Is Your Law Firm Actually Profitable? The CFO Truth Most Attorneys Never Hear with Danielle Hendon

A healthy P&L doesn't always mean a healthy bank account.

In this episode of the Optimized Law Firm podcast, host Patrick Carver sits down with Danielle Hendon, founder and CEO of 4 Corners CFO, a fractional CFO firm that works exclusively with small and boutique law firms.

Danielle started her career in public accounting and corporate oil and gas finance, then launched 4 Corners CFO to bring big-business financial strategy to firms that could never justify a full-time CFO. Her core belief is simple: law firms rarely sell for more than they made in the current year, so you have to make the most profit you can every single year you're in business.

What's in This Episode?

• The rule of thirds, and why it's the first number Danielle checks for every law firm client
• Why lifetime value and client acquisition cost don't translate cleanly to law firms
• How to diagnose a pricing problem, a people problem, or a pipeline problem
• How much of operating expense law firms typically put toward marketing, and why "growth for the sake of growth" backfires
• A year-round financial calendar: budgeting, mid-year check-ins, and quarterly true-ups
• When a solo or small firm actually needs a fractional CFO
• Where AI helps with law firm finances, and where it confidently gets things wrong
• The low-effort, high-upside habit every firm should start today: tracking time, even on flat fees

Three Key Takeaways

Start with the rule of thirds. Roughly a third of revenue should pay your revenue-generating team, a third should cover operating expenses, and a third should remain as profit. If you're off, check your pricing, your people, and your pipeline before anything else.

Growth only matters if it improves profit. Marketing spend should be measured on return, not just capped at a percentage, but growing revenue without putting more money in your pocket is "more money, more problems."

Track your time, even on flat fees. Logging hours at a $0 rate on flat-fee matters is the only way to know whether your pricing is actually delivering the profit margin you think it is.

Episode Chapters

1. Meet Danielle Hendon and 4 Corners CFO — 00:00
2. The Rule of Thirds: The First Financial KPI for Law Firms — 06:48
3. Diagnosing an Out-of-Balance P&L — 09:15
4. How Much Should Law Firms Spend on Marketing? — 11:59
5. A Year-Round Financial Calendar for Law Firms — 16:55
6. When Does a Law Firm Need a Fractional CFO? — 20:15
7. AI and Law Firm Finances — 24:43
8. Quick Win: Track Your Time, Even on Flat Fees — 27:35
9. Inside 4 Corners CFO: Onboarding, Ideal Clients, and Pricing — 30:25

Full Episode Transcript

Patrick:

Welcome to the Optimized Law Firm podcast, where we talk about how to run a more enjoyable and profitable law firm. I'm your host, Patrick Carver, and I'm the owner of Constellation Marketing. We help hungry law firm owners transcend seven figures and gain total ROI clarity with their marketing. And today we are talking dollar dollar bills, y'all.

I'm pleased to introduce Danielle Hendon, who is the founder and CEO of 4 Corners CFO. Welcome, Danielle.

Danielle:

Thank you for having me, Patrick. I love the way you entered that.

Patrick:

Got to have some fun with it. So tell us a little bit about yourself and about the business. Where are you located in the US?

Danielle:

I'm in the Houston area. I'm actually a military brat, so I bounced all over the world as a kid. We landed in Houston when I was a teenager, and we've been here ever since.

I never thought I'd be the person who would get on a podcast and tell you I love accounting, and you're going to think I'm crazy if you're listening to this as a lawyer. But I really love accounting. I actually went to school thinking I was going to be a music major, and realized musicians don't make enough money and I was going to be broke. So I left that major, had friends in the business school, and decided to give it a shot. My family jokes with me all the time now. Hindsight is 20/20: they say, "You were the one opening cash registers at the grocery store at 16 and doing the banking. How did you not know accounting was the path?" But I landed there eventually, and I genuinely love what I do. I love turning numbers into stories.

