Aaron Strauss | The Entrepreneurial Law Firm: Building a Platform, Not Just a Practice

Elise Holtzman: Hi, everyone. It's Elise Holtzman here, a former practicing lawyer and the host of The Lawyer's Edge podcast. Welcome back for another episode. So here's a question for you. What happens when a lawyer stops following the traditional path and starts building a platform instead of just a practice?

This week's guest left Biglaw to create a modern entrepreneurial law firm with national reach and launched a podcast where dealmakers share their biggest wins and lessons learned. He's joining me today to talk about leadership, culture, and what it really takes to think like a business owner in the legal world.

Before we dive in, today's episode is brought to you by the Ignite Women's Business Development Accelerator, a nine-month business development program created by women lawyers for women lawyers. Ignite is a carefully designed business development program containing content, coaching, and community of like-minded women who are committed to becoming rainmakers and supporting the retention and advancement of other women in the profession. To learn more about Ignite, visit thelawyersedge.com/ignite.

I am delighted to welcome my friend today, my guest, Aaron Strauss, who is the founder and managing partner of A.Y. Strauss, a multi-practice law firm with offices in New Jersey and New York. This rapidly growing firm represents clients across commercial real estate, litigation, employment, cannabis, immigration, family law, and corporate bankruptcy matters. Under Aaron's leadership, A.Y. Strauss has earned a reputation for delivering thoughtful strategic counsel with the responsiveness and care of a boutique practice.

He also has a well-deserved reputation for being a devoted people connector, which is one of the reasons he's so skilled at creating growth and opportunities for others. Aaron is also the host of The Dealmakers' Edge with A.Y. Strauss, a podcast he launched in 2021 to spotlight the stories behind top real estate investors, business leaders, and dealmakers and bring listeners behind the scenes of high-stakes real estate and entrepreneurship. I had the pleasure of being a guest on that podcast recently. Aaron, welcome to The Lawyer's Edge.

Aaron Strauss: Thank you, Elise. It's a pleasure to be here with you, as always, to talk to you.

Elise Holtzman: We always talk, and we have great conversations. I'm excited that we're talking with the recording behind us so other people can listen in to what we're talking about so they can be flies on the wall today.

I wanted to just dive right into what you've been building at A.Y. Strauss. You have grown significantly over the past year, even adding practice areas and increasing your attorney headcount by more than 40%. That's insane. We're going to talk a little bit more about what that looks like. But that's an insane amount of growth. So what is driving that growth? How are you doing it with purpose in mind, so that you're not just running around with your hair on fire, grabbing at things, and doing things?

Aaron Strauss: Great question. It's definitely a layered question, a nuanced question. We'll try to dig in a little bit. But essentially, if you could start with the right human beings, the right teammates, the right colleagues who see the world as you see it, the scariness of growth becomes greatly mitigated.

The challenges arise in every growing organization, as they always do. But if you can really team up with people who see the world the way you do, who are really, really intensely focused on client service, who have the skillset, frankly, to deal with your current team members and your clients and who match the culture, then the growth in an idyllic world, although never anything is perfect, then it should feel as if that person you found was always with you.

If you can find those needle-in-a-haystack people, that's really the dream and the goal. It's never perfect, and you're always striving for that, but that's really the goal where you can bring on people that feel as if they've always been with the organization and match what you've already been doing.

With respect to the other practice areas, it's pretty simple. Our clients just need more. We've been referring out a lot in a lot of different areas. We are in the middle of, or maybe second or third inning, you could say, of positioning ourselves as more of a traditional mid-size, mid-market, full-service style type of law firm. Full service is a bit of a misnomer. I really hate using that term because it sounds like you're going to try to be everything to everybody.

But think of it for a CEO of a mid-sized corporation or a family office. Those are two of our target audience type clients. They're going to need help in labor and employment. They're going to need help with commercial real estate. They'll have a litigation matter, a corporate bankruptcy issue, and sublayers and subspecialties will abound. If we keep referring those out, we're ultimately going to be lacking in our ability to really handle what our clients need on a day-to-day basis, and also give the attorneys here a platform that they feel confident that they can cross-sell and deliver holistically for those relationships that they already have in place.

