Estate Planning: Turn What’s in your Heart into an Effective Plan – Interview with attorney Paul Yokabitus of Cary Estate Planning
April 14, 2021
By Matt Miner, MBA, CFP®
It’s tragic but true: We’re all going to die. Burying your head in the sand won’t help.
Estate planning is one of the few things you can do now, while you’re alive, that helps your family after you die.
We know about death in our family, having lost my dad in 2013 and Charity’s brother in 2017. There’s no sugarcoating the fact: When people die, it is horrible. Pre-planning makes this horrible time less horrible for the people you love.
“Alright, alright,” you say. “Some people need an estate plan. But not me.” You could be right: If you’re reading this article and are 17-years-old or younger, you don’t need an estate plan, because your parents can make decisions for you and dispose of all your stuff.
While it’s true that estate planning is more important in some cases than others, If you’re 18 or older, pretty much every adult can benefit from at least elements of estate planning.
Paul Yokabitus of Cary Estate Planning describes estate planning as “Putting what’s in your heart and your head into a legal, binding, and effective transition plan.” Thanks for a good description, and a good show title, Paul!
Who needs an estate plan?
Parents of Special Needs Children
Parents of children with special needs may have the most pressing need for thoughtful estate planning.
Rich folks
People ponder estate planning when they perceive they have accumulated sizable assets. And it’s true: wealthy people need an estate plan. But they’re far from the only ones.
Parents of minor children
The other group that most needs a solid plan are parents with any number of children. Providing care for your children in the event of your untimely death is not a pleasant subject to dwell on, but if you have minor children you need a solid estate plan in place. This is part of loving your kids!
Adult Students or Adults in their Early Career
Beyond these two obvious groups, all adults can benefit from estate planning. For example, if you’re a 20-year-old with no assets, in college or just getting started in work (or if this describes someone you love, like your child), you need an estate plan that addresses decision making and information sharing in the event you become medically incapacitated, even if your incapacity is for a short duration.
Unmarried People
If you’re single, who can you trust to help you in event of your incapacity?
Newly Married (still broke) People
If your newly married, there are instances where your spouse may not sign on your behalf unless you prepare in advance for that eventuality.
If you can find yourself in one of the groups above, you stand to benefit from the right estate plan for you. Besides estate planning, today’s show addresses entrepreneurship - especially business growth and a customer-service mindset.
Growing a New Business
Paul provides wisdom from growing his business from a solo practice to more than a dozen employees in three years, including the truth that entrepreneurs seek discomfort and understand that profit comes from risk, and without risk, we plateau in our achievements. Of course, you need to avoid wipeout risk!
Happy Listening!
TRANSCRIPT
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[00:00:01] Matt Miner: It is a beautiful spring afternoon here in Raleigh, North Carolina. Nothing hurts, the weather outside is perfect, and the only problem is that we can't keep up with the weeds in the yard. It is a perfect time for a wide-ranging discussion of estate planning, entrepreneurship, and business processes. After you listen, you'll know who needs an estate plan, when, and why. You'll hear the connection between bussing tables at age 14 and serving clients in a law practice 20 years later. My guest has advice for aspiring entrepreneurs, "Seek discomfort and take risk. Nothing good ever happened in a place of comfort or total safety," says Paul Yokabitus.
Hey, and welcome to the Work Pants Finance podcast. I'm Matt Miner, your money guide. Work Pants Finance is the show for MBAs, entrepreneurs, and other professionals who want their financial plan to work as hard as they do.
Now, here's your money guide quick tip. If you don't have a will or revocable living trust, you need a state-specific estate plan right now. As Dave Ramsey says, "We're all going to die so do it in style with a will."
Now, if you've already got a will or trust, you need to assess whether it's current or should be updated. Since you last updated your estate plan, have you had kids? Have your kids become adults? Have you acquired a business or other non-employer retirement plan asset like a rental home or vacation home? Have important beneficiaries changed? Have you moved states? Have your assets grown dramatically? If you answer yes to one or more of these questions, you probably need an updated estate plan and maybe an updated financial plan.
This show is Estate Planning: Turn What's in your Heart into an Effective Plan, Interview with Paul Yokabitus of Cary Estate Planning. You can read more at workpantsfinance.com/17.
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I'm particularly excited to bring you this conversation about one topic of financial planning that is so often overlooked, and I know that Paul is going to bring us a lot of value as he talks through what he does and who can benefit from estate planning.
Paul, as we begin, if you could just take a minute and tell my listeners a little bit about your story and what you're up to today.
[00:02:18] Paul Yokabitus: As you mentioned, I'm Paul Yokabitus, I am an estate planning lawyer, and I own Cary Estate Planning. I am originally from Michigan, I moved down here about 10 years ago to the Raleigh area. My wife and our two kids now live in Apex, probably about 10-minute drive from our main office. My oldest just turned six at the end of October and my youngest is about to turn four in January. We're really in the midst of a big growth push right now to more effectively deliver just a really high-end estate planning experience. We've always been one to build ahead of the need rather than be pushed by the need to grow. That's what we're up to right now is planning for the future, seeing what our headcount needs to look like to deliver on promise to our clients of excellent planning with excellent experience, and what future expansion will look like for North Carolina.
