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330. Data, Disney, and the Death of a Solo Lawyer: Inside Craig Goldenfarb’s Eight-Figure Firm

Published on
May 29, 2025
Podcast Host
Chris Dreyer
Rankings.io
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From installing EOS to building an executive team of six (including two CMOs), Craig Goldenfarb made the leap from litigator to visionary—and never looked back. The data drives every decision.

In this episode of PIM, Craig breaks down how he scaled Gold Law into a multi-eight-figure firm, why he built a KPI dashboard before hiring a CFO, and how culture—not compensation—became his greatest retention tool.

PIMCON 2025 VIP Tickets On Sale Now. Get yours today!

In this episode, we break down:

  • How Craig replaced himself as a litigator and stepped fully into the CEO role
  • The modified EOS structure that helped his firm scale
  • Why “Choose the Twos” became a Florida marketing phenomenon
  • How Goldlaw's culture team gamifies the workplace to retain top talent
  • The 7 Figure Attorney Summit and how you can attend in 2025

Guest Details

Craig Goldenfarb is the founder and CEO of Goldlaw, a Florida-based personal injury powerhouse with offices in West Palm Beach and Port St. Lucie. A former trial lawyer, Craig now leads a team of 12 attorneys and 75+ staff. He’s a pioneer in AED litigation, founder of Heart of the Game (HOTG), and creator of the 7 Figure Attorney Summit.

  • LinkedIn 
  • Gold Law: Website | Instagram | YouTube

Chris Dreyer and Rankings Details

Chris Dreyer is the CEO and founder of Rankings.io, the elite law firm marketing experts - for all your digital and traditional needs.  

  • Personal Injury Mastermind (PIM): Instagram | YouTube | TikTok
  • Rankings: Website, Instagram, Twitter
  • Chris Dreyer: Website, Instagram
  • Newsletters: The Dreyer Sheet 
  • Books: Personal Injury Lawyer Marketing: From Good to GOAT; Niching Up: The Narrower the Market, the Bigger the Prize
  • Work with Rankings: Connect

Transcript

Expand Transcript

Craig Goldenfarb:

If I was on a desert island and I had 60 seconds of a cell phone to say goodbye to my wife, I would say goodbye to my wife and kids first, of course. And then I would ask them before I die, give me the numbers, give me the 10 KPIs of how my firm's doing so at least I can die in peace.

Chris Dreyer:

Welcome to Personal Injury Mastermind, let's get into it. Craig Goldenfarb runs a multiple eight figure machine. He's built a three tier leadership team, hired two CMOs, installed a Disney train chief culture officer, and scaled GOLDLAW all by treating it like a real business. In this episode, Craig reveals the mindset shift that took him from litigator to CEO, the KPIs he checks daily, and how culture, systems, and obsession drive long-term growth. I'm Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io. If you're serious about scaling, this is rocket fuel.

GOLDLAW has seen massive growth. You opened up in 2002, but have been an eight-figure attorney for over a decade. Let's talk about the current before we take it back, what are some of the recent wins or milestones that you're proud about?

Craig Goldenfarb:

Well, we're at multiple eight figures and have been for a long time. I think a great win for us is just the establishment of EOS as an operating system in the last five years, and really built that out. And building out my three levels of leadership, which for a firm my size, it took a while as a CEO to learn the different levels of management in a company. And that's something they certainly never teach you in law school, but once you grow as a company, you need to have executive leadership, supervisors, managers, et cetera. So when I realize there's a gap between certain levels of organization, I insert another level of leadership or management within my corporation just like a real business does. And it took me a while to learn that, because of course lawyers are never taught management or leadership or levels of organization. So that's been a big win for me is the stratification of my organizational chart.

Chris Dreyer:

Well, I can't leave you there, I got to dig into that a little bit. I'm really interested in this three levels of leadership and your title right on your username you have listed as CEO. And so talk to me about the key executives that you think at that top level, the leadership level of a successful law firm like yours.