When I started my career, I was in public accounting doing audit, and it was all about understanding the numbers. I left that and went into corporate, and being in Houston, that meant oil and gas, because that's what 90% of us here do in some way, shape, or form. I was with a company I loved. They liked to think they were small, even though they were a $1 billion business. But they went through bankruptcy when the oil markets tanked, almost a decade ago now. It feels like an episode of Landman.

They went through bankruptcy, and then the pandemic hit, and it was this surreal experience of walking with them from big business to small business. And then, I'll be honest, getting let go, because that's what happens in bankruptcy.

I never want to take away from the hardship that a lot of people went through with Covid. But there was a silver lining in how the whole world slowed down. The United States is not known for slowing down, and we were all forced to slow down in a way we never had before. For me, that meant a completely different perspective on parenting: the coaches, the teachers, the friends, the parents of the friends, this whole other world. We were about to hire a nanny to handle that, and I didn't want to give it up.

So I wanted to find a way to do what I love, as crazy as I am for loving it, but in a way that let me show up for my family the way I wanted to. I took a leap of faith and started 4 Corners CFO so I could bring those bigger corporate business concepts down to small and boutique law firms in a way that makes sense. Not a bunch of accounting jargon, not some CPA talking down to you, but somebody who really partners with you to understand the stories the numbers tell, so you can make the best decisions for your business moving forward.

Patrick:

That sounds very reminiscent of a lot of the clients we work with. They want their law firm to have that balance and flexibility, to be a business on their own terms. Speaking of lawyers, how did you get into serving lawyers? What do you offer that's uniquely for lawyers, and why did you choose them as a group to help?

Danielle:

A couple of different reasons. I'll be completely honest and say part of it was stumbling into it. My very first few clients were law firms. And I realized there's a lot of commonality between CPAs and attorneys. Those of us who came up in a big-firm environment are used to the work-hard, play-hard culture. The firm owners I work with now are the ones who, like me, are bucking that system of 60- to 80-hour weeks, where it's all about maximizing billable hours and grinding.

They've flipped the switch to a place where you can be really good at what you do, and even do it part time. They're creating a completely different culture in their firms: family focused, lifestyle first, and still profitable. Still giving them the freedom they want, still providing for their team, but putting people ahead of numbers. That's central to how I like to run a business, and it's central to how we function as a fractional CFO.

Patrick:

Very cool. Before I get into the more hard-hitting financial questions, I did read in your bio that your favorite song to sing is "Bring Me to Life" by Evanescence. So my question for you is: do you also do the rap part of the song?

Danielle:

Oh, you have to. I'm not saying I'm good at it, but you have to.

Patrick:

You go all in. I appreciate that. Okay, on to the law firm financial side of things. What are the most important financial KPIs, the North Star metrics, that law firms should start with? If your clients don't think about anything else in their monthly or quarterly report, what do you have them zero in on?

Danielle:

The very first thing, and the number one thing our clients see in their dashboard, is the rule of thirds. A lot of law firms have already heard this. If you haven't, it basically means a third of your revenue should be paying your revenue-generating people. If you're a little more accounting technical, you might know that as cost of goods sold, but I like to call it revenue generating because it reminds all of us that those people are your billable team members. Then a third of your revenue should be paying all of your operating expenses, otherwise known as overhead. And the final third should be left over as profit, at the very bottom line.

If you're hitting the rule of thirds, you're doing something right. If you're not, it's the very first place we're going to look. Are we pricing appropriately? Are we charging flat fees without the right efficiencies? Are we maximizing realization and utilization?

Then you start to get into the other metrics. If you listen to a traditional business podcast, you'll hear people talk about lifetime value and client acquisition costs, and those don't necessarily apply the same way to a law firm. Lifetime value isn't really a thing for most law firms. You might get more business from a corporation you work with, especially if you're a business attorney. But for estate planners, you've got an upsell or a downsell, maybe the probate on the other side, but not really a lifetime value.