Elise Holtzman: Like you said, there are a lot of different layers here. I want to go back to something you said about finding the right people. If you find the right people, if they think the way you do to a large extent, they want to adopt the same kind of culture, they have the same things in mind, they have the same drive for client service in mind, then it feels like you've found the right people. How do you find the right people? That just sounds so challenging to me.

I know you're constantly talking to people and having conversations with people. How do you figure that out? Because one of the big things that people talk about in the legal profession all the time, and certainly the last few years, is talent attraction and then talent retention. So these are things that managing partners of law firms, practice group leaders, HR people are thinking about all the time. So when you go out there and you have conversations with people and you think, "Well, maybe they're the right person," how do you make some of those determinations about whether they are going to be the right fit for your firm?

Aaron Strauss: It's a great question. I think I always say it's really, really hard to recruit, but it's even harder to retain. I think every person who runs a service business is up at night every night thinking, "How are we going to keep these superstars here? How do we keep the band together?" This is such a great team. You want to keep it going because the worst thing you can do is have an interruption of service for a client when they're used to dealing with some superstar, and then they bounce, and it kills morale.

Hanging on to people is a constant issue that every firm has to juggle and deal with. So we're no different than anyone else. We're blessed to have a superstar team, and we just try to treat everyone the best we absolutely can to hang on to them, just like every other firm out there. But I will say when you are recruiting, first of all, it's hard. You have to try to find people that really want to be more of a smaller style boutique firm.

A lot of people like the safety or security of an AmLaw 100 or 200 firm, or they're a solo, or they have their own firm. Everyone has their own life circumstances about how they see the world and what type of practice they want to be part of. So it's really like a dance. Not only do you want to find the right person that's right for you, but you want that person to really want to be with you. If you're selling somebody very hard, "Come on, it's going to be great," and they're not really interested, that's going to end in a problem.

You really want to have an alignment of interests and alignment of goals and really make sure that you can deliver on what you say you can deliver on, that brand promise to a lateral candidate or an associate or whoever it is coming over, and make sure that they're in alignment with you with respect to culture.

When it comes to cultural fit, you really obviously want to work with very talented people and who like to get back to clients very quickly. It's really just that caring element, that ambition element you can't teach, but service is that. It's just service. You got to respond to people. You got to care about those relationships and you got to try to see ahead of the curve, but you also have to be really good at what you do.

That often means that you've been trained at top firms. Sometimes it means you've gone to great schools, but not necessarily. You're really looking for a needle in a haystack, but ultimately, you're also looking for people who may be exceptional, but not only exceptional attorneys, but they're exceptional people. So you're really looking for the needle in a haystack with a needle in a haystack, and it's extremely hard, and there's a lot of strikeouts.

I'm sure anybody listening to this who's grown a service business or a law firm or accounting firm, what have you, you're always, always, always searching for talent. You're always looking for, who can that next star be? How can you develop somebody? Can you see something in somebody that perhaps they can't even see themselves?

For some reason or another, I have gotten fairly good at recognizing who would be a fit for our current client roster, but who also as a person might connect with the current group of people we are already working with internally.

Elise Holtzman: What about looking for people who have an interest in and capacity to bring business into the firm? Because many law firms, you and I know, hire for pedigree. They hire for pedigree. They hire for fit. This person's great. This person can do the job. But they're not necessarily looking ahead and saying, "Hey, in addition to being this great service business, we're also a business business." We've to worry about where the client business is coming from. We can't necessarily have two people in the firm doing all of the rainmaking. So is that something you're always looking for or just in certain situations? How do you evaluate that?

Aaron Strauss: It's a great question. I always say you can't teach ambition. For somebody who wanted to develop business, they just have to do that, want to develop business. Either they want it or they don't want it. It's that simple. But I've also seen people who are incredibly introverted, like we've talked a lot about, Elise, who are really exceptionally talented attorneys that do exceptional work and they become basically accidental rainmakers. They get referrals because they're the best, and then there's awesome. Then there's the entire other 180-degree spectrum of somebody who's just out there all the time networking, who at every meeting is trying to connect everybody.

