How to Know When It's Time to Leave With Dana Brooks

Welcome to the Grow Your Law Firm podcast brought to you by Pilma. This podcast helps lead lawyers to more growth, profit, and freedom. Here is your legal marketing expert and host, Ken Hardison. Well, hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Grow Your Law Firm.

And today we're going to be talking about something most entrepreneurs think about. but rarely admit out loud. And that is, when is it time to leave? Not when the business is failing, not when you're forced out, not when it's working and something, but rather when it is work, things are working and something inside of you has shifted.

Every business owner or every worker eventually faces this question, is this burnout, is this boredom, or is it growth pulling you to somewhere new? Leaving is emotional. I know I've done it several times. It's financial.

It's identity-driven. And if you get it wrong, it can cost you years. So in this episode, we have the pleasure of talking to Dana Brooks with Fasig and Brooks out of Tallahassee and Pensacola, Florida. We've got a very successful law firm down there.

They've done a great job. I've known Dana and Mr. Fasig for, I don't know, seven, eight years. Yeah.

I watched them really build a great law firm. So we were talking about this, and she says, I'm working on a book. I'm thinking about a book, thinking about a presentation. So I think this is a great time because this is something everybody just doesn't really like to talk about.

So if you've ever quietly wondered where it's time for your next chapter, this conversation's for you. Thank you for being here, Dana. Thank you for having me again, Ken. It's always a pleasure to be on your program.

Yeah. Yeah. So a few questions that I kind of, because I really thought about this after we talked yesterday or text, because we all have to deal with this. And it's hard.

It's hard to figure out what's right or wrong, because like I said, it can be very costly emotionally and financially if you make the wrong decision. And it could be from leaving your job and going to another job or going from like defense work to plaintiff's work, or it could be leaving a firm for whatever reasons. You know, all the time it's either money or core values are not aligned or whatever. And we get all into that.

But let me go back to you. First, I want to ask you, what made you start thinking about this? I'm going through some pretty big developmental changes in my life. As you said, most of our firm growth has occurred in Tallahassee, Florida, which is of the north.

Think about I-10 going all the way through Florida, Jacksonville on one end, Pensacola on the other end. Tallahassee's in the middle. I'm not from there. I don't have a family member there.

But I ended up there because of a marriage and ended up kind of having to stay because I got divorced. But we had a child together and neither right out of us was going to leave and not be there with our daughter. So I kind of got stuck there. That's not a really nice thing to say.

But a lot of people say that about Tallahassee is a college town. It's a state government town. It's a it's a capital. So you can get caught up, especially as a lawyer.

I tell people you can't swing a cat and not hit a lawyer in Tallahassee. It's not a big deal at all. Nobody treats you special for being a lawyer. But I stayed there.

I remarried, put in roots, got an opportunity to become a member of this law firm right out of law school, and then got a lot of autonomy. You know, I got a lot of opportunities there that I wouldn't get in a lot of places. And so we've grown the practice. We've created a lot of really good, well-paying jobs.

We're very proud of that. But at the end of the day, I didn't know a soul in that town other than the person I married. Not one soul. Now, I can't go anywhere because everybody knows who I am, because I'm a billboard advertising, taxicab, bus wrapping lawyer.

And that gets in your head. You kind of like that. You start getting asked to be important on important boards. And your opinion is asked about the direction the community and the city and government and things like that should take.

And you're like, wow, you know, I've got to really something here. And then Thanksgiving, this last Thanksgiving, my parents came over and I don't see my parents that much. They're in Pensacola. I'm from Pensacola, which is only three hours away, but it might as well be in a different planet.

You don't just pop over there. And I'm one of an enormous family. I'm an only child, but my mom's from a huge, huge family. I've got scads of cousins and all kinds of people over in Pensacola.

We had just acquired a law firm or a person from a law firm in Pensacola who had come with us about a year and a half earlier. And my mom came over Thanksgiving and I could tell her memory was slipping. It occurred to me. And my mom's my rock.

