36)
to date.

benefits. All that stuff,

Leah N. Miller (08:48)
And then that will give you what your break even is every month. you put in all your expenses, you now see you have to make at least $100,000 a month just to keep your firm afloat. From there, we think about revenue. What is our revenue goal? if sometimes we’ll start the conversation and you’ll give me a revenue goal of 1.2 million, and then we’ll get to the end and our expenses come out to 1.4 million.

So we’re like, okay, we either have to cut some expenses or we have to increase the revenue. And so you kind of start doing this planning of what does it look like? And then the third piece of that is you need to know how much you need to make. So I start every call with new clients of what is your personal goal? Like what do you as an owner need to make yearly, monthly? Like, I don’t know. And so that’s another number that a lot of people don’t know. They just take money when there’s cash available.

And so if you say to me, Leah, I need to bring home $50,000 a month and your expenses, your other expenses are a hundred thousand a month. Well, then our break even is now 150,000 a month. And so you can work backwards to what you want and you know what your revenue goal should be. And then that also gives you a place where you can say, okay, we can increase marketing. If I take 30,000 a month, then I can put 20,000 towards marketing.

and we have a little bit more money there. And so we can start looking at things. And so that’s how I set up a budget. It’s very interactive of let’s start with the basics and then from there put in what we’re actually spending or what we know is coming up or things that we want to budget for. We’ll put those in there so that we can see, okay, we have to make a certain amount of money. Can we do that? And then that’s a whole other question ⁓ of can we generate that much revenue?

Kevin Daisey (10:33)
Thanks.

No, that’s awesome. I think you had to start somewhere and start with what you have in the history that you have. if they’re assuming you’re not a new firm and just starting, it’s, it’s interesting. I got a couple of new firms that I’m, that are talking to me right now that want to do marketing and they have a budget and they have, they’ve been lawyers for a while. They’re starting their own firms and they’re like, we’re, we’re, we’re, funded, you know, they have a budget, they planned it out.

which is they’re way ahead of how other law firms start, which is like, I’m just going to hang my shingle and ⁓ now all this stuff starts to happen to you. so yeah, I think getting the budget together, even if it’s not as sophisticated at first, just what Leah’s saying, like just look at what you’re doing, work it backwards, try to figure out what kind of budget you do have. And, know, some people come to us and go, Hey, Kevin, I need leads.

Leah N. Miller (11:04)
Yeah.

Kevin Daisey (11:21)
Cool. What’s your budget? I don’t have one. Okay. What’s your market? Let’s look it up. Let’s do some research and then go, well, if you don’t spend at least this much, it’s not even gonna do anything for you. And so while the marketing companies might be able to give you a well, if you have to spend this minimum, that just gives you a number to shoot for, but that might not be within your budget. It might not be possible. So what do you do from there? So, and then there’s all the other things like tax savings. You know, if you keep profit in your company,

And just leave it there. You’re paying taxes on it no matter what, versus you reinvest it back in your business. And, note that, that you invested that back and you’re going to not get tax on that money. Then you can use it towards other things. So.

Leah N. Miller (11:58)
Well, and that’s a conversation I have sometimes with marketing. Like I will talk to the marketing professionals that work with my clients and I’ll say, okay, we’re like, these are our goals. We need to, to X our revenue by the next two years. And so we know we need to do this. How much money do you need? We’re currently spending 10,000 a month. How much do you need? And they’ll come back and say, we need to spend 25,000 a month. Okay, so we will go revisit the budget.

And that’s when I try to educate my clients instead of just telling them what to do. And so again, if you tell me you need 50,000 a month, your marketing people need 25,000 a month, and we have all these other expenses, we’re going to have to cut somewhere until that revenue catches up because there’s going to be a lag time, especially with the marketing. And so we have to plan for that and…

Kevin Daisey (12:38)
you

Leah N. Miller (12:49)
decide what can we live with now, what do we need to do? And all this does is it gives you the knowledge of like where you are with the finances. And again, just knowing the numbers will change your business drastically because things will follow. Like there’s no big aha, like let’s make this change and everything will work out. It’s knowing the numbers and making strategic decisions based on those numbers of we need 25,000 for marketing.

Okay, let’s cut 10,000 here. Let’s increase. If we just build 10 more hours next month, then we can increase our revenue to cover that. you make all these little changes, and then that’s how you see the sustained growth in your firm.