So more than anything, we focus on the team in that revenue-generating cost space. Who's on your team? How much do you want them to be working, and how much do they want to be working? What's our target for billable hours, and how much is that time worth in billable dollars? And are we actually getting flat-fee or contingency efficiencies, depending on your pricing model, out of what that team is putting in?

Patrick:

Very cool. What do you see as the most out-of-whack portion of that? For my own business, we use a similar model called the Perfect P&L. And what I've come to understand is that 90% of the leverage, the areas you can actually change, comes down to labor cost. So I scrutinize that a lot more than everything else. Is there a corollary with law firms, or when nine out of ten people come in, is another part of the P&L out of whack? Where would you suggest people look first when they're trying to get a handle on their finances?

Danielle:

I'd go back to the rule of thirds. If you're over on your revenue-generating costs and paying more than a third of revenue toward your people, then we need to figure out whether we have a pricing problem, a people problem, or a pipeline problem. Is there enough work to keep everybody busy? Is everybody doing the work? And are we pricing it appropriately?

If revenue-generating costs and revenue line up, you still need to look at operating expense. If you're spending more than a third on operating expense, we want to dig in and figure out why. Are you getting a return on investment? Is some of it an owner's perk? There's a category of owner's compensation that sits in operating expenses: the tax-deductible stuff we all love to run through our businesses. It's a big part of why we're business owners, and I want all of our clients to be able to use it, but also to know how it's affecting their operating expense.

So what we do with our clients is pull those items out to the extent we can. They stay exactly where they need to be for tax purposes, but we move them into an owner's compensation bucket for reporting, because I don't want them to skew the operating expense number.

That said, there are things you can do to cut operating costs. One of our clients was in a phenomenal rental space, but she had downsized her team and was still stuck in the lease for the next five years. So we had a conversation about subletting: who could we bring in, and how much space did we really need? Her operating expense was way out of whack compared to her revenue.

Patrick:

What do you think is a good percentage of revenue to allocate to client acquisition, to marketing, for law firms?

Danielle:

It depends on how you market. The people coming to firms like yours for outsourced marketing are going to have a higher percentage there than the people spending more time and less money on networking and referral-based groundwork. It's a give and take, depending on the style of marketing that fits you best.

I always tell our clients it's really beneficial to have both. It doesn't need to be half and half, but you do need some diversity in your marketing. I'm sure you're seeing all the impacts of AI and the shifts in the digital marketing world, Patrick. At the same time, networking and referral-based marketing is slow and unpredictable. It takes a little of both.

In terms of how much to spend, you're putting me on the spot, so I might not be remembering this exactly right. But for a lot of our law firms, it's somewhere between 10% and 20% of overall operating expense. Twenty percent is the high end, which is usually more digital-ads based, and under 10% is the low end, which is usually more referral-marketing based.

Patrick:

One of the ways we try to differentiate ourselves is that we really want to be the advocate for generating ROI for the client, because I think 90% of marketing firms out there either aren't interested in that or only have a surface-level interest. We don't always hit it, for sure. But we proactively push those conversations, because at the end of the day, if the client isn't making money, it's not going to work out long term.

So my thought process, and I'm curious to get your take, is that you want some multiple on your marketing spend. If it's producing a requisite multiple, say 3x, then it's less about being a rigid percentage of your overall budget, keeping in mind the goals of the business. If a firm doesn't want to scale, it doesn't need to spend more. But I've had this discussion with law firm owners who say, "Our marketing is capped at 10%." And I understand that, but you're also saying you want to grow, and we're showing a good ROI. Doesn't it make sense to keep growing?

Danielle:

Yes and no. I'll push back a little on that. Yes, if that's what they want. But growth for the sake of growth, without actually improving profit, isn't going to get anybody where they want to go.

I've had this conversation with clients on the higher end, say 15% of operating expense going into their marketing budget, where we're starting to see diminishing returns with the way the market is shifting this year. So we talk about whether we need to keep spending the same amount just to sustain, or whether we can diversify. Can we train somebody to be a rainmaker? What does it cost to get somebody trained in networking and making rain?