You know, I never thought my mother was mortal. And I thought, oh, maybe she is. And it scared me. And it just occurred to me, what are you doing here?

You have nothing to keep you here. In fact, there's a big need for you to go to Pensacola. That's nascent operation over there. Those are a lot of sprigs coming up out of the ground that need watering.

And here I am sitting in Tallahassee pouring water into an overflowing pitcher. So I've done allocating my resources right. And I'm not going to miss the last best years of my mother's life. So I just, I've already bought a house.

That was Thanksgiving. I bought a house I closed on at the end of January. I'm meeting a designer to get it all cuted up today. But I thought to myself, why are you resisting this so much?

Everything in the universe is telling you leave, go. I never meant to stay in Tallahassee and I've been here 35 years. So, you know, you don't want to wait until you're 58 and your parents start to show signs of, you know, failing before you get stuck in your life. You know, it's not an easy transition.

I have a relationship with somebody I'm deeply for, but that's just going to have to grow with me or it may not. But there's too many things saying yes. And I can make that relationship a crutch. And I've decided that's not what I want to do.

My law partners, everything over there in Tallahassee, it's taken a minute. But it's just kind of going. That's on autopilot. It doesn't need my input daily.

In fact, that's one thing I don't like about it. And was thinking about leaving the firm entirely because I didn't like the way that Tallahassee office operated. We had to have four people to make any decision, usually five, the four shareholders and a COO. And I mean any decision.

It could be, you know, whether we go with this AI or this AI. I'm like, I don't need to be interviewed for every single decision. I can delegate some responsibility. And the way I arrived at that was to realize I can fix any problem.

OK, just because I didn't handle it going across. I know I can fix whatever they do that I don't like. So let me just give them some flack. Let's let out this line a little bit.

And that has proven to be a good thing. They're happier not having to deal with me on everything. And I'm happier that because I kind of felt like this is not the highest, best use of my time. You know, I'm involved in the operations of every little thing.

And that's why do I have a COO if I'm still doing that? So I just had to kind of reevaluate my life in light of that one prompt I guess and seeing my parents But you know me Ken once I make a decision I go ahead on with it I get down the road with it But that's what got me thinking about it, because I thought about some other people in my office. They've changed careers. They've changed from the defense to the plaintiff.

Why don't people change? Every time we've had a change that was initially painful when a lawyer left or something like that happened, every single time, bar none, we did better for it. made more money, hit records, but we were so scared and we would keep people so long that we knew we needed to part ways with or people stayed with us too long. We pride ourselves on being very generous and giving you an enormous opportunity, which means paying a lot.

And whenever someone's making a lot of money, they're not going to leave. Money is a big, big, big thing. And so when you overpay or you give too great of an opportunity, you can end up trapped with a bunch of people you don't want around because they will not leave you. You can't run them out of there with a bulldozer.

So there's a lot of power in leaving on your own and for prompting other people to leave when they're just not ready. So you're still with the firm. You're just moving to Pensacola. Yeah, I'm still with the firm.

But this is another thing. I got to the point where I wasn't sure what my contributions were. I started thinking about how this would go if I weren't here. And it'd go just fine.

I had to get my ego around that. And that's why people don't don't make changes like that. It's fear and it's ego. And it's sometimes a misplaced sense of loyalty.

Loyalty is good. Loyalty is great. You like to see that in people. And so many owners and employers get frustrated when they feel like they don't see loyalty from people that they feel like they've done a lot for.

but loyalty can be invisible handcuffs. You can leave somebody in a situation that has done wonders for you. It's called an elegant exit in my book. You have to be very direct to the person, no passive aggressive, meet them where they are, say, you know, I appreciate all the opportunities you've given me.

I wouldn't be here if it weren't for you. I feel like I'm growing in a different direction. And for me to be fulfilled, I feel like I need to part ways or change the nature of this relationship, however you need to do it and however you need to phrase it. But it's a hard conversation to have.