Kevin Daisey (13:31)
Yeah, that’s awesome. And then, yeah, I guess it also could be like a ramp up, right? Hey, we can’t get the 25 grand right now, but we’re working towards a goal. the other thing too is, I just had an awesome guest on who founded a Esquire Bank. They mo they work with contingency firms specifically, but you gotta put a ton of money into cases and funding them, which might take six months to two years to settle or close the trial.

Leah N. Miller (13:47)
Mm-hmm.

Kevin Daisey (13:55)
You can use your own cash and that way, you know, and your, your, your marketing is not going to grow because you’re, cash strapped or you can use debt to fund the cases and to grow and keep it going. So there’s all kinds of strategies out there as well, I guess, um, to grow and, and leverage other people’s capital at the same time. Uh, so there’s all kinds of cool things that I’m learning about, but, um, but yeah, it’s

Leah N. Miller (14:19)
Yeah, I work

with a lot of my clients work with Esquire and I think it’s a good idea in a lot of situations. But again, it’s one of those you can’t use that debt and then not pay attention to the finances going forward because it’s very easy to get underneath it and not be prepared. And so I always caution like let’s that’s

Kevin Daisey (14:25)
Okay.

Leah N. Miller (14:43)
where we have the budget and especially with firms, so a lot of times they work with contingency fee firms, so personal injury firms, things like that, and there is up and down cash flow. So how do we budget for that? And that’s where we go back to what is that breakeven number? We need to make at least 150,000 a month just to keep the doors open and pay us what we need to be paid and pay for that marketing and do all that stuff. If you know that number,

then you can one, save cash, have cash reserves, and if you don’t know that number, you don’t know how much cash to save. And so I see people who, they feel like they have a lot of cash in the bank, and then we break it down and I’m like, you have a month and a half’s worth of cash. If you don’t settle any cases for a month and a half, we get to two months, you’re out of cash. Or, I have clients on the flip side who I’ll start working with them and they have way too much cash saved.

They don’t want to spend the money on the marketing and things like that. so knowing, like putting that budget together and then the next part of it is actually looking at it every month. So you put it together and then every month you review it you’re like, okay, we said we were going to spend 25,000 on marketing. We only spent 10. What is our ramp up plan? Or we spent $10,000 on subscriptions, but we were only supposed to spend two on subscriptions. What subscription was there? Okay, that’s when we were expecting like,

Kevin Daisey (16:01)
You

Leah N. Miller (16:02)
That’s fine. So those are the kinds of things you need to look at, especially when you are in a firm that has up and down income, like revenue, so that you can plan for those down months and you have cash saved up. Or you can have a loan with Esquire and things like that, like you can have lines of credit to fall back on if needed. But then you know how much you need.

Kevin Daisey (16:22)
Yeah. And then I think to your

point too, is if, if you said, Hey, we were supposed to be spending this much on marketing. Like you want to spend it. You don’t want to be like, well, we’re just going to save that. didn’t need to know we’re trying to grow. Here’s our goals. And this is meant to be spent. and yeah, if you had those ebbs and flows, I, what is, what is for you, what are you looking for for a firm to have cash on hand? How many months for them to.

to run on.

Leah N. Miller (16:46)
So,

had a couple of conversations about this today. So, personal injury firms that run on contingency, I wanna see three to six months. I think three months is fine. I always ask, is there a way to infuse cash back into the firm if we need to? So, do we have a line of credit? Do we have personal money? Like, worst case scenario, if like we need money, can we? And some firms, yes, and some firms, there’s not. So, we need a little bit more safe.

And at the same time, I like the personal injury firms or the contingency fee firms to look ahead and think, what does our next quarter look like with cases? Yes, I understand you cannot predict when the case is going to settle and exactly how much it’s going to settle for. But if you’ve done it long enough, you can get a pretty good idea of these cases are most likely going to settle in quarter one. Okay, well, like we have enough cash or.

We have nothing settling in quarter one except for a little one here and there. We need to make sure we’re really being good about that three months of cash. On the flip side, if you’re a firm that bills hourly and you’re invoicing clients every month and you have a pretty good collection rate, we can get away with one, two months. I still like three months, but I don’t think you need more than three months saved if you have that steady flow of clients on retainer.

You obviously need to, if you’re settling cases and like you need to have more cases coming in than going out to keep up that flow of cash, but you have a little bit more wiggle room because if you’re billing hourly and you need cash next month, as long as you have the clients to bill for, you can go bill and get that done. Whereas your contingency fee firm, you can’t decide today you need cash tomorrow because you’re not going to have cash for six to eight months, 12 months.

