Sarah Cottrell: Hi, and welcome to The Former Lawyer Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Cottrell. I practiced law for 10 years and now I help unhappy lawyers ditch their soul-sucking jobs. On this show, I share advice and strategies for aspiring former lawyers, and interviews with former lawyers who have left the law behind to find careers and lives that they love.

This week, I'm sharing my conversation with Victoria Collier about Quid Pro Quo Law. Victoria used to practice law. She had her own practice, and she ended up selling her practice.

What she does with Quid Pro Quo Law is she consults with lawyers who also have their own practices or own a law firm and are thinking about their eventual exit plan. In particular, she helps lawyers figure out how to set up their firms so that they can be scalable assets.

We talk a lot about that, her own experience in selling her law firm and the work that she does with other lawyers and all sorts of other things. Here is my conversation with Victoria.

Hi, Victoria. Welcome to The Former Lawyer Podcast.

Victoria Collier: Thanks, Sarah.

Sarah Cottrell: Why don't we start with you introducing yourself to the listeners and then we'll go from there.

Victoria Collier: Okay, great. I'm Victoria Collier and I am the founder of Quid Pro Quo, which is a business that helps law firms and law firm owners value their businesses and then sell them. But before that, I am a licensed lawyer and I started my own law firm directly out of law school. I was a non-traditional lawyer, wherein I was a paralegal before I went to law school and also in the Air Force for six years before that. So, yeah, that's the short of it.

Sarah Cottrell: Let's go back to the beginning, which is what we typically do on this podcast. I know you mentioned that you are a non-traditional student. I'm wondering what made you decide to go to law school.

Was it the fact that you had been working as a paralegal and it, therefore, interested you, or was there some other specific goal that you had when you decided to go to law school?

Victoria Collier: It really was that I was a paralegal and I was essentially doing everything other than going into court and certainly, making what I considered probably to be the big bucks.

I was doing all the prep work for court depositions. I was doing all the communications with our clients in between court actions. I just felt like if I'm going to be doing all this, I actually want to have some of the responsibility and I want to have the compensation that comes with that responsibility.

Sarah Cottrell: It's interesting. I actually have worked with a lot of lawyers who were paralegals and ultimately decided like, “If I'm doing this, basically all of this stuff anyway, I want to be a lawyer.”

The thing that is interesting about that is for many people, even if they end up practicing at the same or very similar firm to the one that they were as a paralegal, not everyone finds that they like it, even though they anticipate that they would because they've had that previous experience.

I'm wondering for you—and I know you said that you started your own practice—but can you talk a little bit about what that transition was like from being a paralegal, going to law school, and then starting your own practice?

Victoria Collier: Sure. The other element that prompted me to go to law school was I was dating a lawyer. Prior to dating a lawyer, I really never had anyone that encouraged me. I didn't really have the confidence until I was dating that person.

Having that behind me was also very helpful having that encouragement. When I went to law school, I went to law school out of state from where I was being a paralegal. I did not work as a paralegal while in law school, not at the same firm or even doing the same thing.

When I was looking for summer internships between the second and third year, when you're looking for that permanent job, I defaulted to that type of work, which I loved, which was workers' compensation both on the defense side and on the plaintiff side. I had done both sides. Primarily, I had done the defense side.

I was interviewing at some of your midsize firms in Georgia from out of state, I went to law school in Nebraska, and I was getting interviews but I wasn't getting any job offers and I absolutely loved doing what I did, that kind of work. But I wasn't getting any job offers and primarily, I don't know if this is accurate or if it just makes me feel better but they were saying it's because I was going to school out of state and they wanted someone who could work their entire third year so that they could then see if they're a candidate to be an associate.

That didn't work out for me. So I sat on my floor in my apartment in Nebraska and cried and basically had a conversation with my partner and said, “Let's pretend money doesn't mean anything.”