I've definitely seen the full gamut. I don't think there's one secret way. There's one magic potion, but you listen to people and they leave clues. That comes down to, are they an engaging person? Are they easy to talk with? Essentially, bringing work is building relationships. So the same way that they made friends from kindergarten all the way through school and college, it's going to be the same thing in the professional world, maybe perhaps with a more focused purpose.

So if the person's engaging, they have a good personality, and you get a sense that they're driven, and you can give them the tools and the cookbook, as it were, to be able to follow, to be able to develop business, the likelihood of it becoming the case is very high if they are supported and they're trained and they're coached by professionals like yourself. The odds obviously go up tremendously, but you never know. I've also seen that people will say one thing and then do another. But you always would love to bring on more rainmakers because essentially that's the lifeblood of every service organization.

When somebody's at the peak of their game, perhaps they slow down, and you always want to have people coming up and maintaining and growing. But you can also find people who are just great attorneys who are great with people. They never want to drive business, but they're maintaining and growing existing relationships. That's just as powerful, if not more powerful at times, than finding people who I'd label more pure hunters, if you will.

Elise Holtzman: We mentioned that you recently launched a few new practice areas. So if I've got this right, they're immigration, cannabis, and family law. You also, I think you said that it was basically this idea of being able to serve the client in the full spectrum of their needs. Are these things that people asked you for, immigration, cannabis, and family law, over and over again? Or did you just say, "Hey, these are things that we think that our firm should be doing. Or with cannabis, we want to make sure that this is something that makes us different because not every firm is supplying this thing." Where did the ideas come from for creating these additional practice areas for the firm?

Aaron Strauss: Sure. It's partially opportunistic and partially driven by internal client demands and whatnot, and primarily driven by the people behind the practice areas, like I started off the conversation with. So essentially matrimonial practice. I knew Cary Cheifetz. I met him through a common friend many, many years ago. Referred him a case, did a great job, built a nice friendship, great relationship. We didn't start the firm saying, we're going to get into matrimonial, but our clients all the time, we refer out, have issues. One of our partners has been doing it to some degree. So it made sense to add on, but again, not from a theoretical perspective, but from the actual human beings are the right fit.

So Cary, I know for over 15 years, and he's exceptionally talented. Nancy, who I met more recently, obviously has been his right hand in the field for many, many years. So that just felt like a perfect fit, and it's been great. It's only been a few months, but it's really felt like they were with us for years. Jen Cabrera, who launched our cannabis practice, we had been working with her for years. A lot of our clients have issues pertaining to cannabis and the leasing. We referred to her. She referred to us. We were her real estate arm. She was our cannabis arm. So after a while, we said, "Jen, look, we're already working together. Why don't we actually work together?" So it wasn't like this big theoretical push. We already were working with her. So that just made a lot of organic sense.

Dini is a superstar. She went in-house after a period of time at big firms. We actually had met her a couple of years ago prior to try to launch the practice. She decided to go in-house. When she was determining to reposition and pivot back to law firms, we already had a multi-year relationship with her. So it's not like we started the firm saying we need to do X, but if we find a human being we think is a superstar that really fits with what we want to do and is ambitious and has the drive and the capacity to do a great job for clients, it adds to what we're already doing. So that's the combo.

Elise Holtzman: What I'm hearing here is that you have to be ready to go with the flow because I think that when people look to start law firms, everybody talks about having a plan. Got to have this plan. You have to know in advance what you want to do. You can't just run around and chase bright, shiny objects. Then that's great. Nobody likes a plan more than I do. I mean, I'm like a poster child for the personality who loves planning. But I think this is a great example of how you can't be so rigidly tied to a plan that you don't see the opportunities that are coming up around you.

Aaron Strauss: For sure.

Elise Holtzman: That's what I'm hearing you doing is, "Okay, I had a plan. I wanted to start this firm. I wanted to do things a little bit differently, but these opportunities are coming up."

Aaron Strauss: A hundred percent. We know we want to become more full-service. So I know several practice areas we're really looking for right now, but we're not going to launch them until that right person comes along because you can have a nice practice, you can be great on paper, you make a lot of sense by the book, but in reality, if you're not going to click and mesh with what's already happening, it's just not going to work out.