[00:03:14] Matt: Well, I'm super excited to get into some of that with you because that's always the entrepreneur's problem is how to build at the right time for growth and do that in a way that serves clients and so you don't run out of money at the same time. We'll get to some of that business stuff in just a sec. I guess I'd like to start a little bit of focus on your expertise. If you could tell us why estate planning is important.
[00:03:36] Paul: I think from a very layman's perspective, estate planning is really putting what's in your heart and your head into a legal, binding, and effective transition plan. I think pretty much everyone in our country, in the world generally, has an envisioned or has some sort of rudimentary idea, at the very least, of what they want to happen at the end of their life and after they're gone. Estate planning is just putting the legal tools and parameters in place to make sure that it does happen, not just that it's a hope that it's an actual plan.
[00:04:10] Matt: I think that's a great way to define it. If you could build from there and say who needs estate planning and when do people need that in their life?
[00:04:17] Paul: I think pretty important to start to figure out, "Okay, what is estate planning?" Estate planning for us is not just what happens when I'm gone, it's also layering in tools that protect you while you're here to make sure that you are always cared for, that the people that you care about will have the ability to care for you in your worst-case scenario like incapacity, accidents, illnesses, those sort of things. In that respect, elements of estate planning are appropriate for anyone who's an adult. As soon as you turn 18, a lot of parents have this shock because they can no longer make effective legal decisions for their kids anymore. They find themselves closed out of important medical decisions, important educational decisions. Some of the planning that we'll do starts when a child is endeavoring to go to college, they're packing up and getting ready to be a freshman in the dorms and that sort of thing.
For a lot of our existing planning clients, they'll come to us just to put in basic powers of attorney to make sure that mom and dad still have the ability to make decisions in those instances of worst-case scenarios. That is, I guess, foundational starting point. If you have kids, if you have a house, if you have any, even insignificant amount of wealth, property ownership, then wills become important. Obviously, if you have young kids, then guardianship becomes paramount part of planning from birth to age 18.
All that to say, I think estate planning is important for everyone, it's just a matter of what it looks like and how it can help you but that's I think a key concept is that estate planning is not one size fits all. It's not something that can effectively be done in a cookie-cutter templated manner because tools work in different ways for different people and strategies have to evolve over time because you're not frozen in time. Life doesn't happen in a vacuum so estate planning should always evolve just like financial planning. A specific stock or retirement strategy may be good when you're in your 20s, but it's going to be inappropriate when you're in your 70s. Estate planning follows those same sorts of rules.
[00:06:17] Matt: Yes, I always think of planning whether it's estate planning or financial planning, a lot of times those transitions, many of which you touched on there are drivers for that. I'm sure you see that in terms of when people seek you out. Of course, estate planning is one that it's important to put into place before that ultimate transition because it really has to be there in advance.
I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about your business, tell us about Cary Estate Planning and how you work, and then what makes you different from other estate planning attorneys?
[00:06:48] Paul: First and foremost, we only do estate planning. We started this venture as a niched offering instead of being more of an element of a transactional practice or in tandem with business or real estate, anything like that.
We're only two years old. I started Cary Estate Planning back in October of 2018 after working for a couple of other law firms doing estate planning in more of an associate role, saw some gaps in the market, saw some points of improvement and innovation that I think could have been utilized and saw an opportunity to further niche from, at the time in my previous practices, we did estate planning and business law.
I always thought that you can do one thing a lot better than you can do two things just by virtue of not needing to pay attention as much to the changing nuances and nature of two different while complementary, but very different practices. We made the concerted decision to not do business planning anymore and just focused on estate planning and probate and never looked back. It's been probably the best decision that I've made as a business owner was to stay on that path and not try to get lured onto different paths or to include other practice areas or anything like that.
We have made a concerted effort to always be client-centric and always put the client's experience and objectives first, even to the direct detriment of our own financial goals or needs or what have you. I grew up in hospitality and service and that really informed the way that I wanted to shape my practice. I bussed tables starting at age 14, waiting tables when I was 16, bartended some in college, but every day it was an opportunity to deal with people on good and bad days, but still deliver the same level of service to everyone regardless of how they treat you. I felt like that was just a good way to do business generally.
I also was raised by very working-class people. My mom started out as an autoworker and then went back to college and got her bachelor's in nursing when she was in her 40s. My dad just retired last year after working at the same automotive factory for the last 35 years. He worked at this company longer than I've been alive, I'm 33. He was always United Auto Workers, blue-collar, working-class, do hard work and you'll find your way in life kind of thing.
What I bring to law practice is that middle-class blue-collar background. I don't wear a tie or suits or anything like that, I like to be approachable. This is about as fancy as it gets for me. This button-down Oxford and khakis, it's pretty much my work uniform. It's almost to the point where I can make a meme of myself. My closet, it's pretty much plaid or some design Oxford button-down shirts in multiple different colors and varieties of khakis.