And instead, what happens a lot of times, people get passive aggressive and they start getting huffy, start acting like, what's her problem? And then the person who's huffy is going, well, you ought to know. You can't tell I'm unhappy, kind of like in a marriage. Why do I have to tell you?

You ought to know. Why do you think I'm stomping around this house? No, you have to use your words sometimes and you have to do it respectfully. But you can you can leave situations that don't work for you anymore.

You just have to be very direct about it and honest with yourself. Yeah, I remember when I left the first firm I was with, I was with him from 83 to 95. And the guy, the partner said, you know, well, this is just not a good time. I said, Mike, there's never going to be a good time.

that's right i mean there's never going to be a good time you know it's like you got to rip the band-aid off and go with it and it wasn't i mean it wasn't fun i mean you know but the deal is uh in that situation i feel like i had outgrown the firm and uh i wanted to do things and they were more conservative and i was more entrepreneurial clashing too much and i just uh it really came down to i wanted to start marketing and they didn't they thought it was unprofessional and And so our Corvets started misaligning and where we wanted to go.

And that's okay. I think that's fine. I mean, you know, it's - but I want to get back to you. So what was, like, the biggest fear?

Because you probably were since this before last October, I imagine. Yeah. What was the biggest fear? Which one of them turned out to be exaggerated or flat-out wrong?

Gosh, there's so many, Ken. And I had been very discontent in this firm for several years. I had given up. Talk about leaving.

This comes up in masterminds with you all the time is whatever you do want to grow your firm and you want to scale it. A lot of times you got to leave the practice of law, at least the practice of law as you have been experiencing it. And I didn't come up through general PI. I had been a med mal defense paralegal.

And then when I came switch sides, got a law school, I became a medical malpractice trial lawyer, tried my first case like five weeks out of law school. And that was my life for several years. So whenever we decided to focus on other things, because med mal is kind of a passion project. That's not a cash flow driver.

Whenever you hit, you're the happiest person in the world. But to finance those cases and pay all the staff and wait on them a couple of years, and sometimes they don't pop, that gets old real fast. And your law partners who are doing the PI hustle, they're looking at you. Where's the money?

Where's the money? I see it going out. Where's it coming in? You know, not everybody has that risk tolerance.

And that's, gosh, it's almost like a vanity area of law now. That's not true. But you know what I'm saying? It's for rich people.

People have already made their money and people who do have a pretty big ego and do like trying those cases. The minute I found out I could pay somebody else to do that, I knew I was never getting ready for trial again. So it's just it's too taxing for me. I'm glad I could do it.

I'm glad I did it. But I'm quite done with that. But that was a big thing for me because I didn't want to do general PI because I know I could hire people to do that. Then it was largely a bunch of paralegal management.

So I was lost. What am I going to do then? What does it mean to run this firm? Well, aren't I supposed to be bringing people in?

I'm going backwards if I'm managing law firms again. I did that before I went to law school. So I was very unsettled. So then you came along and we got really involved in growth and all the things that you do to help people build successful practices.

I got very much into that. And then that got to a certain level. You know, Tallahassee is only so big. There's only so many people in car accidents.

There's only so many people who get hurt. So many people are going to do something about it. And so many people are going to pick me. So that's a lot of whittling down.

So I was I got to do something. So I was very uncomfortable. And again, we are very unique in that we have active, active shareholders who all have strong opinions and want to be involved. That got tiresome for me.

And so I'm like, something's got to give. Do I just leave and go do my own thing? Because if it was just me, I would be doing things differently. But I thought, do I want to start up a law firm at my age and do all these kinds of things?

Do I want to deal with the recruiting and the hiring and the dissolution and all that? And that didn't turn me on either. Plus, I love my partners. I mean, they're just wonderful human beings.