So it's being patient. It's waiting for the right pitch. It's supporting the people you bring on to have their back and to lean into those relationships and also understanding it's going to take time to really build that interconnectivity. But it should make all of us stronger over time as well.

Elise Holtzman: So let's talk about some of these different hats that you're wearing, because at the risk of stating the obvious, when you're managing partner, you're wearing a lot of hats. I mean, you're the one who has this vision for the firm. So you've got to be the visionary. You've also got to make things happen. So you've got to be somebody who executes. You've got to be a strategist. You're mentoring people. You're making all the decisions about or most of the decisions about who is the right fit, what practice areas are we going to bring on.

So, first of all, how are you balancing all of those different roles? Because I think that it's one thing, as you say, it's a lot easier in many ways. Some people like that safety net of sitting in the office and grinding out really good work or being told, "Hey, you're the practice group leader for this particular practice. So do this thing." You're wearing all of these different hats, and some people might think you're crazy because not only did you voluntarily take on these roles, but you're the one who decided you should do it in the first place. So first of all, how are you balancing all of this? Then we can talk a little bit more about which ones you like the best and which ones are the most challenging.

Aaron Strauss: That's a great question. It's something we talk about extensively, and it's a constant, constant struggle to find where you should spend your time for maximum efficiency, opportunity, but also sanity. So we're lucky that we really do have a strong operations team here. It's small, but it's strong and it's growing. So we've got an administrative team. We've got a finance team. Got an operations team. We've got good vendors and supporters around the edges, and we're investing more heavily into the infrastructure of the firm itself. So the better the infrastructure, the better the core operating team, inversely proportionate to that.

In an ideal world, the stress of the managing partner and leadership should go down. You are right on wearing a lot of hats, and the goal is every six to 12 months, you want to be firing yourself from the hat that you're wearing. We are also blessed to have hired some great people, and we've been working together as a team, some of us for over a decade. So there's a comfort knowing that this person's got this deal under control, this person's got this.

It's more so when you don't have a lot of operating history with somebody new that you have to learn about that person. They have to learn about you, and they have to learn about how they're supported. So right now we're literally going into that issue where we need to invest further into more depth operationally. Also, as much as we've been trying to fight it, you really don't want to become bureaucratic. But you will need more systems and more infrastructure to be able to scale to the next level.

We're putting that in place. It's a process. It's a process where part of you wants to hold on to the old days where it's just five, 10 people, and you just get it done. Then, when you move to 30, 40 people, you have to have broad systems, more checks and balances, more operating support, and you have to grow leaders.

We have thankfully here a lot of people who are exceptional in what they do. They have leadership capacity. They are leading in their own way in real time. I lean on a lot of people every day to do what I do. If I had to break down my highest and best use, it's really recruiting and retaining, two edges of the same sword, as we talked about. Overseeing that soft piece of the law, which is the culture. Are people getting it right? Are they treating each other well? Are we getting back to our clients in real time? Is this still the type of place that I'd be proud of working in?

The third bucket, like you said, Elise, is really just the unpredictable. It's the everyday. That's the bucket I think that keeps everybody up at night, whether they're running a business with five people or 500. It's just that absolute unpredictable, what's going to happen today? You can start in the morning with your list. It's like, I got to make these five calls, I got to be in these meetings. Then boom, something happens that no one saw. Sometimes it's great, sometimes it's not great. But you need to feel this kind of emotional resilience to just keep rolling through whatever it is.

Elise Holtzman: You talked about the highest and best use of your time. What part of the role do you find most rewarding of the things you achieve? What's your favorite thing to do that you would do all day, every day if you knew that you could trust somebody to take the rest of it off your plate?

Aaron Strauss: Yeah, and we are trusting. There's going to be more and more taking off my plate as we grow. It's impossible. But the thing I've really developed a passion for that I love is recruiting.

If I meet an exceptional candidate, I can just tell they're going to be great and I know it and I can feel it. I just have this sixth sense about it. So if they want to come over here, it's very exciting. I try my best to make that happen. Then the other part is I really do love building those relationships with the clients, showing up for them, staffing teams, knowing we're going to just crush it on a certain assignment for them.