The goal there though is not to be like look at me, I'm so different. It's intimidation, it's to remove the intimidation factor of law practice of, we don't have the ivory tower law firm set up, we don't have like the downtown Skyrise, we don't have marble in the entryway. We don't have $2,000 Brooks Brothers suits. I'm just the guy. I just so happened to be really passionate about serving clients. I just so happened to be a lawyer. We've used that mentality as the foundation for our firm culture. Everyone who we've hired along the way has had that same type of background, that same type of passion towards client service, and always and only, doing what's in the client's best interests every day, they ended up.
[00:10:35] Matt: Man, just so many points of connection there. I was like frantically scribbling notes as you talk. I love the client-centricness. This is what drives me in everything as well. Also grew up, my parents own a bed and breakfast in Tucson, Arizona. It was all the time around helping guests and knowing what it is just to serve. That connection to the hospitality industry, I don't think hurts.
The other thing that I really was interested in that you spoke about is, you've chosen, if I am hearing you right, to go niche on your offering but you would describe your clients as diverse, is that right? Whereas in my business, I say this podcast is for MBAs, entrepreneurs, and other professionals who want their financial plan to work as hard as they do. So, I'm niching on specific clients that I'm speaking to. Then I find that their plans have many areas of contact or similarity but I'm not niching on a specific part of the plan or a specific way of doing business. Tell us a little bit about how you thought about that.
[00:11:43] Paul: Yes. I think it points to where our practices are the same but different. You're engaging on more of the relationship that is revenue-producing over time. Ours is a lot more like frontend weighted. What we are searching for are not specific types of people but people who have a specific type of planning you don't need in mind. What we niche down on is more so what I would call the client relationship rather than a customer transaction. That's how we differentiate who is a good fit for us versus who isn't.
We'll be the first to admit that we're not going to be all things to all people. We have a very specific type of planning practice that is not going to be the right fit for a lot of people if they're not on board for a long-term relationship-oriented planning proposition. They need to be seeking professional more specialized advice. They need to be on board with fulfilling their obligations as far as carrying out that advice. Also, that they will always want guidance along the way. Whenever life throws a curveball that they're on board for reaching out and engaging in that back-and-forth relationships.
We want people who want to be coached through or guided through this planning process, not just people who want papers with their names on them and papers with their kids' names on them, that thing. That would be more the customer-- I guess it's like a dichotomy or distinction is that we are pushing further and further and you see this in financial planning too, is the commoditization of what we do.
The way that you distinguish is to play in a very different arena. LegalZoom can never be allowed to do what we do. They can forever have great templates but they will always lack in that ongoing relationship and guidance over time. What we offer is peace of mind, it's more certainty, it's more outcome-oriented, not deliverable-oriented. Our goal then is to establish deep, meaningful relationships that we nurture over time and that we are in charge of the follow-up on. We don't just say, "Well, client, here is our deliverable but it's up to you to reach out and remind us that we're obligated to deliver that."
As we've grown, we've actually first bifurcated now split into threes, our clients' relationship roles within our firm. It used to be, when we were first growing, we hired a client services manager and she was tasked with all things client interaction. Now, we have three people that subdivide the different phases of planning the before unit, the during unit, and the after unit, because we just got so big that it wouldn't be efficient or a good experience for our clients if that was still going to be one person doing everything.
What we're engaged in then is a true relationship, not just one on paper, it's one that we are the ones calling for no reason just to say, "Hey, how are you?" Not to sell them the next great trust that's been created out of nowhere or to try to get recurring revenue. That, I think, has been a massive misgiving or failure of the estate planning industry is the push towards this expectation of recurring revenue for no reason.
There's a lot of firms that push what would be considered maintenance plans, where they're saying, "Well, you pay us $300, $350, $400 a year, and you can always have unlimited revisions and annual reviews, and this stuff. It's like, how many people do you know that have changed their state plan every year, if they have, you probably don't want to work with them.
[00:15:35] Matt: They are probably troublesome.
[00:15:36] Paul: You end up selling a service to a client that will very quickly grow to resent that service because they're just paying you for no reason. What we've done instead is created a service platform that is forever. It's what we call our lifetime lawyer plan but it's not something that has a subscription fee attached to it. Now, to be clear, we don't insure the planet itself for the rest of their life. It's that we endeavor to always meet with them on a recurring basis to go over and have those discovery meetings and review meetings on a regular basis, generally every three years.
That's not this leash to keep churning recurring revenue. It's just to make sure that we are addressing things on the front end when they're small, instead of watching them blow up and explode 20 years later because they never had anybody reaching out to them to prompt a review.
[00:16:23] Matt: The way that I hear that from my seat is just that you perceive a need for that ongoing care with clients and so you've structured your offering to be able to address that need. I think that's terrific and one of the reasons we're chatting today. I also wonder, have you ever run across a book by a PhD therapist lady named Moira Somers up in Canada called Advice That Sticks?
[00:16:45] Paul: I don't think so. No. I'll write it down now. I'm always looking for more books.