Craig Goldenfarb:

Sure. Well, let me start by saying there's certainly no right answer. And you have the EOS model, which is a visionary and an implementer. So that's a one-one, I call that a one-one, because there's a CEO and then a COO, chief operating officer, and there's not a lot of redundancies in that strict EOS model. So if the CEO dies or something happens, or retires, you got a problem. And then if the COO dies or retires or quits or something, you got a problem. So there's two levels of non-redundancy. So the EOS coach, or we call her an EOS light coach because she doesn't strictly stay to EOS, she said, "Look, every company is different. So mandating that you stick to the one-one model is short sighted." So in my company we ended up having an executive team of six people, and in my company we have two chief marketing officers because they have different roles too. And then we have a chief legal officer who runs all of product, our product is professional services.

We have me as the CEO, we have a chief operating officer, and then we have a chief culture officer. Because in our company, culture is such a high priority. So as you can hear, any company is going to have a different executive team. But my point is at the top level, we call it the executive team like many companies do, and it's different. We have two CMOs, which is absolutely crazy. I don't know of a lot of law firms that have two chief marketing officers. So the answer is you should have an executive team once you're over let's say 20 people in your organization, and then beneath that, we have department heads or our leadership team. And then the third level is what I call your basic managerial level, which is supervisors, directors, and managers.

So I didn't know any of this stuff coming out of law school. I didn't know any of this stuff until about 10 years ago, but I realized that the levels of leadership is just like the chain of command in the military. And once you realize that in order to run a really solid organization such as the military, you need to have a chain of command. And people do not refer to their organizational chart as a chain of command often, but I do, because there's clear accountability in an organizational chart. And the more layers you have when you need them, the more well run your organization is.

Chris Dreyer:

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And it reminds me, the one-to-one, that's interesting to think about because we're an EOS-based agency. So we have, I'm the visionary and I have an integrator, and I've never thought about that. It makes me think of Dan Kennedy, when a horse goes lame, you need to have a backup. I think in his book, the No B.S. People and Profits book, and you're right, there's not a redundancy there so that's something interesting. So you need to surround yourself with the other executives. I got to ask on the marketing guy, I own a marketing agency, the CMO, the two CMOs is one for digital and one for more traditional. Is that the setup?

Craig Goldenfarb:

Sort of. What was funny is I was interviewing to replace my marketing manager who we separated, and I was looking for one. And then because I've interviewed a lot of marketing folks, I know what questions to ask. And let's just pretend there are 50 different skill sets in marketing, whether it's digital or mass media or branding, events, et cetera. And when we gave that list of 50 to both of them, we said, "What are your favorites?" And these were two top candidates, and they each pretty much clicked 25 different check boxes. So we were like, "Oh my God." One dude was an expert in 25 and the other lady was an expert in the other 25, and I looked at my COO who was next to me and I said, "You're going to kill me, but we have to hire both of these people." And she looked at me like I had three heads.

And so I quickly went back to ChatGPT and I said, "Can a company succeed with two CMOs?" And I got all these great Harvard Business Review articles, "Yes, yes, yes, yes, and here's how it'll work." So that was absolutely crazy outside the box thinking, and it worked. And so now I have one guy who really focuses, his skill set is I call it external marketing, which is business development, community events, graphic design, et cetera. He does all my media buys. And then the other one is more internal. She does content, newsletters, digital buys, everything that requires her to sit at her desk, and she also runs our intake department as well. So their skill sets were so complimentary, it just blew me away. So that's why I hired two CMOs.

Chris Dreyer:

That's incredible. That's incredible. I like the clear distinction of the roles, like you said, they're not going to fit every law firm, but they fit yours and what you were looking for. Let's rewind a bit. You were a very successful litigator before fully stepping into the CEO role. What was one of the biggest breakthroughs? What finally pushed you to take this leap out of the courtroom and into running a business full time? What was that moment, walk me through that change of being a litigator to CEO?

Craig Goldenfarb:

Sure. Well, I think every good leader goes through a period hopefully of self-awareness and some mindfulness where they realize what their genius zone is. There's a lot of books on flow or genius zone. And in about 2010 or maybe even earlier, I realized that being a litigator was not my genius zone. I was good at it. I got some good verdicts, and I'd been a trial lawyer about 15 years at that point. So I had a lot of verdicts under my belt, but I found I wasn't happy. I was gaining weight, didn't have balance in my life. And then I started to identify through my life coach who I had at the time and through some mindfulness courses, what was my flow, what was my genius zone? And I realized that once I took the Myers-Briggs test and a couple other tests that I was a connector.