I actually like the marketing too. I think it's fun. I like running the podcast. I like overseeing brand strategy. We're going to redo our website this year. I actually find that pretty fun as well. So I've created this dynamic where I can excel in a softer area of law where I really enjoy.

Elise Holtzman: What's the part that maybe you didn't see coming? If you could go back to Aaron Strauss, who was just launching this thing and was all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed about it, when you look back, what do you say, "Oh, Aaron, you did not know that this was part of the deal"?

Aaron Strauss: I would tell you, I love the strategy. I love business development. I love marketing, recruiting. I love the growth aspect. I think it's fun, exciting. It still gets me up in the morning.

It's managing all the nuanced gray in complex relationships. You didn't foresee that you're going to bring this person on, and then they may not click with this other person, and then that's going to lead to an issue here. It's the sort of compounding effect of overlapping of relationships where if you have 10 people in an organization, it's complex. There are a lot of ways it could go. But if you have 40, there are just more things that could bubble up in real time. You can have the best infrastructure, the best HR, the best brand, but there's always going to be little points bubbling up.

You want to try to keep everybody happy, but that's not also an attainable goal anymore when you have 30, 40 people looking to push that growth further. So becoming a leader, frankly, wasn't something that I really ever had training in. We've talked about this a lot. We've done some training. But when you're the sales and marketing guy, bringing clients and building relationships, you want to be liked. "Oh, I like that guy. He's made me happy. He's the crowd pleaser," so to speak.

But really what leadership comes down to is you have to have that ball in your pocket to be liked, but more so to be respected. To be respected means you sometimes have to make the hard decisions that are not fun. Perhaps somebody is very technically strong, but they shouldn't be in this specific role. It's not the right fit. Or something's there that you wish it wasn't the case, but having, frankly, the stomach to lean in and make tough decisions was not something that I ever thought of becoming, but it goes hand in hand.

If you want to have a company, you got to lean in, you got to make tough calls, you have to show up, and you have to do what's right for the organization, not an individual. That's something I had no training in. I'm constantly learning. I read a ton of books, but it's something that I was just not prepared for. I'm constantly trying to upgrade my ability.

Elise Holtzman: Well, it's understandable. As you say, no one ever bothered teaching us this stuff. It's not like we went to law school and they said, "Oh, by the way, we want you to learn all these leadership skills because you're going to need them." I mean, it was never mentioned to us. Then many of us don't learn it at our first firms because we're supposed to just sit at the desk and put your head down and grind out really good work and learn how to be a good technician.

So I find that many managing partners are blindsided by it. I think many of them move into the role and do it well. I think not all of them are quite as thoughtful as I know you are about it. But you're right. It's a combination of you've got to be a human being, but you also have to make decisions that help you take good care of the firm. Sometimes it's not about the person, it's about the business. I think that for anybody who cares about people, as you so clearly do, that can be a real challenge.

Aaron Strauss: Right. It's an asset and a liability depending on the day and time, but it's a business where it's just people. The product is documents. Sure, we deliver great documents, and we deliver what I hope is exceptional advice, but you have to keep great relationships all the time, and they're complicated. Human beings are complicated. So you have to try to understand all the levers, what the motivations are, how to lean into those relationships.

But sometimes you just straight up miss something that you never saw coming, and you can't take things personally. You can't also beat yourself up too much that, "Oh, I should be perfect." It's okay to make mistakes. That's another thing, too where law school and then junior associate, you just think you got to get everything perfect. But life is by definition imperfect. All we do is constantly try to improve and iterate and iterate and iterate. That really is what growth is. It's just hard when it's not tied to exact data points.

Elise Holtzman: I think it is hard. I also think that there's a level of self-awareness that leaders have to have that they sometimes don't have, or there's fear that they're not engaging head-on. So, for example, I do see law firm leaders, whether it's managing partners or practice group leaders or people who are leading in some other way, who are sweeping challenges under the rug. Again, totally understandable. Why wouldn't you sweep it under the rug? Who wants to deal with nastiness or people's hurt feelings or maybe having to say something that you really wish you didn't have to say?