Growth for the sake of growth is just more money, more problems. If you're not actually putting more money back into your pocket at the end of the day, you're just spending more to make more. It's a spin cycle. I want owners to remember that you don't always have to be on a growth trajectory. And if you are, make sure it's benefiting you, not just growing for the sake of growing.

Patrick:

Totally fair. When you talk to your clients, do you have a schedule of events throughout the year that structures a firm's attention on financial matters? I assume you do monthly reconciliation, but are there set intervals, like a big retrospective deep dive at the beginning of the year to plan for the future? One of the challenges I see with law firm owners, and every small business owner, is that you're trying to do the work and market the business at the same time, and it can feel overwhelming to get into a simple rhythm. I imagine you have a framework that makes that easier.

Danielle:

We do. We have a framework we use with every client during onboarding and every single month to understand the stories the numbers are telling us. But I also like to start every call by asking how things are going, what's giving them heartburn, and what's stressing them out. I've already read the reports. I already know what's in them and what's going on with the business financially. We use those reports to problem-solve and get to the root cause of whatever's giving them heartburn. And if nothing is, we problem-solve toward the growth trajectory and their goals.

There is a background framework tied to the calendar year, because you need to prep a budget at the end of the year. So come September and October, we're looking back at all the expenses. Is this really where we wanted to land? What do we want to keep, what do we want to get rid of, and what do we want going forward, so we have a budget to start the new year?

Around mid-year, we look at the current year's budget and ask whether this is the track we want to be on. Every month we're looking at the budget outlook, but mid-year is when we really dig into whether we need to cut anything, especially longer-term investments like marketing. We've given it six months. It's had time to play out. It is or isn't doing what we wanted, so we can measure it in the summer and decide whether to pivot. Should we do different SEO, or any of the things you're really good at and I'm not? It's about making sure we're getting the ROI.

We also do quarterly check-ins to true things up with clients who pay bonuses quarterly, or who have a quarterly conference budget. Did we actually go to those conferences? Things that aren't monthly trends, we check in on and true up each quarter.

Patrick:

Gotcha. You offer fractional CFO services. Can you walk me through the progression you recommend for law firms, by revenue or size, for when they'd benefit from a more comprehensive CFO structure? If a firm is doing $100,000 or $200,000 a year, do they need a CFO? When is it most impactful to bring somebody on?

Danielle:

That question is part of why we specialize in small and boutique firms, because I believe a financial foundation is critical for every firm, even a solo who's just hanging a shingle.

For those firms, we do it through strategy calls. I know you can't afford a fractional CFO yet, but I want you to have the strategy to set the foundation and make sure you're on the right track with pricing. I don't want you to build a huge pipeline while pricing wrong the whole time. So we go through a strategy call package, and by the end of it, the goal is that you're set up, making money, with your pipelines in place. Then we can take the numbers off your plate so you don't have to worry about them anymore, build a budget, work on your cash flow, and decide who to hire, when to hire, how to hire, what to pay them, and how many hours. All the what-ifs that come into the financial picture.

What usually happens is a solo does strategy calls, and then somewhere around $250,000 to $300,000, the solo starts hitting their own capacity and realizes they need help. That's the scariest place to be as a business owner. It's not just finding the right person. It's "Can I pay them? When will they make me money? How much can I afford? Will I still be able to pay myself?" We can answer all of those questions through the budgeting process. So as you near capacity is when I'd say to find a fractional CFO who specializes in small and boutique firms.

There's also a point where you scale into eight figures and multiple eight figures. We have a couple of clients in that spot, and that's a very different CFO service than what my team offers. You'll go to a completely different level with a different team. But every business needs a financial foundation. You don't want to build a pipeline and price it wrong the whole time, or build a business without actually paying yourself, burn out, fall behind on your personal bills, and go out of business anyway.