At that time, money didn't mean anything because she was a prosecutor. So she pretty much chose passion over profit because she wasn't getting paid much. I just said I want to work with old people. I had been a nurse's aide in a nursing home. I had done hands-on home health care before I went to law school. I did both of those things. I just love old people.

We discovered that there was a practice area called Elder Law, which is a niche in the estate planning world. I fortunately was able to do my third year of law school in Georgia.

I was the research assistant for the Elder Law professor in Georgia. There's only one of five at the time lawyers in Georgia that did Elder Law. So I got an internship with that person.

My transition, I think, was wonderful and beautiful because I had a very reputable professor understudy. Then I also learned a whole lot from a private practitioner of what to do and what not to do.

My only decision was, “Do I try to work for someone or work for myself?” Well, that decision was made very easily for me because of the five lawyers who did Elder Law at the time, none of them really wanted to expand.

I had given a full business plan to the man I worked for. He essentially showed that I could produce three times what I was asking in salary. He laughed at me and so I started my own firm.

Sarah Cottrell: Ah. I wish I was surprised. Unfortunately not. Well, so tell me about that. Tell me about starting your own firm, what that was like, and just how that progressed for you.

Victoria Collier: Yeah, sure. Well, he and I are friends now. I mean, it's 22 or 25 years later, which is all good. I already had my business plan clearly because I had created one to give to him. That was helpful. I just had to work out the plan.

But no, truly during my third year of law school, the wonderful thing was that I was out giving presentations to prospective clients. I couldn't give legal advice, of course, but I could talk about basic stuff like powers of attorney and things like that. So I was already getting my name out there among the professionals, my referral sources, prospective clients.

So by the time I passed the bar, I had people saying, “Can I refer a client to you yet? Can I refer a client?” In Georgia, like many other states, you graduate in let's say May, you take the bar in July, you don't get your results until, in Georgia, it's October 30th, so there are five or six months where you cannot open your own practice because you're not licensed.

So what I did was I found a lawyer who was miserable doing what he was doing, which was family law, and I said, “Come work with me.” For those six months, I taught him how to do what we were going to do in Elder Law so that we worked under his bar license.

I was basically his paralegal telling him how to do what we're doing. That allowed us to get clients and get revenue. Then when I got my bar license, we were partners for a year and then he retired.

Sarah Cottrell: I love that story. Okay. Victoria, obviously at the beginning of our conversation, you mentioned that you now own this business that helps people value and I think maybe also prepare their firm for a potential sale.

I am wondering where you would like to start in terms of talking about your experience with your firm and ultimately building that business, what do you think would make the most sense in terms of having the listeners understand how you got there and what that business does?

Victoria Collier: Sure. I'll start by saying that when my partner retired after we'd been together just one year, it never crossed my mind that he could ask to be bought out. I don't think it ever crossed his mind either because that just wasn't done. Along the way when I started my own practice and then I promoted an associate to partner and my partner was partners with me for a couple of years and then it just wasn't working out for either of us, I asked him to leave. He also didn't ask for any kind of payment to get out or anything like that. He just wanted his computer and I'm like, “You can have it.”

I don't think it's on the top of people's minds that when people exit either partnerships or just in general, “I don't want to do this anymore,” that you can get anything out of your firm.

Well, fast forward to 18 years after I started my law firm, I wanted to exit. I was 48 when I made the decision. I was 50 when I actually exited. I spent those two years really creating a situation that I could sell for real dollars in my pocket when I walked away.

The reason for that was I was the sole breadwinner of my family. My spouse was a stay-at-home parent. We had two minor children who were eight when I made the decision, and 10 when I executed the decision. I have twins. And I didn't have any money saved up for retirement or what the next plan was or anything like that.

All I know is I bought a farm and I wanted to spend more time with my kids and there had to be a way that I could do that. I had to get money out of the firm so that I could support myself until my next business or the farm was going to be producing money for me. The next business is Quid Pro Quo where I help other lawyers value their firms and sell them.

Sarah Cottrell: Can you talk a little bit more about what things you did, what steps you took to get your firm to the point where it was saleable?