But as you suggest, doing that might feel good for a while, but if you keep sweeping things under the rug, there is then this big pile under the rug. It's like the rug has this big bubble underneath it, and you're not dealing with it. So I think that for many people, it's an evolution, and it's not always a comfortable one.

Aaron Strauss: A hundred percent. We feel it every day, Elise, like we've talked about. It's a constant journey, and you're never there, and you can never sit on your laurels from yesterday. Last year may have been awesome. This year may be whatever. Every day you're just resetting. That's hard. That's hard to do. It's an emotional and financial and complete overview of what's happening that day, week, month, year, quarter, etc. It's just always ongoing. There's no, "Now I'm good." That never happens.

Elise Holtzman: Right. But there's definitely something there that keeps you doing it. Because in theory, you could say, "This is a crazy job. I don't know whose idea this was, but this is a crazy job. I've got to reset every day. I'm never completely done. So you know what? I'm going to go do this other thing." Yet there's something that drives you to keep doing this.

I'm just curious. For you, what do you think that drive is? Why not just throw in the towel and say, "Well, this was fun, but now I'm going to go work for some other law firm, or I'm going to go in-house, or I'm going to go set up shop at campgrounds and just pretend the world doesn't exist"? Why this?

Aaron Strauss: Well, the last one's campground sounds actually very idyllic. That one to me, I would do. I would never fit in-house. I would make a terrible employee. Other firms I've definitely toyed with. I've thought about it. I feel responsible, frankly, for the promises I've made and the commitments I've made to people. But I also still do find it rewarding to see people grow and evolve and be entrepreneurial.

I like the complexity. I like the chess puzzle of it. I like that it's not so binary. It's not move the checker piece, but it's seeing all the angles. At times it could make you crazy, but I do find it rewarding to have a strategy, execute on the strategy, and challenge myself, challenge myself and the team to see what we can do. To make certain bets and see them pay off is very exciting. It's very exciting. There's no question.

The unpredictability of it is something that can make you insane. I think everybody who manages any business has that, but if you have a great team and you're leaning in together and you're really trying to make a concerted, unified effort towards success, it's fulfilling. That's what you're striving for on a regular basis. I think a lot of this stuff just comes down to mental resilience, mental health. It's a tough business.

We have to answer to our clients. We have to answer to our team members, to our family, to our vendors, to our operating team members. There's just a lot of balls in the air to juggle. So you have to become the person, frankly, that can do the work that you set out to do. That's really what the biggest challenge is. It's to focus on the internal work, which is quieting the internal chatter of negativity, of speaking to yourself from a point of respect and not negativity and to essentially fastening your own seatbelt so that you can fasten the seatbelts of others as you go through this journey we call life and business together.

Elise Holtzman: It is a difficult job. If it were easy, everybody would be doing it. What are some of the ways in which you put that seatbelt on, or let's call it putting the oxygen mask on? The way they talk about it on the plane, how you're supposed to put the oxygen mask on yourself first before you put it on other people. What are some of the things that you do to take care of yourself so that you can stick to the leadership path, even when it becomes challenging?

Aaron Strauss: It's a great question. First of all, I hire great coaches, such as Present Company, to really talk through these thorny issues. They're not binary. Like I said, it's not like, is the document good or is it not good? It's seeing all the gray areas of human beings, which is the most complicated assignment anybody could ever have.

I find meditation just setting your intention at the beginning of the day. I'm not perfect, but I go through periods where I meditate. I think taking care of yourself physically, exercising. I try to take long walks in the woods, just myself. It's hard to be upset about anything or anybody when you're surrounded by nature. Also, just having perspective. I find if you're thankful for what you do have, then you focus less on the challenges that you face.

So every day, I'm thankful for my health. I'm thankful for my family. I'm thankful that there is a successful operating business. I'm thankful for my colleagues. I'm thankful to be able to do what I do every day, even though it's not easy. So I find if you're focusing on the positive aspects, ultimately, you will peel off those negative layers. It's not easy. There are days where you want to hang it up. There are days where you're just very stressed out.