That's the best thing about it. It was just a lot of that with me And then when Pensacola came up I always wanted to be back home I never meant to be away 35 years If you ever been to Pensacola it one of the most beautiful places ever I been there several times It beautiful It just gorgeous And I have so many friends I one of these people who keeps up with everybody I went to high school with and all my family I go to all my reunions all that stuff So I thought I got an enormous group of people over there.

Want me over there. There's a need over there because the dynamics of the PI world in Pensacola have opened up to where, you know, there's room for us. There's so many people over here do mass torts. I'm in the Pensacola office today.

Our partner over here, wonderful man. He and I seem very, very compatible. I think it's because we're both born and raised here and there's just something about it. We just kind of get it, the cultural differences.

So this opportunity came around, but it came around a year and a half ago and I'm still sitting over there in Tallahassee, you know, because I was so stuck in my ways. I didn't think, I could not conceptualize not being there with the other shareholders, even though we have one lawyer over here trying cases, doing litigation, doing PI, running the firm, trying to do all the marketing. That's way too much to ask one person to do. And, you know, how long is that sustainable before he's burnt out?

So, and if we need to add more people, who's going to have the time to help him find those people and stuff? So, you know, it should have been crystal clear to me when we acquired this office, Dana, get back home. But it wasn't because I was so used to being in Tallahassee. So you're in everything is always it's self-limiting beliefs.

It's just all in here. It wasn't reality. Other people could see it clearly for us, but we're in the middle of it and we can't see it. It's like looking from inside of a wine bottle.

You got the label. You really can't see what's on the outside of the label. Right. Yeah.

I'm looking outside. I see, yeah, this is a red, you know, whatever. Yeah. Yeah.

I think that every time I've left, I probably waited too long because it is serious stuff, right? And I think the way you've done it is you've really just kind of checked your ego and said, listen, I'm going to let them deal with it. I'm going to go over here and practice law, be near my family, be where I'm comfortable, and be happy. Yeah, you only get one shot.

You only get one life. and if you have health scares or have to have a surgery or you know heart starts getting weird uh can't get that blood pressure under control things like that you know i guess i just start feeling mortal i just realize you don't have all day sister most people are younger than you now so you know make the most of it and and you know i think a lot of it too ken this is kind of funny i have a lot of change in my personal life i apparently have a high level of comfort with that but I'm renting a house right now because I'm after 13 years of threatening to remodel my house that's another thing I'm under remodel in a major house in Tallahassee what I do kept going probably going to sell it I'm not sure but I bought a house over in Pensacola that I like you know anybody else most people would have gone well I'm in the middle of this remodel I've got to finish this out so in the middle of this I got these two beautiful homes that I could be in and I'm in a little rental I'm a little rental house and I go in that little tired house it's like staying in hotel room for trial for a year.

That's what it feels like. And I'm sitting there going, I could be at home looking at water and here I am in this little boxed in thing, you know, and, but it made me think to myself, I'm giving up a whole year of my life at 58. That's a valuable time. So that's another reason I said, well, while I'm sitting here, you know, not really able to do a whole lot, why don't I get my life together in Pensacola?

So I just started getting a plan. This is the other thing. I was a mental health counselor before I went to law school and I worked in an inpatient psychiatric hospital. You can't get in there unless you're homicidal, suicidal, or seeing, feeling, tasting, smelling, and hearing things the rest of us are not.

So I have very seriously sick people, but I found out how bad they were when they came in there. If you could give them a plan, if you could give them, okay, a checklist, something to do, anybody can follow a recipe, anybody can follow instructions. And so that's what I did with myself. I said, okay, what am I trying to do.

I want to move over there. It's going to take me a while because this needs to be, I can't do anything that's going to leave people in the lurch. I've got commitments to people. So I look it up.

So I plan everything out. I'm usually Pensacola week, Tallahassee or traveling or whatever my commitments are for a week. I'm not overly committing to things just because I get asked. I used to have a very, very full calendar and I had to kind of leave my ego on the table.