Victoria Collier: Sure. When I built my firm, I was, as you know, a paralegal before. I was very comfortable with paralegals. I had built my firm with what I will call “an army” of legal assistants and paralegals, not so much lawyers. I had tried to hire lawyers, I just wasn't great at it. In addition to owning my own law firm, I also taught law firms across the United States, how to do a particular niche within our niche.

I was out of the office a lot traveling the country doing presentations. That's the number one thing I would say that catapulted me was that I had to delegate much of the production and the work to other people.

I had to trust them to do that. I had to train them to do it so I could trust them. Number one was taking me out of certain roles within the firm and allowing other people to do those tasks.

That was number one. Number two was about 10, 12 years in, I realized that we don't have efficiencies. We have no procedures, no nothing. When people left, it would take a whole other person to sit down with them for a week or two to train them on their job and this person sitting down there with them may or may not be proficient at that job. They just happen to be available and they've been around long enough to at least see the job from the perimeter.

I thought, “That's not the way I want to spend my money paying two salaries to sit here while one learns and the other one observes.” We started putting policies and procedures in place. That way we could just train them. As an example, in my current business Quid Pro Quo, we just hired a new executive assistant two days ago.

My exiting executive assistant before she left, we already had written policies and procedures, but she went one step extra and she made a short video for every single thing that's critical that she did for me.

Now, while I'm onboarding this new person, part of my training is to watch the videos and then we're going to talk about it and see what I'm going to want you to implement.

I don't have to sit there. No one else has to sit there. She's watching the videos. She's showing me that she can do the training that was detailed in them. It just made sense. Number two was putting in policies and procedures and training manuals for others.

Then the third and the final most critical part was I needed to clean up my finances. I needed to get my data together. I needed to show that this firm has value and you cannot show that if you don't have good data, clean profit-loss statements, and trackable records like how many people call your office? Of those people who call your office, how many of them schedule appointments? Of those that schedule appointments, how many of them hire you? What's your average case value? All the data that's really required to know, “Do I have a successful financial side of this business?”

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. I imagine for someone who's listening if they are a solo or small firm owner and they are thinking, as many people are who listen to this podcast, “I don't really think I want to be doing this anymore,” one of the things that I have heard from people in that position is that the day-to-day running of the firm, the practice takes up so much bandwidth that they don't necessarily feel like they can take a step back to do some of what you're describing.

I'm wondering for people like that who are listening, what advice do you have for someone who's thinking about, “I might want to make this move in this way, but I don't feel like I have the bandwidth to devote to these things that need to happen”?

Victoria Collier: I think it all comes down to priorities and how you value yourself and those priorities. When we consider what's the value of time and what's the value of tasks, how we spend our time, and on what tasks are we spinning them, then that gives us some clarity.

For example, I had a client who was still doing her bookkeeping on Sundays, she and her husband. She'd been in practice for 30 years, making decent money. They were making about $600,000. The net was close to 60%. She could afford a bookkeeper.

But she was overwhelmed. She was working all the time. When you can pay a bookkeeper, I don't even know what the rate is anymore, but let's just say it's $100 an hour, your billable hour is $350 or $400, then when you look at it this way, it makes sense for me to spend that hour getting a new client and getting $400 versus sitting there and wasting my time at a $100-an-hour expense.

Now the mindset, though, that people have is, “What’s on Sunday? It's not like I'm getting clients in anyway.” Well, the more exhausted you are, the less likely you're going to get a client Monday through Friday because you don't have the energy to receive that client.

Number one is really figuring out what tasks need to be done, what could you pay someone to do those tasks, and then start prioritizing those as to what can I get off my plate?

It's not just that. It's also what would I do with my time, Sarah, if and when that is off my plate. So many people don't get things off their plate because then they're just like, “Well, then what am I going to do?” We have to be strategic about that.