[00:16:48] Matt: She's writing to financial advisors but how advisors have an ethical responsibility to help their clients follow through on the planning and not just to say, "Well, we delivered the adequate planning go forth and implement, client." It doesn't mean the client doesn't have a responsibility.
[00:17:07] Paul: That's my massive consistency with what we're doing is, it's not that we got it right in the moment. That should be baseline. You did your job, good job. That we are always given the opportunity to the client to reassess over time, to make sure that's wishes have not changed. It's fine that they don't, it's not like we're trying to press any points of update just for the sake of update. It's just to have the discussions because life is not frozen in time. Life happens to everybody and things change.
Unfortunately, sometimes kids pre-decease their parents and wealth shifts drastically, rules and laws shift drastically. Coming up on or in an election year, it happens as of today, it'll be tomorrow. It's like, what does a change in administration mean for our state tax and capital gains and all these different things. If you're not having that discussion, then you're just building this house of cards. It looks structurally fine. When it's actually tested, who knows?
[00:18:02] Matt: Well, I wonder if you could talk just briefly about the key estate planning documents that everybody needs?
[00:18:08] Paul: Probably, the most important one that we create is actually-- it goes by different synonyms, but I call it the financial power of attorney because that's the most approachable way of terminology because that's what it does. It's it speaks to transactional and managerial affairs and financial affairs. When this is like a married couple or even an individual with kids, it's often the only area or arena of authorities that don't exist by default by state law. Like, for instance, spouses don't have the ability to sign the other's name just because you're married, but you do have the ability as a spouse to make medical decisions for your wife or your husband.
There's always a default and test-to-see framework for wealth succession. Those at least exist at law. If you don't have a healthcare power of attorney, if you don't have a will, there's at least some default that will act as a better-than-nothing type thing but that doesn't exist for financial authorities. Your only remedy then if somebody becomes incapacitated is guardianship. That's usually where we start is let's talk about how we protect you while you're here, effective powers of attorney, and building out the bench of fiduciaries to make sure there's always somebody there but we usually are then looking at what happens while you're here. What happens after you're gone. A line of demarcation, I guess or a line of significance is your death, what happens.
A last will and Testament is a foundational planning elements. Generally, we'll do a couple of different things. If you have minor kids and appoint a guardian for them to raise them till their age of majority, if you don't, then it still would appoint an executor and then name beneficiaries for any probate assets that you have. In North Carolina and really in modern America, the will doesn't control that much just because of the way that wealth succeeds people usually through financial accounts with beneficiary designations. But the will is still an effective way to catch all if everything falls away and you have this sort of a worst-case scenario, then a lot of things would default into the estate but the will would still dictate who gets your real estate, your personal property, your car titles, those sort of things.
Some families will engage in trust planning where they're basically not well served by just beneficiary designations in a will if they want to consolidate multi-county real estate, if they want to expedite the sale of real property. There's a lot of different reasons to use trusts but it's usually that the more basic elements are insufficient to effectuate your overall ideal outcome.
A lot of people with kids who are immature or under age will use trust to really shape the way that beneficiary designations work by naming the trust instead of naming the kids. It's a good way to take risk off the table for different known and unknown or likely and unlikely risks. That's not to say that trusts are required by any means. Many people are well served without using trust at all. It's just it's always got to be an assessment of pros and cons and likely versus unlikely risks just to make sure that what you want to happen will happen.
[00:21:09] Matt: Now, I appreciate you going into all that. Just for clarity, that financial power of attorney that you described, sometimes called a general durable power of attorney, that's what you're talking about there.
[00:21:19] Paul: Yes, that's right.
[00:21:20] Matt: One of the questions that I get a lot is to talk with folks about the differences between a carefully drafted will such as one you would prepare and including perhaps testamentary trusts versus creating and funding a revocable living trust now. Could you talk about how you see the ideal client for each of those planning scenarios? You've said already something about complexity or lack of complexity kids, not kids but any other color you can provide.
[00:21:45] Paul: Generally, testamentary trust end up being like a can versus shell distinction. When we do revocable living trusts, it's to have certainty is to make sure that we create some privacy, some certainty around how things will flow. There's always a risk with testamentary trust that we have inadvertent probate inclusion for assets that we would otherwise want to avoid probate with.
That's mostly because testamentary trusts are created by will and wills are probated. Usually, in order to get assets into the possession of a trustee under a testamentary trust, things either have to go through probate or risk being included in probate inadvertently through inappropriate beneficiary designations and those things. When we do revocable trusts, it's to make sure that we're taking that risk off the table.
We never recommend testamentary trusts as a standalone solution to overall wealth succession. But they certainly are a good catch-all safeguard in the event that something unexpected and inadvertent does happen, then it's not the full-on worst-case scenario that it could have been but their purpose is to shape the way that assets are held and administered over time according to the rules that create them.
Revocable trusts have the ability to really build out the provisions and contingencies and the safeguards and the conditional logic to make sure that things are always and forever outside of the scope of probate, outside of the scope of anybody's oversight or control that shouldn't have that access. Keeps it private. We can also avoid real estate sale delays by using revocable trusts. What I mean by that is North Carolina generally treats homes or real estate as non-probate assets. They do go outside of the core process of probate when it comes to wealth succession but there are some delays or additional things that have to happen before the house can be sold or that real property can be sold.