And as a connector, that leads towards you being a CEO, and building connections, building up structures. And since I do a lot of personality testing, it was obvious to me that I like to build, I'm a builder and a connector, and a trial lawyer is not necessarily a builder or a connector. So I like being out in the community, I like building connections, I like building organizational charts, and I like structure. So that led to me realizing that my best skills were business skills, and I had some, but I was busy taking depositions and trials. So I realized, "Hmm, let me read a couple books and see if they float my boat." So I read Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. I started reading some Dan Kennedy, I started reading some Patrick Lencioni, and I was like, "Oh my God, this is my favorite stuff."

So once you become self-reflective and you realize where your genius zone is, your goal is to spend a lot of your day doing what you're good at. And I realized as I started to build, "Oh my God, this is really fun." So I think it all starts, I just gave a seminar last week in Orlando, it starts with some mindfulness and some self-reflection, realizing what you like to do. So the pivotal moment for me was sometime between 2005 and 2010 and realizing my zone or my flow, and it was building a business and creating and being a visionary rather than doing the work of trials and depositions. And I made a very intentional shift in my mindset, instead of identifying myself as a lawyer, I now say my pronouns are CEO.

Chris Dreyer:

That's incredible, that's incredible. It's really interesting how you discovered your zone of genius and those books, and I've read all those books as well, and that's what I liked. But I'd be interested to hear, well, how did you find your integrator, the yang to your yin, so to speak, that takes on those duties?

Craig Goldenfarb:

Sure. Well, I'm a huge proponent of coaching, both being coached and coaching others. So I had always been in a group in Orlando called Atticus, which is one of the lawyer coaching programs, and they'd always taught me about different business skills and life management skills. I highly recommend that program. I'm an instructor in that program now in Orlando and their trial lawyers organization. And at that point, I realized that they were limited because they didn't teach EOS, Atticus did not teach EOS. So I read Traction, I read Mike Morse's book. I realized that this was something that I wanted to get involved with. So I hired my EOS coach who was formerly with Fireproof, which is Mike Morse's group. And then she'd left Fireproof and started her own company, and she's been my EOS coach for five, six years. And she again does not strictly stick to EOS, the one-one model, and she helped me design my executive team.

And at that point, believe it or not, I did not have a COO. So you bring in a good general manager or a coach to spot something that you don't spot. But I was an eight-figure firm, doing great, and I didn't have a COO, yet I was trying to start at EOS. So she came in, and it's like a coach coming in and saying, "Oh wait, you got a good team but where's your quarterback?" I was like, "Oh, you need a quarterback?" "Yeah, well that's why you're not scoring any points, Greg, because you have a running back and wide receivers, or an offensive line, but you don't have a quarterback." I'm like, "Duh."

So I quickly pivoted to finding a COO, and we used a headhunter that was far too expensive, but we had several candidates from across industries. And I ended up hiring someone from the finance industry to be my magical unicorn COO, who is still my COO today. And she moved from California to take the job. And she had been in the finance industry, she didn't know what a lawsuit was nor a auto case, nothing, zero, but she had all the COO skills that I needed and now she knows everything.

Chris Dreyer:

Thank you for sharing how you used the headhunter to find your COO and that story. It's always interesting, they're number two. A lot of times it's like two trial attorneys, and one individual learns that they like marketing and sales, and then the other goes the other direction. It's different for you. Does the finance person have that bean counter in them or are they still able to see the entrepreneurial vision, or do they balance you?

Craig Goldenfarb:

I also have a bean counter mentality, but I'm not into profit and losses as much as my COO because she has an MBA degree. So I do have a three-person finance team as well. I do not have a CFO, because I don't think personal injury attorneys need a CFO because we don't bill. So that's my personal theory. I do have a head of finance, so a CFO might cost you 125, 150 grand, whereas the head of finance costs you 80 to 90 grand, at least in my market. So we made the determination because we don't have a receivables, we don't bill, that we don't need a CFO. Plus my COO has an MBA in finance, so she loves profit and losses, loves going through QuickBooks, loves doing all sorts of financial reports and Excel spreadsheets and measuring KPIs. So I don't need a CFO, maybe different from other law firms.