Patrick:

There's a lot of truth to that. I've experienced it in my own business evolution. For the first five years or so, it's just willpower, and you look at the bank account as your main measuring stick. Then you get to tax time and think, wait a second.

Danielle:

Then you really start looking through it and realize, "I didn't actually make that much. I did better in corporate," or in big law. I've had people come into our consult calls questioning whether they should go back. And it's not because they aren't great attorneys. They're fabulous attorneys. But nobody taught them how to set up a business.

Patrick:

It's absolutely true. Like anything valuable in life, it's often last on the list because you don't feel the impact immediately. It's hard to see its value when you're among the trees and can't see the forest.

Danielle:

For law firm owners, the right fractional CFO isn't just about making the numbers look better on paper. It's about giving you peace of mind and confidence when you're making a decision.

Patrick:

That makes sense. A couple more questions and we can wrap up. Do you see AI having an impact on how law firms handle their finances? Are there opportunities for law firms, or ways you see your own services shifting or improving with AI developments?

Danielle:

AI can do a lot, and I'm actually a huge proponent of it. We use it on our team. But you have to check in on it. You have to train it, gut-check it, and make sure it got it right, because it will be the most confident person in the room and still be wrong.

I'm borrowing this from somebody else, and I honestly can't remember who to credit or I would. But I think the firms, whether financial, legal, marketing, or any professional service, that stay in touch with AI and learn how to make it part of their systems are going to beat out the firms that don't. I don't think AI is going to take any of our jobs, but I think the people who know how to use it are going to take the jobs of the ones who don't.

Patrick:

That's well said. My experience is that it's the world's best yes-man. It makes you feel like you can run through a wall, and then you get to the end and realize there's a lot wrong, and it says, "Oh yeah, you're right to call me out on that."

Danielle:

I'll be honest: my team works very heavily in Excel, and I thought I was really good at Excel. But when I turn to AI and say, "I want to do this, this, and this, and I need a formula," it can spit out some amazing things. You just always have to make sure it got it right.

Patrick:

What you're describing is exactly my experience. It can give you something truly mind-bending, but for a long time we had a consistent problem where it couldn't do basic math. We'd ask what eight plus eight is, and it would say 20 without blinking.

Danielle:

So please don't run your finances on it. Don't stick your P&L in there and ask it to tell you what to do with your business. It's not there yet. But if you know what you want to do and you need a formula to make it work in Excel or Google Sheets, it can crank out a formula.

Patrick:

Final question. Are there any quick wins lawyers can apply to their own finances today? Something low effort with a high upside?

Danielle:

I say this knowing how much I hate doing it myself, and we literally just wrote a social media post about it: track your time. I get it. When you come from a big firm, you're burnt out on time tracking and never want to do it again. But you need to know how much time you and your team spend on everything. That information is gold. It's how we know you're pricing appropriately, how we start to measure the budget, and how you make efficiency, utilization, and realization decisions. It's a pain in the butt, and you don't have to track it to the tenth of an hour if you're not billing hourly, but you do need to know where your time went.

Patrick:

Do you have any tools or best practices you'd recommend? One of the big sticking points is always which tool to use, one that's good but not overly taxing in time or energy.

Danielle:

Most of our clients use their practice management tool, and most of them are in Clio. You can literally say, "I'm on this client," hit start, and it tracks your time. Then you stop it, it summarizes the work, and it goes to the right matter.

For anyone doing hourly work, you already know this because you have to. But it's even more important on flat fees. It can get a little tricky, and you basically want to track it at a $0 rate, because you still need to bill your flat fee. But it's critical to know how much time you and your team put into those flat-fee matters, so you know whether you're even making the profit margin you thought you were.

Patrick:

Awesome. Danielle, I really appreciate all the wise words. There's a ton of value in what we covered. Big thank you for joining us on the podcast.

Danielle:

Thank you so much for having me today.