You know, you want to show up to everything you get invited to. But is that really moving the ball down the field or is that just keeping you occupied? That's what my frustrations were in the last several years. I felt like I was plenty busy.

I was certainly occupied. It seemed like the, you know, it helped bring in cases and it helped the status of the firm. When my status, you know, rose, so did the status of the law firm. But that's, yeah, that's not life's work.

That's the thing that ought to just naturally come along with your life's work, I guess. So I needed a purpose. And this this set it for me. But I've seen so many other people struggle.

We just hired an attorney about my age. Miserable defense lawyer. Good at it. In fact, that's the whole reason we interviewed him.

Everybody liked the guy. But he just, you know, but the guy's working for a defense, big, huge defense lawyer. So, you know, he's not getting any particular individual attention. having to work remotely from home he's in you know a track suit all day walking around the house and his paralegal's in missouri and he was just he finally just said this is a shitty quality of life i don't like this and so we talked to him and yeah he was president you know reticent to switch sides and when he finally did that's the happiest man you've ever seen it's like rescuing a dog you know and they just love you and they lick your face all day he's up and we're in two floors over there.

He's on the floor. He's on the floor. He's meeting people. He's funny.

He's in the group text that we all have with the lawyers and he's making the jokes and stuff. And you just feel so good. But think about how many years did you spend in that miserable place, billable hours, billable guidelines, no choice over your cases, just trying to make some defense out of whatever plops in your lap. I've done that.

So I understand the grind of it. But you stay in an environment you're not happy in just because you're used to the paycheck. And then you start telling yourself things. Well, it's not that bad.

Oh, well, if I went to the PI firm, I'd probably have to pay for all my staff and my advertising. I can't do that. You don't know. You haven't asked.

All of us work a little bit differently. So, you know, his heart was in the right place and he's a great plaintiff's lawyer, but he just got stuck. So many come out of law school and you start that billable hour job. Next thing you know, because most, you know, a lot of them were men back in the day when I saw this.

Next thing you know, they had a baby coming. They had a house. Then their wife didn't want to go back to work after the baby. And they'd go, I have zero risk tolerance.

I have zero ability to take any risk. That's not always true. You don't know what you don't know. So you need to go find out.

And then if you are like I was right out of law school, I had a tremendous ability to take any risk I wanted to. So you better believe I took the highest one that had the highest potential payout And here I am now Best decision I ever made But I was married to an insurance defense lawyer at the time very cautious very prudent person really didn want me to do it You know he couldn tell me enough about all the risks He couldn't tell me enough about why that was a bad decision. And I looked at it like, listen, I don't know that I'm going to have another opportunity like this covered around the corner.

I'm going to take it. And if it doesn't work out, we'll just see. But I had to leave, you know, again the track that looked comfortable i had to leave the advice of people that i respected because i had to believe in myself yeah and i can relate to that when i sold my firm in 2010 everybody thought i was crazy my wife everybody because i was i was on tv i was famous i mean i was getting all asked for autographs at restaurants and at uh yeah walmart yeah and i was making you know seven figures money i mean you know but that's a good gig but i got up one morning and i just was not looking forward to it and i was getting more and more miserable and i said well maybe it's just a slump maybe i'm just burning out so i backed off but then six months later i still was not looking forward to going into the office and uh that's why i sold and for me you know it was the best decision ever made i do not make the kind of money i made back then but my quality of life and i get up every morning i'm still i'm almost 70 now i'll be 70 this year i'm charged up man i mean i look forward to it i mean for me it was the best decision for a lot of people it wouldn't have been but it was uh i was scared because i didn't know what the future you know held and uh i didn't have a cushion because i had the money i got had from selling out but of course then i went through a divorce and gave half of that away but but that's okay too that'll be that's okay i mean i'm fine with that yeah i've had some of those personal dissolutions myself and whenever you're contemplating them and you're in the middle of it you think oh what have i done oh my word what have i done not one time has unfortunately i've done that a couple times but all of us have ended up better i've ended up in a better place they've ended up in a better place and everybody wants to fight that because it is such a loss it feels like failure whenever you leave i think that's the biggest thing is people have to get their head around reframing what leaving means.