So my COO has all the business skills. We do have, as I said, a three-person finance team below the COO, but between the four of them I've made the determination that I don't need a CFO. So I like numbers. I'm a numbers guy and a KPI guy, so I don't mind, there's a lot of lawyers who are like, "I hate all that stuff. Don't show me a spreadsheet." It happens to be one of my interests is I'm a math guy, so I don't mind KPIs and profit and losses and finances. So for me, that has worked out. So I do have a huge finance team headed by the COO who has an MBA.

Chris Dreyer:

Got it. That's intriguing. And I've always found when you have the good KPIs and the metrics, it makes it a lot easier to deal with some of the people issues. It's, Hey, it's not this objective, like, "I think this employee is not working." You have actual metrics and it's like, "Hey, you missed your numbers," and they're established at the very beginning. On that finance, is it more capacity? Is it more looking at those KPIs and utilization maybe with your case managers or however you're structured for your team?

Craig Goldenfarb:

So our entire backbone of our firm is KPIs. We're a data-driven firm in all regards. And I'm looking upwards because above my two computer screens is a 65 inch television on my wall, that's my KPI screen. In the Fireproof book, they call that their jumbotron. So my jumbotron is a 65-inch monitor, and what it has up on it all day is my top 10 KPIs. I have about six levels of KPIs as far as granularity, and the top 10 are up all day. So I've nicknamed those in my speeches, my desert island KPIs, which was if I was on a desert island and I had 60 seconds of a cell phone to say goodbye to my wife, I would say goodbye to my wife and kids first, of course. And then I would ask before I die, "Give me the numbers, give me the 10 KPIs of how my firm's doing so at least I can die in peace."

Chris Dreyer:

That's incredible, that's incredible. And you're on vacation, whatever, you could check that. And you have the comfort, the head hits the pillow, you're not wondering how things are.

Craig Goldenfarb:

Well, I'm lucky enough, I don't even check it on vacation.

Chris Dreyer:

There you go, there you go. So I want to lean into a few of your statements on client first. Happy employees, happy clients, every firm says that, but you have something that really stands out. Because what's different that I absolutely love is you have this personal injury response unit that actually go and meet the injured clients where they are. How did that idea come about? Tell me a little bit about this unique component of your business.

Craig Goldenfarb:

Sure. Well, pre-COVID and the last 20 years before COVID, people did want you to come out to their house and sign them up. Now, the world has changed since COVID, and we've signed people up now on their cell phones. They sign our contracts on their cell phone. But before that occurred, we had a car, called it the Personal Injury Response Unit, PIRU, kind of dumb name, but that was our first vehicle probably 10, 15 years ago that of course was wrapped in our firm logo, et cetera. So we sent that out to lots of locations to sign people up, and it was of course a traveling billboard. Now, we now have eight firm vehicles. So now we have eight traveling billboards for various purposes, but that was the first one we used. And a lot of people did have folks in-house that would go sign up a case, but they would enlist a paralegal.

I'm like, "Well, that paralegal now just spent three hours signing up a case, that was three hours they could not do paralegal work." So we hired an in-house person a long time ago to be that person who would drive that car, because it's so much more efficient to pay that guy 18 bucks an hour rather than your $50 an hour paralegal taking time from doing interrogatories to go out and sign up a client. So we really devoted a lot of time originally to a personal injury response unit, which we don't need anymore. We sign up one case a month by traveling to the location, we don't need to. But that was pioneering in the industry about 10 years ago, because what we did is we did a no-show analysis. So it used to be in the olden times where you'd set the appointment for the client to come in, and we had a 30% no-show rate.

So if 30% of clients don't come in and don't show up, it means they hired another lawyer. And if you multiply it times our average fee per case at that time, which was $15,000 for a pre-suit, you got 30 times $15,000 that you'd lose. That's 450 grand, and that would be in I think a quarter. You're losing $450,000 in a quarter by not having a car. That ROI is ridiculous. So that's the data-driven type analysis. And I still know people who set appointments for their clients to come in in personal injury. I'm like, "Are you kidding? You're going to wait three days and wait for someone to actually show up? Have you done a no-show analysis?"