If I can save three hours of tasks that someone that's making $25 to $50 an hour can do, what would I do with that? Would I be developing marketing materials? Would I be doing strategic planning for three to five years? Would I be out networking and getting new clients in? We have to know how we're going to fill that time. Otherwise, we never will replace ourselves because we don't see the value of the other tasks.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah, that makes total sense. You mentioned these big three things that you needed to do to position your firm to be sold. I think you said it was two years between when you decided that you wanted to make that happen and then it actually happened. I'm wondering, do you find that to be a typical timeline or is it faster or slower? I mean, I realize the lawyerly answer is it depends, but I'm wondering if you've seen any trends.

Victoria Collier: Well, I'd say it's all over the board for sure because too many people wait until they are burned out to get out. Then it's like a firecell. Then just like, “Well, I'm out.” When you want more money and the actual value of what your firm can bring in, it does take time. It takes resources and mental resources.

When I made my decision, one of the critical factors was I actually hired a COO, or as you can also call it, professional legal administrator, to come in and clean up my business for me.

I didn't have, first of all, the skill set to do it. Otherwise, I would have been doing it all along. I didn't have the energy or desire to personally do it. But I knew it needed to be done if I was going to sell my firm for an X amount of dollars. It had to be done. So I literally hired a C-suite level six-plus figure to come and do that for me.

It took two years. It could have taken longer or it could have taken shorter depending on the state of my affairs and how adept that person is at getting it turned around. But many lawyers going through this don't want to, first of all, invest that kind of money in getting their firm in the shape they want it to be in, or they don't have the emotional time to do it.

People contact me sometimes to sell their firm. They're like, “I can stay another year.” But then once they've made that decision, this is the trend I see when you say are there trends, the trend I see is, “Okay, so you're willing to stay a year or more?” “Yes, I am.” Okay, they hire me. We get the value.

We start to get things going and they're like, “This has to be sold in two months. I am so ready to get out of here.” Something mystical happens when the decision has been made and now it's like, “This should have happened yesterday.”

Sarah Cottrell: It's so interesting because this is one of the things that I talk about on the podcast a lot which is related to this timeline issue. For lawyers who are thinking about leaving and for at least the vast majority of lawyers who I work with when they come to me, they tend to be in a position where they're like, “I know I don't want to be doing this, but I do not know what it is that I want to do and I don't really even know where to start.”

I think for some people, they think that they shouldn't start that process essentially until they're ready to go. But the reality is that going from “I don't know what I want to do and I have no idea how to even start going about figuring that out” to the point where you've actually identified something that you want to be affirmatively moving towards as opposed to just getting away from something takes time.

It just takes time. It's a process. Sometimes I find that people don't think about the fact that there is going to be some time between the point where they start working to figure out what it is they want to do next and then actually are in a position to say, “Okay, I'm leaving and this is what I'm going to do.”

I wonder if you would have a similar perspective in the sense that I often tell people, “Once you know you want to get out even if that is not something that's imminent, even if we're talking about a two to five-year plus plan or timeline, it's still worth starting on the work that you need to do to figure out what it is that you want to do next.” I'm guessing maybe that is the same for someone who's ultimately looking to be able to sell their firm as an asset.

Victoria Collier: Oh, for sure. One of the significant studies out there shows that a large number of people who sell their businesses have seller's remorse within 12 months of doing so. That's because they don't really have a plan for what they're going to do after they so-called retire.

It's different, I think, for people who have been in the working world and the corporate world where they've got that retirement income coming. They can use that to travel the world and all that kind of stuff, whatever they do.

But for entrepreneurs, for business owners, it's been our whole life. We've been building and building. It's our baby. So many of us are serial entrepreneurs that retirement is not even part of our vocabulary. We just know we don't want to practice law anymore. We just haven't figured out what that next thing is.

One of the things that I do when I'm assisting our clients that do want to sell is we do a personal readiness assessment to figure out, first of all, how ready are you? Second, what will it take to get you more ready emotionally? There are exercises that we go through as far as visualizing who are the people in your circle or who do you want to be in your circle.