The issue with that non-probate transfer is that the asset can be brought back into probate if there are creditor claims against the estate and there are insufficient assets to pay those claims. The creditor can basically petition for the house to be brought back into probate. Even if you don't have debts, and to be clear, this isn't talking about the mortgage. The mortgage is its own separate thing.
This is going to be like credit card or hospital, that's more often than not but even if you don't have those debts, your beneficiaries still have to be able to prove to a third-party buyer that those creditor actions cannot or they either don't exist or cannot attach. You either have to wait two years to be able to sell that property, which would be when all claims are basically barred through statute limitations, or you have to open probate and run the notice to creditors to basically shorten that timeline to usually six to eight months depending on how quickly you can get probate open.
If people want to totally bypass that probate issue or the probate inclusion issue or the real estate sale delay issue, they can hold title in a revocable trust and have expedited offloading and those sorts of real estate assets. Numerous benefits of a revocable trust. Obviously, it's a difference planning investment proposition. Some people have to weigh the pros and cons against their budgetary concerns or their risk tolerance to basically see what would be the best overall outcome but that's always an individual choice based on full disclosure and education.
[00:25:06] Matt: Today's show is brought to you by Cary Estate Planning. They didn't pay for this ad spot but if you live in North Carolina and need an update to your estate plan, Paul Yokabitus and his team at careyestateplanning.com are a great place to start.
One of the advantages of having a podcast as perhaps you can attest is that sometimes you get to ask people questions that you're just personally interested in. In our first call a few months ago, you mentioned that you share a process roadmap and tracker with your clients as they work through the estate planning process with you. I just wondered, what's that tool like from the client's perspective? Why did you decide to do it? How did you make that all happen? Then what did the clients say?
[00:25:49] Paul: I think a point of client service is setting the expectation. When that's the case, it's I think incumbent upon everybody that if you are in a consumer client-facing role, that you have a process by which clients have a repeatable experience that is enjoyable but that they should know what to expect over time. What is the next step? What's the step after that? That kind of thing. At the beginning, before people even meet with us, we show them our process. Basically, here is the timeline and this is what things look like generally right now.
It's not going to ever be like this robotic process, nameless, faceless, stale experience but it's consistent. We have road marks or landmarks within it that every client experiences. We basically will schedule our initial strategy meeting, we'll have follow-up points to that, we have engagement, we have the next couple of weeks of communications and touchpoints and updates and statuses and those sorts of things. So that one, we're not going too long without there being any communication.
We want to make sure that our clients are being reassured, that things are going well, and that they're being well taken care of and that we are actively working on their matter and those sorts of things but we're also just sprinkling in extra beneficial information. One of the first emails or clients get after they actually hire us is what you should be doing while you're waiting for your documents. We always obviously want to make sure that our clients review their planning documents before they schedule their signing meeting but there's generally a two or three-week period when we're actually creating the document.
That's just inevitably a potential point of a lack of communication if you don't have a good process in place. One of the things that they'll get is what you should be doing while you're waiting, which is gathering beneficiary designations, auditing your current assets designations that exist. Not just pull the ones that we want to update but make sure that if they're already filled out, that they're doing what you want them to be doing, making sure that you have a list of contact information for your important people and that sort of thing.
That's just stuff that they could be doing along the way so that it's not like, okay, wait, wait, wait, now sign your documents, now go. If we do trust planning that we've got titling instructions on beneficiary designations that can immediately be submitted instead of saying, "Okay, now everything is signed. Okay, now go to your bank and pull your beneficiary designation. Now go to your 401k plan administrator, those sort of things." We also make clients know that we're also well connected with other people who do what we don't do like divorce, business law, real estate, realtors, mortgage lenders, financial advisors, all these different complementary services that we don't provide, we could very easily direct them to people.
We found that when people are engaging in estate planning, they're also on board for other things. Like they want to get planning in place generally. That could be life insurance, it could be long-term care insurance, it could be financial advising, it could be any number of different things. We see that as an opportunity to provide another level of service by redirecting our clients to someone else who is also a complimentary service router.
That's just a couple of aspects of our process that we're very transparent about from the outset so that clients before they even hire us, before they even sit down at a table with us or engage in a Zoom meeting with us, will know what they should expect if they want to engage in this process. It's super transparent, there's no intimidation, it's very easy. You'll see-- we've got I think over 55 Google reviews that a lot of the theme in that is that the process is so easy, and it should be. That's part of our model is that this shouldn't be a difficult process because if it was, nobody would do it.
[00:29:38] Matt: Not only easy but get to deal with nice people like you along the way. As you work through that stuff with your clients, on the client-side, is that an app on their phone or is that a piece of paper? How are you communicating it?
[00:29:54] Paul: Right now, it's a combination of phone calls, emails, and text messages. When they get it on the front end, it's basically an email attachment PDF like a visual roadmap, but what we're trying to get to, is we're going to be building out a client portal that has a dashboard in it. Like my goal has been to basically build the Domino’s pizza tracker for estate planning, to basically see in real-time in a visual manner where we're at on our side, so that clients cannot just hope they get a communication to that effect, but that they can just pop in and log in and see where are they.