Kevin Daisey (18:25)
No.

Yeah, yeah, it’s easy for like me or Leah where we have clients signed up on retainer, right? Pretty predictable. So yeah, that’s interesting.

Yeah, for us, we have a monthly financial meeting where we bring everyone in a room and we got a spreadsheet and reports and all that stuff. And we see like cash on hand, how many months we’re running, you know, we can run on. And then all the other stuff too, like, you know, profit net, you know, everything like that, evaluation, company value, all that kind of stuff. that is something you definitely want to have, even if they’re basic, like you’re saying P &L, what is the other one? P &L, balance sheet.

Leah N. Miller (19:00)
a balance sheet, statement

of cash flow. And then if you don’t understand those, that’s when you find somebody to meet with you. And a lot of times, what I do for clients is I almost force them to meet, well I do force them to meet with me. Because when I talk to people, I say, I will meet with you at least once a month. And I say at least because it’s hard to get lawyers to focus for an hour on this stuff.

Kevin Daisey (19:02)
Yeah, every single month.

Leah N. Miller (19:25)
We are going to meet once a month and go through all of this. And I’m going to make sure you understand it then we’re going to talk about what’s coming up. And it’s always something different. Are we hiring somebody? Should we spend more on marketing? I always ask the question, is the marketing working? So, you know, we’re talking every month about increasing the marketing budget. I’m going to remind you to go back to your marketing people and say like, we’re spending, you know, $20,000 more a month for the last six months. Is it working? Or is it not? Yeah.

Kevin Daisey (19:50)
Yeah. Is the right, is the strategy right? You know,

the spins one thing, but how you’re spending it and what you’re doing should, should tweak and change if it’s not hitting the mark. Yeah, that’s good idea. yeah. So if you’re not looking at this stuff, you don’t know anything. You know, we look at art, we make changes to our P and L every single month. We go, what is that? Why is that categorized there? Well, that should be under here. Hey, what about this new thing that we added? That’s not even on here. Okay. Yeah. And then we’re.

Leah N. Miller (19:53)
Yeah.

Kevin Daisey (20:15)
My financial admin in house makes a ton of notes. then we, the next time we have all those changes made because every month there’s something that’s different.

Leah N. Miller (20:24)
Well, and then you get to

the end of the year. One, you can make decisions as you’re going because you cannot make financial operational decisions based on the finances if you don’t even know what the finances are. But then when you get to the end of the year, you’re not stressing about like, oh, I need to get my taxes together. I need to get this like you’ve done it all year long. You know what’s happening. You like I right now I’m having the conversation with clients of we’re about to finish Q3 and your net income is five hundred and eighty thousand for the year.

you’ve got a tax bill coming. So let’s talk to our tax planner about how we can decrease the tax bill before the end of the year, because you only have until the end of the year to make changes a lot of times, and let’s save some money. Because we’re getting to the end of the year where firm owners are like, I want to take some profit out of the business. Fantastic, I want you to take profit out of the business. But we need to save for taxes. We need to have enough to go into the new year. We need to invest in a couple things into the business.

Instead of making gut decisions based on the cash you have in the bank right now, you’re making really strategic decisions based on the financials. And that is what will give you the long-term sustained growth in the firm.

Kevin Daisey (21:31)
Yeah. And then I’ve been learning so much about just the tax strategies that you can do as a business owner. you know, Hey, you’re going to be stuck with a big bill of 200 grand. So go buy a rental property or reinvest it back in your company or put it in a 401k or your kids Roth IRA. And there’s all kinds of crazy stuff. So it’s the Augusta rule to rent your house out to yourself for business meetings. So there’s all these tax things that you can take advantage of. If you don’t know any of that stuff.

or have someone like Leah to talk to, then you’re just taking money and you’re giving a lot of it back in taxes.

Leah N. Miller (22:05)
I would also caution you when you start doing those things. what I, and I work with financial planners and tax strategists with my clients is your financial planner is thinking about how much money we can put into your like financial future. Your tax strategist is like, how much money can I save you on your taxes? And then I’m thinking cashflow because a lot of those different things you can do takes a lot of cash out of the business.

and you want to make sure there’s enough cash left in the business to get you through the first couple months of next year. And so you have to have all these people thinking about it and talking about it because and going back to the budget, you need to know how much it’s going to cost you to run your firm. Because if you’re tax guys like, hey,

Kevin Daisey (22:37)
Yeah.