What are the activities you enjoy or used to enjoy or would like to enjoy and start really visualizing? Again, like I talked about before, when you take yourself out of certain roles, how will you fill that time? Well, this is the ultimate role you're taking yourself out of so how do you fill that time?

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah. Okay. You talked about the side of getting your firm ready to sell. Can you talk a little bit about your experience in terms of finding someone to sell to?

Victoria Collier: Sure. Now, in my business Quid Pro Quo, our clients, for the most part, we have outside third parties coming in and buying our client's firms. But that was not my experience. My experience was that when I hired my COO, I do pretty thorough personality testing.

The analyst came back and said, “She is going to want to take over your firm.” They said that to me as if it was a bad thing. I was like, “Oh, so in three months or three years from now?” They're like, “Yeah, I don't know. But that's the thing is we don't know that part.” I said, “Okay.”

I basically told her that we need to get this firm in tip-top shape, no matter what, in case something happens to me or things like that. I did not say from the beginning, “Hey, I plan to sell this.” I just said, “I'm bringing you in because we need to be more formalized as a business.”

Then as we went down that road, I observed her behaviors. I observed her desires. We had a team retreat with the entire team. We were going over goals and future goals.

We all had our vision boards that we had prepared and brought to the meeting. On her vision board, vocally, she was like, “I'm going to be a partner of my own firm at some point, blah, blah, blah.” But it was presented almost in an angry way.

I was blindsided, but I was like, “Okay, this is in line with personality testing.” After the team retreat, I went to her and said, “I plan to sell the firm. You have plans to own a firm. So this can be mutually beneficial. So I'm going to offer it to you first before I go outside the firm and start offering it to others.” We closed within three months from that day.

Sarah Cottrell: Wow. That is amazing. Okay. Can you tell me, Victoria, at the point where you were selling your firm, you'd already gone through this process of getting it ready, had you started to think about what you wanted to do next and decided that Quid Pro Quo was the next step or did that come at some point after that?

Victoria Collier: I had no idea about Quid Pro Quo.

Sarah Cottrell: Tell me more.

Victoria Collier: In 2019, I bought a farm because my daughter had a horse and I was paying for this horse to be boarded somewhere. I had been meeting with this gentleman every month to talk about business ideas.

In the state of Georgia, hemp was becoming legal in 2019 for the first time and so I thought, “Oh, well, I can buy a place, board her horse at my own place, save some money there, and then we can make the property productive by growing hemp and turning it into CBD products.”

That's what the plan was. That's in fact what I did. When I owned my law firm—so I owned my law firm from 2002 to 2020—since 2006, I had been coaching lawyers on how to have better practices, specifically within the niche of the niche that I had within my practice.

Lawyers knew about me across the nation because of that coaching. So when I basically sold my practice, lawyers came to me and they're like, “Hey, how did you do that? Can you help me do that?” I'm like, “Well, I can supplement my income from the farm from my buyout, which will help. So, yes, I'll coach some lawyers.”

Well, the lawyer part, the coaching was supposed to be the backup to the farm. What ended up happening was it became the primary and the farm not only became the backup, but it doesn't even exist anymore in the way that it did before. I don't grow hemp anymore. Now I just have a small hobby farm with animals for my daughter.

This is all we do now, or all I do, is the Quid Pro Quo. But it's because there was such a demand after I had done it that people asked me to coach them first and foremost. People weren't ready to sell immediately, they were like, “I want to be ready to sell in three to five years or 15 years, can you teach me?” I said, “Yes.”

First and foremost, the very first year of the business, I was just coaching people. It was the second year and the third year which we're in now where we really are doing a lot of valuations.

Just this year alone, we've done over 100 valuations and then acting as consultant/broker, if you will, to help sell the law firms and find the buyers. It's just been so exciting. We haven't had to really do any marketing other than I have a presence on Facebook, but I haven't had to do any paid marketing. It's just been coming from my relationships and the huge, clearly, need for it.