They began drafting or they're having the attorneys reviewing it, that thing that they can just pop in, like you would with the Domino’s order, something akin to that. There isn't some plug-and-play software that exists in that regard now, so we are trying to do that with proactive communication.
[00:30:50] Matt: I love it.
[00:30:51] Paul: Like our client relations manager, Maggie, does that manually. We do a con bond board type approach, but it's more of like a sales pipeline, where we have different stages of like active matters. It's not in the lead stage, but it's in the actual, like active matter stage where we can see when a matter goes from one stage to the next, and so when a matter is in the next stage, then Maggie would reach out and give like a manual update saying, "This is what we're doing. You should expect this in a couple of days. Let us know if you have any questions or any changes in line, that kind of thing."
Instead of it being like this robotic process of just autoresponders and that thing, it's more actual touch. It's more meaningful.
[00:31:32] Matt: I totally agree. On your side internally, is it a workflow in your CRM, or is it just a flow chart?
[00:31:39] Paul: It's a workflow. Yes, and some of that is assisted by automation like we have time-based triggers and that thing that give us reminders. Or say like we have an email that will send out to me and basically, the whole team that says, it's been 10 days since client X hired us or signed the representation agreement. That's just to put in our mind like we should have drafts out to them within the next couple of days. We set the expectation for every client to expect their drafts within two to three weeks.
So we try to perform on the front end of that right over or exceed our expectations. When that 10-day email goes out, we're like, "Okay, check the status of it, where are we?" We should have drafts at least most of the way done, and then it puts a little bit of sense of urgency and that thing. We've got things pretty well tuned in that, we're ahead of the game, on most of these, sometimes it's a little bit more complex on the drafting and that thing, but it just gives us automated internal touches to basically give us reminders here and there.
[00:32:40] Matt: Shifting gears a little bit, Paul, you're using content and media as part of how you're building your business, although based on everything you're describing, I'm going to guess that the referrals also come in hot and heavy. How is that content marketing going, and how long did it take to get traction and how do you see clients coming in through these different marketing channels?
[00:33:00] Paul: I have always done content creation in some form and a lot of it has been blog posts. I then shifted to including a weekly email newsletter, that I call a Friday Five, which is just a fun email newsletter. It really never has anything to do with law, its gifs and stuff like that are just funny. We usually include some links to upcoming webinars and that thing, but it's otherwise a pretty-- It's the anti-lawyer newsletter, I think. That has been a theme of my career is to do what lawyers don't do, but that plenty of other industries do. It's not like these are unique concepts that I created out of thin air like it's just that I see them in other industries and think, well, why can't lawyers do that?
This year, we started doing what was supposed to be one video per day. It was like a 366-day video challenge, and I got through middle of February and then I missed a day, and then I went off the rails. As long as you don't break the chain or link in the chain, then you can keep it going. We've tried to still keep on that goal though, which was the 366 videos in a year, and so we're over. I think in the bank not published yet, but we've got probably 50 more in the bank right now, or over 300, so we have like another 60 also to go, and we'll meet it. That was like the overall point though, not that we literally get one every day, but that we get this massive channel on YouTube that just has all this great content.
As we've been doing that, we have our YouTube channel tied into rev.com to automatically transcribe all of our videos, so then that creates written content that we can then repurpose into blog posts or like FAQ pages, that kind of thing, because a lot of our videos will end up being like a minute to two minutes. They're not really appropriate for a traditional blog post, but I did like a 40 video series on estate administration and so I could plug all of those into one long-form, cornerstone, blog post of just sort like this is the estate administration for process.
Then it have 40 videos embedded with transcribed and headlined and all that stuff, SEO optimized content. The big thing is just doing it, consistency. Even though we fell off the wagon when it came to that specific challenge, we've still made a concerted effort of not just the YouTube videos, but podcast episodes, some written content like standalone written content, but that's taken a backseat to video and then social media.
We for a long time were doing meme Mondays, which was trying to just make estate planning a little bit more fun. So we use like some Always Sunny in Philadelphia memes, SpongeBob Square pants memes, stuff like that were like culturally relevant now, but trying to make them not like annoyingly relevant to estate planning, but like funny, clever connections because my thing too is like, I don't want to be annoying in what we're doing. Otherwise, that's not really helpful either, but it's always just been like, I feel like a lot of people in our positions get that analysis paralysis and think that everything has to be perfect.
Most of the videos have been on my cell phone, almost all of them aside from the podcast episodes, which we record on zoom, so it's literally just been like this selfie cam, a minute, two minutes here and I batch them. I do like 60 at once, but recently I've been going on quora.com, and basically just pulling questions and answering them, just saying this is an actual question from a person, I'll provide the answer and then I just churn them in and it's been good, but we've always tried to provide value and that's always been like the overarching standard, for everything was that, there's no point in doing it unless it's going to be valuable to somebody. You can't just like churn out content and be like well content's, it's words, Google likes words so we'll make words. If it's not beneficial, it's not answering a question, it's not really beneficial to anybody.