Leah N. Miller (22:48)
do this thing and buy this thing for 200,000 and your financial advisor is like, let’s max out the profit sharing plan, it’s gonna cost you 300,000. And I’m like, you need 300,000 to get through the first three months of next year, you don’t have enough cash for all of that. And so you have to make sure all these people are talking so that you know you have enough cash because there’s a difference between financials on paper and what’s actually like cash available.

And so it’s a hard thing, you you look at your P and L and you see a net profit on the bottom that doesn’t include everything all the time. And so that’s a hard thing to realize. And so you just, need all these people to think about all these different things for you. ⁓

Kevin Daisey (23:28)
Glad you said that. yeah, no one go do any of those things that I said on your own. Um, no, it’s just, you’re

a hundred percent right. Um, everyone has their, their reason, right? Uh, if you have a business attorney for your business, they’re trying to protect your business. The financial planner is trying to grow your, um, you know, your wealth and the tax strategy is trying to save as much taxes. Everyone has their place.

They might, if they’re not talking to the others, then there definitely could be a conflict there. Um, especially you’re in your CFO or your financial admin, whoever you need to run all this through by them. Hey, by the way, I spent 200,000 every year. What are you talking about? You know? So, um, yeah, that’s a very good point. It takes, it takes a village. Yeah. And not to be overwhelmed, you know, obviously,

Leah N. Miller (24:12)
I say it because I’ve seen it happen.

It does. It does.

Kevin Daisey (24:18)
You know, I talked to a lot of firms that are just starting out or just getting going. And I just tell them how important it is to start having these conversations now, because you get busy. You add a few people. Next thing you know, your books are a mess. You haven’t done reporting. You don’t have a budget. And now you’re just stuck in the day to day grind. And then you’re like, I don’t have time to do this. I don’t have time to meet with Leah. I don’t have time to pull this stuff together. So just, you know,

And that’s based on my experience to start doing as much as you can, learn as much as you can, bring people to help you. that’s why it’s great to have a fractional, like you can’t afford a CFO internally. Like that doesn’t make any sense for most firms. so it’s all education and I used to hate the numbers, just, I don’t really care about that kind of stuff and spreadsheets. I’m not an analytical guy, but the more you understand them, the more I like it. So, you know,

Leah N. Miller (25:03)
You

can make operation, like it makes the operational decisions less overwhelming when you understand why. And honestly, it, you know, just it helps all of it run together and makes, helps you feel more confident in the operational decisions you’re making because you know that, you know the goals of the firm, you know the values of the firm, like all of that stuff that you should know and do in your firm.

And if you start making decisions based on the values, the goals, the financials, then you can feel good about the decisions that you’re making for the firm because long term that’s the best thing for the firm, even if it’s like kind of crappy in the time being.

Kevin Daisey (25:42)
Well, you know, as an entrepreneur, as an owner, know, you’re usually breaking crap and making decisions and not really having much to go on. Just, I want to do this. Well, I have this much cash over here. I’m going to go do this. It’s a lot better to be like, Oh, I, I can go do this. Awesome. Yep. Leah’s going to say, go do this. It’s a great decision. Here’s all the information backing up that decision. And that feels a lot better than just like, you know,

running and breaking stuff and not really sure if that was the best decision. And sometimes you had that, that was a bad decision, you know.

Leah N. Miller (26:11)
Well, tell, yeah.

I tell people all the time, like, I don’t judge, some people are like, they don’t wanna tell me certain things they wanna spend money on or whatever, but I don’t judge what you wanna spend money on. I wanna help you understand why it’s a good or a bad decision. So again, if you come and tell me, hey Leah, I need to make $50,000 a month and you’re only bringing in $100,000 a month, then like, let’s talk about it.

Here’s what you have to give up. You’re gonna have to do extra work because you’re not gonna be able to hire this person. These are the things you’re gonna have slower growth because you can’t put as much into your marketing. I’m not gonna judge you for what you wanna spend money on. I want you to understand the give and take and how it works so that you can make the decision of, if I just take 45,000 a month and I figure out how to live off of 45,000 a month,

That gives me an extra five to hire this person. And then that’s the next step. And so that’s what I help people understand. And I don’t, you know, like I’m not gonna judge you. So I just want you to understand it.