They're like, "What's a no-show analysis?" I said, "Dude, you're in first grade. You need to start with that basic level of data knowledge is your no-shows." Just like doctors do. They do a no-show analysis. That's why they're always confirming your doctor's appointments with a text, an email, a hot air balloon. These days, every doctor you get like nine confirmations so you're going to show up. Why? Because they lose money when you don't show up. So do lawyers.

Chris Dreyer:

That makes me think of Hormozi's, that $100 million Offers book on the denominator. A better offer decreases effort and sacrifice by the customer.

Craig Goldenfarb:

Of course.

Chris Dreyer:

So if you're decreasing the friction, it's going to be a better offer.

Craig Goldenfarb:

The friction, we're looking for ways to reduce friction. I noticed Amazon has gotten better in the checkout process. When you go to your cart in Amazon, it used to take about three clicks or four clicks before the order would be placed. Now everything's set up, your credit cards in there, your shipping preference is in there. It's now a one-click once you go to the shopping cart in Amazon, and instantly you get an email, "Your order's been processed." So that's reducing all the friction points, and now you get it within six hours at your door. So they're brilliant at reducing friction points in the sales process, we want to do the same thing.

Chris Dreyer:

Yeah, that makes me think of a lot of the tech advantages, the different marketplaces have been built, the different network effects like your door dashes and Uber. Uber for example, from a network effects perspective, they become better when there's more drivers because you have to wait less for less time. So all these different things, it got my head spinning in regards to this. One thing I wanted to talk to more about this client service and value in people that you've hit on is your chief people or your chief culture officer from Disney to make your firm the happiest place on earth. So how does that differ, like that role? I hear my peer, my friend, Michael Mogul, talk a ton about culture. We have our core values, but how does this culture officer, this people officer, how do they contribute to the growth of the business?

Craig Goldenfarb:

Sure. Well, some people view HR as bad cop, and we try to dissuade our employees from that. But HR definitely has some regulatory aspects to it. HR also has some disciplinary aspects to it and a lot of rules and regulations in the HR manual, and it's rules-based. Culture is fun based. So we don't call it good cop, bad cop, but that is good cop being culture, bad cop being HR. But that's a way sometimes the employees view it, and we try to dissuade them of that evaluation. But our culture team, their mission statement is, as you said, to make this place the happiest place on earth to work. And that's because I stole my culture officer from Disney World and she modified their mission statement, and her job is to make sure everybody's happy, literally. Like at Disney World, their job is to make sure everybody's happy and satisfied.

So she can separate herself from rules and regulations, and we have the GOLDLAW games every month, which is a new fun thing, whether it's bring your pet to work or bring your best high school yearbook photo to work and everybody tries to identify who they are. Or we have a game room, or we have bumper pool tournaments, foosball tournaments, pinball tournaments. We have contests. We had a Easter egg hunt. This is every month, and within the month we have little mini games as well. And if you think about how boring a law office can typically be, what if you're engaged every week, whether you choose to participate or not, you have the option of being engaged every week and especially once a month in a GOLDLAW game with something that might be fun. That's why people stay at companies, because they're engaging a different part of their brain, the fun part of the brain, which may keep them somewhere.

So along with all our normal stuff, which is great benefits and 401k and profit sharing plan, which is wonderful but boring, we want to engage the other half of their brain. So we have a wheel, contest wheel for various... Once a week we give away something, whether it's an Amazon gift card or a two hours off, or something that culture designs. HR doesn't have time to do that, and HR might not have that skillset because HR isn't thinking of fun. So we have two separate departments that work together, and one is the chief culture officer and one is the chief of HR, but they really collaborate together as a team to make this the happiest place on earth to work. And we've won South Florida best place to work midsize business for four years in a row.

Chris Dreyer:

When that Monday rolls around where they've had maybe the Friday off and they're excited to come back to work and not dreading that Monday, those means don't really apply.

Craig Goldenfarb:

Well, I had a quarterly office meeting this morning, which we had with almost 100 employees, and I said, "I have two goals, two main goals in this company. One is to provide excellent product, which is our legal service, and the second is to provide an atmosphere where everybody wakes up in the morning and is happy to come to work."