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah, I'm wondering for people who are listening who are law firm owners, are there any particular questions that they should be asking themselves if they're maybe thinking about whether they might want to go down the path of selling their firm but aren't even necessarily sure about that at this point? What would you suggest for someone in that type of position?

Victoria Collier: Well, the more valuable firms are going to be the ones that can exist and thrive, not just survive but thrive without the owner's presence. To that extent, if you want the highest value, you would have a team and processes that continue without you, that continue to make money without you.

Let's pretend you have a team and processes, but you're still there all the time because of your ego, your passion, or whatever. It's time to start passing off that gavel, if you will.

I would say you need to start, I'm a runner, so I run and I ran in school and I still run today, but you've got your individual races where I can run the mile and I can get my time and I can come in first, second, third, all the way through last.

But then you've got the mile relay where there are four people. You each have to pass that baton after each lap. We, as owners, have to shift our minds from being that individual, “I'm going to run the mile” to “I'm going to be in the relay. Who's next that I can pass this to?” Start developing those behind us and start relying on those people.

That's number one. Number two is, at the end of the day, for a buyer, it's all about profit, profit, profit. What's going in my pocket, pocket, pocket? So if you don't have much profit, then it's not going to be a desirable firm to buy.

It doesn't mean that someone's not going to be willing to take your cases and maybe pay you a percentage of whatever your phone number generates for you, but no one's going to come up and give you money in your pocket upfront if you don't have any profit.

To that end, buyers are looking for predictability. So how can I show them that the phone is going to keep ringing, that the clients are going to keep coming, that the revenue is going to keep coming? Whatever you can do to be able to show that other than, “Well, I've been here for 30 years and everyone loves me,” well, yeah, everyone loves you, but you're leaving, so I mean, what else is there?

Sarah Cottrell: Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Okay, Victoria, for people who are listening who are on some continuum of “I am wanting to leave the law and do something else,” is there anything else that you'd like to share about your story or about your company that you think would be helpful for those people to know or that you'd like to share?

Victoria Collier: Yeah, I would say that number one is that you cannot think about this or plan for this too soon. Because none of us know the why or the when we need to exit our practice.

It could be a medical issue. It could be death. It could be desire or lack thereof. We never know when that's going to hit us. You can't ever plan it too soon. I love Dr. Stephen Covey's Begin With the End in Mind. Don't just jump in and just go in every single day and do what you're doing. Think about the end. What does that look like so that we can design it from now?

With that in mind, I would say that if you've been practicing for a period of time, always getting a baseline value. What is my value today? What is it worth? I'm from the estate planning world and you hear people say, “Oh, I don't need a will because I don't really have anything,” then they die and it's a mess because they did have something.

All of us, our practices are an asset, whether it's valuable or not is another story, but it's an asset that has to be passed on. So let's figure out what is it worth so that you can then start getting excited about what do you want it to be worth? What do you need it to be worth? I tell everybody that the first step to anything is let's just see what you have. Let's get a value on that. Then all plans and paths can go from there.

Sarah Cottrell: That makes sense. Okay, Victoria, if people are interested in connecting with you or learning more about the services that your business offers, where can they find you online?

Victoria Collier: Our website is quidproquolaw.com.

Sarah Cottrell: Amazing and we will put that in the show notes and on the blog post for the episode so if you're listening in a place where you cannot write things down/Google it on your phone, just go there and the link will be there.

Victoria, thank you so much for joining me today. This was so interesting and I think it'll be really helpful for those people who are thinking about “What can I do with my law firm if I want to leave the law and do something else?” So thank you again.

Victoria Collier: Well, thank you, Sarah, for having me. Love it.

Sarah Cottrell: Thanks so much for listening. I absolutely love getting to share this podcast with you. If you haven't yet, I invite you to download my free guide: First Steps to Leaving the Law at formerlawyer.com/first. Until next time, have a great week.