Kevin Daisey (27:14)
Yeah, was a true story this morning. was talking to a tax person and it was like, yeah, I’m trying to try and buy a new truck. I’ve had my same truck for eight years. It’s getting to the point where if anything breaks, it’s past warranty. And I usually offload vehicles before a hundred thousand miles. I was like, years, my income’s gone up considerably since I bought that truck and it’s still valuable. So I’m going get a lot for it. so, but I’m like, I’m telling you all first before I do that.

And they’re like, cool, no problem. But are you going to get an asset that’s going to cashflow to pay for that new truck? And I’m like, damn it. so they’re like, yeah, just don’t go do it because you want to like, let’s, you should plan out how you’re to do it. Doesn’t make sense. And at the end of the day, it’s like, yeah, go do that. And we can write that off. Buy a truck that’s 6,000 pounds. You know, can we write it off under one of your businesses? So, you know, I just, it’s making.

smart decisions instead of rash decisions. And I think if you have the numbers in front of you and you understand them, it’s going to give you that ability to do that. So, and have someone like Leah to smack you around a little bit and.

Leah N. Miller (28:10)
So I mean, I tell people no sometimes I’m like, that really isn’t a good idea right now. But if you really want to do that, these are, this is what might happen. And they’re like, thank you. I needed somebody to tell me that. And so I’m that outside person that does not have the emotional attachment to your money that you do. I want you to succeed. I love when my law, like when law firm clients are like, Hey, we settled this case. I’m like, my gosh, that’s amazing. Like I love it.

Kevin Daisey (28:13)
you

Leah N. Miller (28:37)
But at the same time, I’m not emotionally attached to your money like you are, so I can objectively say, hey, that’s really just not a great idea right now. And they’re like, yeah, thank you.

Kevin Daisey (28:44)
You

Just hiring Leah might be worth it just for that. Just to tell you not to spend money on stupid stuff. That’s awesome. No, I mean, this is so important, you know, and again, the smaller you are, the more important that that to start to understand the stuff, to have someone, you know, doing your bookkeeping, to have someone do a financial meeting with you, look at your finances once a month. and again, if you’re a solo, you know, just.

starting to understand this and get in the habit and have some education around it. so that when you do hire people and bring people in, or if you get to the point where you have a in-house CFO, you’re that big, you still as a business owner need to have some understanding about it, you know, because you’re going to need to be part of those meetings. So, well, Leah, I love it. It’s, awesome to watch you grow and what you’ve done. And, you know, of course we work with you.

on your stuff and we appreciate that.

Leah N. Miller (29:31)
Yes. Always good,

always good. Hello, Ray.

Kevin Daisey (29:35)
I appreciate that. now it’s been awesome to watch you grow fast and, and what you’re doing. So, always singing your praises. Anyone needs financial help for actual CFO, a second set of eyes, bookkeeping. what’s all the other services that you offer?

Leah N. Miller (29:49)
Yeah, I have a whole bookkeeping team. So I have a bookkeeping team and we can take bookkeeping clients just starting out or established and then CFO clients as well. And I handle all of those myself. So love doing client meetings and yeah, you get me for a fractional CFO client.

Kevin Daisey (30:02)
You get Leah.

You better sign up soon because

at some point you might not get Leah.

Leah N. Miller (30:10)
Well, yeah, I’m getting close to capacity on that, but I always love talking to people. I will always do a free consultation. Like Kevin said, I’m on LinkedIn. So I always like to share bits and pieces of things on LinkedIn because I just want law firm owners to be educated when it comes to their finances.

Kevin Daisey (30:27)
Well, Leah, I appreciate you coming on to share. It’s important stuff. Not always the funnest conversation, but it’s again, as you learn it and understand it, you start to appreciate it and it gives you the tools you need to make decisions. yeah, connect with Leah, reach out. She’s all over LinkedIn. Always posting great stuff. That’s just going to be helpful if you just want to follow her.

Just look up Leah Miller. And then of course, if you want a personal introduction or referral to her directly by email, let me know and I’ll make it happen.

Leah N. Miller (30:47)
Mm-hmm.

Thank you.

Kevin Daisey (30:55)
All

right, Leah, anything else you want to share before we roll?

Leah N. Miller (30:57)
No, I think that’s it.

Kevin Daisey (30:58)
All right. Well, thank you so much for joining me. A good, see ya and, I’m sure I’ll see you soon in other circles, conferences, things like that. So everyone, Hey, thanks so much for tuning in. Hope, you found this helpful and connect with Leah, please. She’s gonna, I should this way. She’s gonna, help you either way. So we’ll see you soon on the next episode.

Leah N. Miller (31:02)
Yeah.

Thanks.