Patrick:

We're chatting with Danielle Hendon, owner and founder of 4 Corners CFO and one of our partners. I wanted to get into some of the specifics of her business and give you a window into what working with her and her team might look like. So tell us the elevator pitch: what does your company do for law firms, and what types of law firms do you serve?

Danielle:

I'll give you my favorite opener. Law firms rarely sell for more than what they made in the current year, at best. There aren't multiples on law firms. That means you've got to make the most money you can right now, every single year you're in business, and put it where you want it. That's what we focus on.

We support small and boutique law firms in making the most profit they can and finding the freedom and lifestyle they really want, so they're running a business, not working for their business. We don't do bookkeeping, and we don't do taxes. We focus solely on forward-looking budgeting, cash flow, and strategic analysis to help you get where you want to go.

Patrick:

Very cool. Do you recommend bookkeepers? Even though you don't do it yourself, could a client come to you and have you quarterback that whole financial piece of the business?

Danielle:

Ninety percent of the clients I share with bookkeepers don't actually meet with their bookkeepers. They just meet with me. The bookkeeper says, "Hey, I've got questions," we cover them, and I send the answers back. So clients don't have to sit through two different financial meetings.

And if you aren't ready for a CFO and you're in the strategy call stage, I'm very picky about the bookkeepers I work with. I have a handful I know and love, and I'll make recommendations to make sure you're set up with the right bookkeeping foundation to give you the right numbers from the start.

Patrick:

That's a big pain point with bookkeepers in general. As an attorney, you don't know what you don't know. Someone starts doing your books one way, and your bar license is on the line.

Danielle:

Totally.

Patrick:

Only to find out a year later that it was done using an outdated approach, or just not done well. So having that oversight is probably a huge advantage of working with you. What's the most common use case for your business? What problem do clients come to you with, in their words, that you're able to solve? Do they just come to you and say, "Give me clarity"?

Danielle:

I'll give you a couple of scenarios that are some of my favorites. The first one is when you think your P&L looks great on paper, but your bank account doesn't, and the profit isn't transferring all the way through. That means we're missing some pieces, and we need to do some digging and some financial strategy and adjusting. It's one of my favorite places to help, not because those firms aren't making money, because they usually are, and there's usually still a good salary behind it. But the profit margins aren't coming all the way through because things haven't been structured to support that.

The other is when attorneys hit their cap. You're doing all the doing: running the business, running the marketing, bringing in the clients, doing everything, and you can't keep going. I'm a big proponent of paying yourself really well, because eventually you have to pay somebody else to do part of what you do, and you still want to be able to take your piece. When people hit their cap and need to hire, it's one of the scariest places to be as a business owner.

I've done this with enough firms to tell you: if you have ten billable hours a week of work to give somebody else, you can hire someone full time, and in a firm with a healthy culture that isn't aiming for 40 billable hours a week, the other 20 hours they bill are going to be all profit.

Patrick:

What we're really talking about is a sounding board for those financial decisions. That's what a lot of folks use us for too: "How are we doing compared to other immigration firms, or other firms in the area?" Since you work exclusively with law firms, you have a really good sense of best practices for what the numbers and the P&L should look like. What do you hear from client feedback and reviews about what sets 4 Corners CFO apart from other CFOs?

Danielle:

Love me or hate me for saying this, but one of the best compliments I got early in my business was, "You are not that stuffy old white guy CPA telling me what to do." And I said, "No, this is a partnership. I've got purple hair, and you've got to be okay with that too." This is about supporting you in making the best decision, not telling you what to do.

I'm not going to be the person who tells you what to do. I'm going to help identify options. We'll talk about opportunity costs. We'll run what we call what-if scenarios: what if I do this, what if I do that, and what happens on the other side? I know from being a business owner myself that when you feel something instinctually, when you know this is the next thing for your business, we just have to figure out how to make it work on paper.

Patrick:

Makes sense. What does working with you actually look like? If somebody signs an agreement, what does the first month look like, and how does the relationship progress? When do things start to click with their finances?