[00:36:50] Matt: I'd like to go back a little bit to your decision to launch Cary Estate Planning two and a half years ago. I did not realize as recently as that, you've talked a little bit about how you want to do stuff differently than other lawyers do. What happened in your life that made you decide it was the right time to start your own thing or you had always known you would do that, and now two and a half years in, how do you look back?
[00:37:14] Paul: I think that there are people who have a predisposition to entrepreneurship, and I think that I'm one of them. Not that I have like some arrogance that I think, I know how to run businesses and so then I need to do that. It's more like I just always felt compelled to create something that I wanted to create, that I didn't want to continue to have to always ask for permission to do things. I think that one of the skill sets that I've developed early on in my legal career was marketing.
I've always heard the phrase like before you build a business, have a client and so what I've always been good at is personal connection, branding, marketing, and that thing. I knew that whenever that should come and has now been just a little over two years, that I would be okay because I knew how to communicate with clients and with people who work with the same clients that I want to work with. But over and above that I didn't really know that much about running a business or creating a business. A lot of it was trial by fire and just learning along the way. I just saw owning or opening my own practice as an inevitability just was going to happen, it was a when, not an if. There was an opportunity to do that and I just seized on it and the rest is history.
[00:38:33] Matt: You mentioned this earlier a little bit, but how many employees do you have right now, and how do you resolve those hiring decisions to be ahead of your growth curve without running out of money?
[00:38:46] Paul: We're at 11 now, so I started as a true solo two years ago, and stayed at true solo for six months. All of this hiring has only been in the last year and a half and most of it has been this year. We've added 7 people this year, so the way that we conceptualize or plan for it is to envision the next level of firm that we want to be and then staff up for it. Luckily, I had somewhat of a mindset shift in the first year of practice that saw these sorts of decisions as investments instead of expenses, but also that you don't have to have an entire year's salary in the bank before you make that hire.
That cash flow is a thing that's generally speaking every time you make a hire, you should be making more revenue to support it, whether that's because that person themselves is making more revenue because it frees me up to be able to market more, or take more consultations. We, I think first off did a good job early on saving money, establishing a cash reserve so that we could steady the ship and make it through any storm that came up. But we've also been really intentional with what the client experience needs to look like and as we grow, scaling our team to maintain it because the firm that got us to a quarter million in revenue is not the same firm that got us to a million in revenue, is not going to be the same firm that gets us to 3 million in revenue.
Those steps of scale, really stress and really demolish actually the systems that you're building along the way, so you have to think proactively ahead, 6 to 12 months, and say, where do we think we're going to be revenue-wise? Where do we think we're going to be capacity-wise? That's probably been the bigger driving force is capacity because our marketing systems work so well that we never have a want for new clients. It's more so making sure that we have sufficient capacity to service everyone without missing a beat or without diluting the process. That's been the point all along is first off maintaining that same dedication to client service at scale, but also making sure that everybody is doing what they're best at so that we're not having one person do several jobs in an okay way that everybody's doing their highest and best use.
[00:41:06] Matt: You can do that well with a team of your size. Paul, this is a show about life, work, and money and I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about what you love, about where you are today in life, work, and money?
[00:41:18] Paul: What I love about my current life in my practice and in my family is that, it's very intentional, it's very authentic. I'm not just pounding the clock, doing things that I need to be done for the sake of doing them. I'm truly only doing the things that I have a passion for in my practice now instead of having to do everything. But it's also allowing me to be a lot more intentional with my time at home and that I have very regular hours and that's largely because I'm not doing everything.
There's two other lawyers in my office. We have eight staff altogether, so it's not everything falling on my shoulders to get done. So we've been able to through growth, really get a lot off my plate to be able to allow me to only do what I'm best at and delegate the things that I'm not the best at to people who are going to do it better than I can; and so what that means is everybody that has an enjoyable life, that we're all keeping very reasonable and regular hours, that we all enjoy what we do and that's a better work-life balance. That's a better career, and so financially, personally, professionally, it's really hard to see how life gets better than it is right now. It's hard to fathom this 10 years ago when I moved to Raleigh for law school, it's not something that I could have ever dreamed. It's amazing.
[00:42:35] Matt: I think it's fun when everything's clicking, and I like what you're describing because not only are you experiencing better life as the owner, your employees are like you said, doing their highest and best work and then if that's really true, the clients are, in fact, being better served by that work than they could be if it all had to run through you.
[00:42:57] Paul: Well, and that was a, I think a priority for our hiring too was not just that we had people to do things at a high level but that they were also being compensated fairly. Everybody here makes a good wage. We have comprehensive benefits. Our firm pays for everyone's, health insurance, premiums, dental vision, we have unlimited PTO. It's an enjoyable place to work culturally and so that I think was always going to be really important for us given like my parents' lives, even my experience with how they worked, in that union driven, that hard work sacrifice, time for money, type experiences. I wanted this to be an enjoyable career, not just a stop along the way in life.