Chris Dreyer:

Incredible, incredible.

Craig Goldenfarb:

I just boiled it down to two things, really.

Chris Dreyer:

Wanted to touch just a little bit more on marketing, and you've got over 900 reviews when we did the research for this, and that speaks to client service, that speaks to happy. That's been, what do you call that, the marketing that-

Craig Goldenfarb:

Social proof, social proof is what they call it, I think.

Chris Dreyer:

Yeah, talk to me about that.

Craig Goldenfarb:

Yeah, sure, that's been intentional. Everything we do is intentional. We know that if you're looking for a blender at Walmart, you Google blender at Walmart and then you read the reviews. So everybody knows the reviews count, and that's called social proof. So what we did is 15 years ago when reviews started becoming a deal, we start to incentivize Google reviews within the firm. And we came up with a very complicated system, and the reason it's complicated is because people will cheat the system if you put money behind it. So we pay, I believe, $50 a Google review to our employees. And then people started saying, "Well, what if my brother does a Google review? Does that count?" And we're like, "Yes, as long as they don't claim they're a client." So an employee's brother will do a Google review and say, "My sister loves where she works."

That counts, they get 50 bucks. But we had to put parameters on this, because if you have 26 cousins, we don't want you to earn $5,000 for your Google reviews. So we put all these guardrails, it took us 10 years to put all the guardrails in place to see how people are trying to game the system, but what it results in after you perfect it is hundreds of Google reviews and thousands of Google reviews. So we have two offices. We have about 940 as of yesterday in one office and about 100 in our Port St. Lucie office, so we're above 1,000. And we're up there with Morgan & Morgan in the number of Google reviews. And we expanded it this year to Yelp and Lawyers.com and other platforms, because we know that some people are on those platforms so we want to encourage the use of those platforms as well.

Chris Dreyer:

On those other platforms, like for example Yelp. That's one that I talk a lot about, because if someone's on their mobile device and they use Apple Maps, well, it's pulling from Yelp. And you certainly don't want to have a one-star review on Yelp, it has their own issues from filtering reviews and things like that. And yeah, I love that you have a process, you have an incentive structure for these reviews, and that's how you get them.

Craig Goldenfarb:

And it's one of the KPIs of our customer service relations expert who deals specifically with customer service. She does not handle any cases, loves to talk to clients, and she does the closing meetings with the clients in personal injury. So at the end of the case, after they get their money, they've talked to their lawyer, they've talked to their case manager, she walks in last. And because we know that the lawyer doesn't give a crap about the testimonial or the Google Review, we know that that's not high on the lawyer's priority list, they want to get back to their work. So Jennifer comes in, and she has a strict checklist she goes over, requests the Google Review, teaches them how to do Google Review, and then requests the video testimonial. And our in-house videographer and social media expert are on call to come up and do the video testimonial right then.

And one of her KPIs, Jennifer's KPIs, is the percentage of clients that give a Google review that also give a video testimonial. So we try to keep that at about 30%. So you can tell the overall key to my speech as always is intentionality, which is that you can pull levers and change any metric with intentionality.

Chris Dreyer:

That's incredible, Craig. A few final questions, this has been a lot of fun. One of them teed up. We hear a lot about this work-life balance, but what's your approach to work-life balance?

Craig Goldenfarb:

Sure. The same advice I just gave on everything else, which is intentionality. In fact, my wife Colleen, who is a former TV news reporter and anchor woman is a better speaker than I am. So I've invited her to the last three, four seminars. She has an amazing speech, which I am getting her on a TED Talk, on work-life balance and how it is being married to an entrepreneur. So it's not my perspective, because my perspective is jaded, but how about your spouse's perspective on how our personality as a driven workaholic entrepreneur affects the spouse and the kids? Now, we're empty nesters. We are a cautionary tale, because I'm a driven entrepreneur, I have 10 businesses. But she speaks on all the tools we've developed in the last 10 years once we came aware of the imbalance in our marriage, the imbalance in our work-life balance. So we started utilizing a lot of tools, got a marriage counselor, got a life coach for the two of us, and found all these wonderful tools in order to reconnect, in order to make some sacred spaces in our presence, in our connection, communication techniques.