Danielle:

My goal is that you get an "aha" moment out of every meeting. We meet once a month. My team and I do the doing; you just have to show up and meet with us. We coordinate with your bookkeeper and your tax person.

There's a six-month onboarding process, because there are six steps we want to make sure we get through, and there should be aha moments in every one of them. For example, the very first thing we do is look at your balance sheet. If it isn't being reconciled properly by your bookkeeper, or your trust accounts don't tie out for a three-way reconciliation, we need to talk about process and procedure before we even start on financial strategy, because you've got bad data coming in. So we start there.

The next step is your revenue streams. I want to know how you make money, who makes you money, and what types of money you're making. How are you pricing? Flat fee? Hourly? What does the team look like? We pull it all apart so we can say, "This is how much money we think you could be making." And if it's not what you are making, which is usually the case, what can we tweak this month to get closer to that goal?

Each layer builds like that. It leads into building a budget and running budget-to-actual analysis so we really understand the story. Then we go from budget-to-actual into a cash flow forecast and cash review. Are we over or under on cash? Are we making or losing money? What does it look like six months from now? For firms working on contingency, when are we going to get paid, and do we have enough to get there?

We're here to support you not just in the monthly meeting, but by email with a 24- to 48-hour turnaround, and with all the what-ifs along the way. I'll have a client email and say, "Oh my gosh, so-and-so just quit. We need to hire somebody else. Can we make a plan?" And we'll figure out what they can afford to offer.

Patrick:

Great. Who do you work best with? You mentioned small and boutique law firms. Does that mean a solo up to ten lawyers? Are there practice areas you like working with more than others?

Danielle:

I love this question, because I ask everybody who says the same thing to me. Small and boutique means different things to different people. Somebody can say "small law firm" and mean 50 people, and that is definitely not what I mean.

When I say small and boutique, we go all the way down to solos, though at that point you probably want strategy calls rather than full done-for-you service. When a firm has a team of maybe three to five, with paralegals, associates coming on, and a VA, EA, or outsourced help, that's where we usually start the Focused CFO services.

My favorite place to work with people is when they're growing into the multiple seven figures, so $2 million to $5 million. It's really fun, and so much about your business changes in that stage. Those firms are usually under 15 to 20 people, and not all attorneys. If you have 15 to 20 attorneys, you should be making far more than $3 or $4 million. But it's that stage where you're building something you could put a succession plan behind. You've got a team behind you, you can go on vacation, and the whole firm isn't going to hurt for it.

Patrick:

Excellent. Can you give us a preview of your service offerings and a range of pricing? For the record, if someone watches this later, things may change. But I like to ask so it's easier for people to hop on a call already knowing what an engagement looks like.

Danielle:

I'm an open book on that. The lowest level is a single strategy call, which is $295. We also offer a strategy call package of six calls, buy five and get one free, for $1,495.

From there, you move into our Focused CFO package, which starts with a six-month onboarding. The first contract is for six months, with a $2,495 one-time onboarding fee, and then it's $1,995 a month. For the handful of larger clients we take on, past $5 million, it's a $4,995 onboarding fee and double the monthly fee, so $3,990 a month. I should be able to do that math in my head.

Patrick:

Perfect. Last question: what's the best way to get in touch? I'm more than happy to make introductions, but do you have an introductory or discovery call, and should folks go to the website?

Danielle:

Absolutely. My website is 4cornerscfo.com, with the number four, not the word. From there, there's a contact page and a link to book a discovery call. The very first step is a discovery call, because I want to make sure we're a really good fit for each other. I love working with passion-centered firms, and it takes the right fit for everybody.

I'm one of those abundance-mentality people. If I'm not the right person for you, I have friends I'm more than happy to recommend. And if we are the right fit, we'll dive into what we can do for you, what that looks like in our framework, and all the details.

Patrick:

Perfect. Danielle, thank you so much for your time. I look forward to having you back.

Danielle:

Thank you so much.