But every morning you wake up, it's another opportunity to go after and go get it. You just have to be able to keep moving and don't look to the left or to the right or look back. You always want to reassess. I'm not saying move blindly, but the challenges today are by definition not going to be the ones from yesterday. So keep making progress, whether it's just an inch, a foot, 10 feet, or a mile, just always be moving forward no matter what you're doing. The progress sometimes won't feel like it's there, but it is always happening over time.

Elise Holtzman: I just want to highlight two of the things you said. One is about the gratitude, because I think that for most people, if you ask them, "Are you grateful for the good things in your life," they would say yes. But I learned many years ago, after going through some challenging things in my own life, that actually living in gratitude on a regular basis, actually reminding yourself on a regular basis of the blessings in your life is really, really powerful stuff.

So like you, I do that, and I encourage other people to do that, especially when you are carrying a lot of weight. I mean, as you mentioned before, you've got a lot of people relying on you now. This is a big job, partly because when you grow any kind of organization, any kind of business, you've got a lot of people relying on you. So not just your family, of course, but the people that are working in your organization.

Then the other thing you said about taking care of yourself, I mean, I think a lot of people do focus on exercise and good nutrition, things that I could certainly be a lot better at. But I like that you mentioned the meditation and the connecting with nature, because I think so many of us, we're so driven in this profession, and we are focusing on outcomes. What can we get to the client and what do we need to get to the partner, and what do we need to send out by email?

We forget that we really do need to connect with ourselves and the world. So if somebody had told me years ago that I would be meditating, I would have rolled my eyes and told them they were crazy because it just seemed so woo-woo to me. I think I was very close-minded to the idea, not necessarily proud of it, but I point it out to people because I think that that's something that we in the profession sometimes do.

So I love hearing that you use meditation and connecting with nature to help you stay grounded and centered. So thank you for sharing that. I think it's always good for people, especially the kind of people that you and I run into on a regular basis, to hear that thing, especially from someone who's so ambitious and so hard driving. It's like, "Oh yeah, there's this person behind the growth of this law firm."

Aaron Strauss: A hundred percent. Another thing is also just trying to make it all about yourself. The people who say I, I, I, me, me, me all day, they tend to not attract certain things in the world. So if you can have your conversations revolve around we and our and make it much more about a team every day, as opposed to, well, I, I, I, me, me, me, you're just going to have an emotional offset and an unloading of some of that stress and pressure too.

Also, take the time horizon. Think about where you were five years ago and the struggles you had five years ago, or 10 or 20 years ago, and then one year ago, and just look back and say, "Have I managed to be successful during all these periods? Did I get through this? Did I do that? Did I accomplish that?" Yes, there were always setbacks. I'm not saying it's linear, never as linear, but trust yourself.

You accomplish certain things, and then you start to play head games where you start to say, "Well, that's not reasonable. Why is it not reasonable based on prior performance? You did this, you accomplished this, you accomplished this. So why the hell can't I accomplish that?" As long as you have basis for it and you can emotionally detach yourself from the vicissitudes, riding up and down of every little emotional neuron that wants to fire off from a negative perspective, why not? You know, why not?

Elise Holtzman: Well, I think there's this element of stopping and smelling the roses. In my role as coach, one of the things that I try to do sometimes, one of my clients will say something like, "Oh, I did this thing. It's done. It's great." Then they move on. Like, "What? Slow down a second. Let's pause here and pat yourself on the back for a minute, at least acknowledge that you've accomplished this thing."

So you talked about having it not be all I and have it be we, and I think that's really important, but there are extremes. There's the I, I, I, and then there's the never stopping to smell the roses and recognizing your own accomplishments and being able to take a moment to be proud of yourself. So there's a lot of real estate between those two extremes.

And so I love that we don't do one or the other. I think that lawyers maybe could take a little time to pat themselves on the back and be proud of themselves and acknowledge that they have moved ahead, because I think we're always so ready to run to the next thing. So I love that you said that.

I mentioned earlier in the introduction that you have a podcast called The Dealmakers' Edge. So, in addition to you yourself being an organizational leader, you have a front row seat to how top business leaders think. What are some of the things that you hear from the people that you interview that resonate with you? Has anything that you learned from your guests influenced you and how you do things at A.Y. Strauss?