It's not quitting. Yeah. And I think, too, when you're leaving, it depends on, am I running away from something or am I running towards something? Yes.

It's a lot better to be running towards something than running away from something. How do you think about that? I think that's right. I think you've got to have some direction around.

You're just flailing in a different environment. That's why I like for people to sit with their misery a little bit. I'm trying to teach my 32-year-old daughter this. She wants an immediate end to discomfort.

And I said, sometimes you don't have enough information or you're going to make an emotional decision that makes you go from bad to worse. So sit with it. Literally consider your alternatives. Think about the timeline for them.

What's it going to take for me to do it? What resources will be needed to do it? Do you have the time to regroup? What's it going to take to go in a different rush?

But just sit with it. This is why it is so hard for people to be around people who are grieving. Nobody wants to sit with you in your discomfort. Nobody wants to see it.

People are action oriented. They want to end your suffering. They want to end their suffering. But sometimes you need to sit in your misery and really think about it or else you are going to go from bad to worse.

Yeah. So got to wrap up. Before we do, I want to speak directly to anyone that's thinking about leaving their business or leaving their job or whatever. I want to ask you this.

if someone is listening, feels the pull to leave, but yet does not have a clear next thing, what are two or three things you would tell them they should get clarity with without blowing up their life or their business? I put it down on paper. And when I literally wrote it out, I did this when I left a 20-year marriage. I put it down on paper.

Well, first thing I asked myself is this, do you want the next 20 years of your life to look like the last? My answer was not no, but hell no. And I put it down on paper and I'm a rational person. And I thought there's not one thing here that I can point to that says stay.

Same thing when I got ready to move to Pensacola, write it down on paper. The second thing is coach. You know, I like a coach. You're a coach.

You're a great coach. There are several and they don't have to be professionals, but you got to maybe have a shepherd, maybe more so than a coach, but somebody has got to keep, talk your head right, keep your head right, because otherwise you're going to get back into your head. And it's real, It's much easier to go back to all the excuses for why not to leave than it is to find the courage and the strength to leave. So sometimes maybe you need a therapist, maybe you need a coach, but have somebody to help you sort through this thing.

If it's not crystal clear like it was to me when I wrote it out, my path was as clear as day. If it's not so clear to you, get some help from somebody who's objective, not your best friend or your parent. Yeah, that's why people don't run for office. Yeah, it's not because they're worried about getting their nose bloodied.

is because they don't like the effects that it has on the people who love them. So sometimes those aren't the people to ask advice for because they want to protect you more than you want to protect yourself sometimes. So get some objectivity about your life. It could be a personal coach.

It could be a professional coach. I've seen a lot of people give up the practice of law altogether and go in a different direction. There are computer programmers or they started a computer business or whatever they're doing. They were so scared to do it.

And they were like, oh, I wasted that education. Oh, I was in school so long, it was so hard. That's self-limiting beliefs. That's in your head.

So I would say write it down and then get some help from somebody who's objective. Yeah. And I think people shouldn't leave because they're exhausted or because they're frustrated or because they're bored. But you're going to leave, whatever it is, leave with intention.

I mean, you've got to have a complete plan. But I like what you said about writing it down because you really need to know really some clarity about how you're going to get your financial runway, you're pushing already in this and the direction you're moving even if it's not 100% clear but at least a direction so yeah well this has been great, it's good to catch up me too and I'm happy for you, I really am I mean I know these decisions can be tough but I think for you, I think you made the right decision and I'm happy for you feels good, thank you Ken until next time, this is Ken Hardison dedicated your success.

We'll see you next time.