And so work-life balance is kind of a misnomer. It's more like work-life integration, because our brains as entrepreneurs, it's tough for us to get home and stop thinking about work. So what do you do with that? What do you do with that default? So my wife has started to speak nationwide on her title is actually why your identity as a provider, as an entrepreneur, is bull shit. Because we all defend ourselves. We're looking to provide for our families, but what if we get divorced and our kids hate us? Well, then who did we provide for? So it's bull shit. When we say we're providers, and, "Honey, you certainly like the vacations, you certainly like the purses and the nice house," that's just us hiding the fact that we don't have any work-life balance or work-life integration, and hiding behind money. And that's absolute garbage, because you have no connection with your wife or your spouse or your kids. It's garbage.

We're deluding ourselves when we make a lot of money that that's an excuse for not having a complete and whole life. So we've utilized so many tools. We've stayed married after 26 years. My kids think I was a halfway decent dad. I won't go to great dad, because I was a workaholic. But I have really open communications with them as adults, and I apologize and I say, "Here's what was going on for me, here's how things are going to change in the future. And I don't want this to affect your choice of spouse." I have two daughters. And I realized that what I modeled for them could be harmful.

Chris Dreyer:

So powerful, thank you for sharing. Two final questions. First, tell me about the 7 Figure Attorney Seminar you just had in April. What's the next seminar on the horizon?

Craig Goldenfarb:

Sure. I'm speaking at the Neostella conference in Milwaukee in May. Neostella is a software company that works with Filevine, it's one of Filevine's partners. I will probably, I'll give it a probably, do the 7 Figure Attorney Summit next year. I always do it in April. I've done it eight years in a row. And I say, "Trial lawyers don't come," because my seminar is not for trial lawyers, it's for business owners. It's to teach you how to manage and hire people to do the business aspects of your firm. If you're a trial lawyer and you do both, come, because you need to learn some of those skills or you need to hire people who have those skills. There are a lot of trial lawyers who belong trial lawyers, but if they own a business, they're going to fail because they want to be a trial lawyer all day.

So I've done that eight years in a row. I just did it in Orlando last week, a couple hundred attendees I believe. And I'm teaching business owners how to navigate that really difficult process between being what I call a plumber, which is a trial lawyer, and the guy who owns the plumbing company, which doesn't plumb anymore, but he's miserable because what he used to love to do was plumb, because he was a plumber. So where do you fall on the spectrum, and all us lawyers are definitely on the spectrum, between plumber and the guy who owns the plumbing company? Are you the technician, which is the trial lawyer, or are you the entrepreneur who owns the company, or somewhere in between? And most people are somewhere in between.

Chris Dreyer:

What comes to mind for me is, so my sister and brother-in-law own a plumbing and HVAC company, a very large, probably the largest in southern Illinois. And they would get a lot of value from attending just on those highlights. And then Craig, this has been amazing. Where can people go to connect with you and learn more?

Craig Goldenfarb:

Sure. Well, my website is one place. It's Goldlaw.com, I'm branded as GOLDLAW because my last name is Goldenfarb. The other is the seminar website, which is sevenfigureattorney.com. So you can see an example of the amazing speakers, they're all from my law firm. I'm the only seminar in the United States where all the speakers are the heads of one law firm. So it gives you a soup to nuts, under the hood view of how one law firm is run, that's my law firm. So that's sevenfigureattorney.com. It's spelled out, sevenfigureattorney.com. Also, I have an ice cream truck that's branded that we send out to charities to give away free ice cream, which is also a massive billboard. So you can look up sweetjustice.com. We named the ice cream truck Sweet Justice, we actually crowd sourced it to get a name. So we gave $500 to the person who came up with the name. But the easiest way is probably the website for my law firm.

Chris Dreyer:

That's it for PIM. If Craig's story lit a fire under you, don't just take notes, take action, build systems, track your KPIs, hire the right leaders. And if you want more insight on how to grow your business, not just a firm, be sure to subscribe, share, and leave a review. I'm Chris Dreyer, catch you next time.

 

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