[00:43:43] Matt: You've taken some big steps towards bringing that vision to life, so I'd love to hear about it. Paul, I wonder if you could tell us, what's one piece of advice that you've benefited from in your life that you'd like to share today?
[00:43:55] Paul: I think that it's seek discomfort because nothing that we've ever done well has happened in a place of comfort. Our growth has happened, white-knuckled, really scared to make those decisions. When I started my firm, my wife stays home with our kids, we didn't have a secondary income to rely on. We didn't have benefits to rely on. It was very much a burn the ship and never look back moment and there was a lot riding on it. A lot of our growth decisions and steps have come with the same, not same consequences, but difficulty in pulling the trigger at least initially. Then I started really getting used to the proposition of risk equals profit.
You can't grow, you can't make a profit unless you're taking risks. You're just going to be stagnant. Plateau happens if you're not going to risk. That doesn't mean you throw caution to the wind and say, "To hell with it all, we're just going to do whatever," but it's calculated risks. It's intentional risks towards a better overall existence. That, I think was a point of advice early on for me, but that I share regularly is that you have to be okay with taking risks and you have to be comfortable in the uncomfortable
[00:45:10] Matt: Seek discomfort and take risks. I think that's consistent across the entrepreneurial landscape. Do you have any books that you'd like to recommend today or that you've read in the past?
[00:45:22] Paul: Yes, at least from a business owner's perspective, my two favorites are Traction, which is about the entrepreneurs operating system and basically how to create a business structure that's going to be beneficial over time and allow for growth and those things. Then the StoryBrand, Creating a StoryBrand, which is basically like how you convey the message of your business towards your intended client, like what you do, how you can really brand that towards your ideal client. Those have been very significant books for where we are now.
[00:45:55] Matt: You've described who should follow up, which are people who need estate planning and are interested in ongoing services. To verify, you're only licensed in North Carolina. Is that accurate?
[00:46:07] Paul: Correct. Yes, for now. I'm from Michigan originally. I'd like to get reciprocal licensing in Michigan and then we're looking at Virginia too.
[00:46:14] Matt: It makes a lot of sense. It's been a really interesting thing for me through the pandemic is the diaspora of new clients that I have. Thankfully, I don't need a separate license in every state, we just have certain registration requirements that we have to deal with, but given that people might be interested in planful estate planning in the great state of North Carolina, how would you recommend people follow up with you?
[00:46:35] Paul: The first is always caryestateplanning.com. That's our website, great information, very easy to contact us there, our homepage is structured on that client experience, how we're different and why anybody would choose us over the next lawyer. Then social media, Instagram, Facebook, just Cary Estate Planning, and then our YouTube channel just search Cary Estate Planning. I think there are probably over 270 videos up there now.
[00:46:58] Matt: And more coming.
[00:46:59] Paul: More coming, more in the hopper.
[00:47:01] Matt: Terrific. Well, Paul, I've likewise very much enjoyed the conversation. I thank you so much for your time spent today and I hope you have a wonderful rest of your afternoon.
[00:47:09] Paul: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
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[00:47:16] Matt: There are so many takeaways from our conversation today. While I love the broad estate planning thoughts, I also really appreciated Paul sharing his experience of taking the services business from a solo practice to more than a dozen employees in three years, that is super fast growth. Now estate planning is one of the few things you can do now that helps you while you're alive and helps your family after you die. We know about death in our family and there's no sugarcoating the facts. When people die, it's horrible. Your pre-planning can make this horrible time less horrible for the people you love.
Paul's description of estate planning as putting what's in your head and your heart into a legal, binding, and effective transition plan really resonated with me. Also, good estate planning incorporates tools that help you while you're still alive. Some degree of estate planning is appropriate for anyone who's an adult. You especially need it if you have kids or assets, your estate plan should include contact information for all your important people.
Then shifting from estate planning to entrepreneurship, Paul talked about seeking discomfort. Understanding that profit comes from risk and without risk, we plateau in our achievements.
That's it for the estate planning and entrepreneurship discussion with Paul Yokabitus flashback Friday looks at career topics. Again, the show is called engage mentors, attract sponsors and spend time with amazing people. Until then, this is Matt Miner, encouraging you to make a financial plan that works as hard as you do.
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[00:48:52] Daughter: Matt Miner is a fee-only, fiduciary financial advisor and founder and CEO of Miner Wealth Management, a North Carolina registered investment advisor for Matt provides personalized, unconflicted advice to clients for a fee. He's also my dad, so please be nice when you talk to him. Matt is a certified financial planner professional and holds a Series 65 securities license.
He earned his bachelor's degree in finance from Arizona State University and his MBA from Duke University's, Fuqua School of Business. Work Pants Finance, that's financial media business, where he talks about work, entrepreneurship, kids, and money, taxes, investing in other personal finance topics. workpantsfinance.com exists to share wisdom, to provide general financial information does not financial tax or legal advice. If you are an individual and probably need personal advice for your specific situation, you should consider building relationships with helpful, caring, and competent professionals who understand your unique context and can provide advice that is tailored to your needs.
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