Aaron Strauss: That's a great question. I mean, having the podcast is great for a number of reasons, but first and foremost, you're always learning. So I would listen to these people all day anyway, they would talk to me. So the idea of recording it and sharing it and marketing it and all that good stuff is just incidental returns, if you will.

But I will say there's not an episode we've recorded where I don't walk away saying, "Wow, I've not learned something [sic]." I mean, literally just the one we released last week, I had a friend of mine on, and he was talking about the chairman of his firm. It's a massive real estate organization. Somebody said, "How do you handle all this responsibility?" The stresses he had were nothing compared to what the CEO and the stress that they had. He's like, "How do you deal with all those problems and all those issues?" He said, "I just deal with one at a time, just one at a time."

Everyone likes to say, "This is stressful, this is overwhelming," all these problems. You just break it down all the way to the bottom, bottom, bottom level, and say, "Okay, this is one issue. Let's just tackle this one issue." You don't have to figure out everything all at once. So, just little notes like that I'll hear on a bi-weekly basis. It's very inspiring for me. I really love stuff like that. I read a ton of books as well. Anything to inspire thought leadership, anything to make myself feel like I'm making incremental progress. But the podcast has been a lot of fun. I think listeners like it.

I'll tell you, I was with somebody the other day, and he is a top executive at a public company. I just had lunch with him on Friday. He was saying that the CEO was listening to the podcast, loved it. He wanted more at the end. He said, even the board of directors, he got feedback that they listened to it. He felt like it was done exceptionally well. He happened to be a fabulous guest who knew what he was talking about inside and out, but it made me feel really good that I was sort of somehow driving somebody else's success.

Or another brief story, I was with a friend of mine who's head of construction for a major family office, national developer investor. He literally told me last week, he was between him or another organization to win a large real estate deal. He said the guy checked him out, Googled him, our podcast came out. He listened to the podcast. He said, based on that, he felt that he could trust that person. He awarded the deal. He said, "You sound like you'd be a good partner for me."

So the fact that this person had that marketing piece about him online where his story was told in an authentic way, it literally allowed him to have tangible value in the market and win a real estate deal. Besides from making me feel great, I know when he chooses a lawyer, he's going to say, "You know what? That guy helped me out." But all kidding aside, even if I don't get that deal, I feel really good, like I created some value. So giving, learning, it ties into marketing, it's a great way. It's a great holistic way to touch all these faces in one fell swoop.

Elise Holtzman: Aaron, as we wrap up our time here together today, I know you and I could talk all day long, but there is a hard stop here with the podcast at some point. There was a phenomenon called the curse of knowledge, where experts sometimes forget that what is so obvious and natural to them is not at all obvious to others. When it comes to driving rapid growth, but doing it intentionally and strategically and enjoying it along the way, what's a principle or piece of advice that may seem obvious to you, but you think is important for people to hear?

Aaron Strauss: It's a great question. I think it's multi-step. One is that things take time. People are very impatient. They want to see immediate results. The younger you are today, the more you have technology in your blood from when you were born. People expect everything to be rapid. Growth actually takes time, and it's not linear. It goes up, it goes down, it goes to the side, you get kicked to the curb, you go up this way, you go back that way.

So you got to take a long view and you've got to focus on what's a multi-year horizon versus a multi-day horizon. Obviously looking at the days and months as you go, but give yourself some time. Say I'm in the first inning of this, second inning of this. So have that perspective, look back, and look forward. Also, like I said, one issue at a time. You're not going to solve everything at once. Just what's the issue of the day? What's the issue of the week or month? Or what's our annual goal? Just break it down.

It's unpredictable. So when you do get stressed and when you do get knocked down and you do get surprised by some "bad thing," recognize that you've been through it before. Life is not linear. There's always something that's coming around the corner you can't see. You can either engender and invoke anxiety, or you can just embrace it. The challenge is the more risk you assume, the greater potential you have. But lawyers in general tend to really run from risk. We're risk-averse. We advise our clients on being risk-averse.

So you want to manage risk and hedge it against opportunity. You don't want to be foolish. But at the same time, anybody who's done anything significant has always dealt with a very healthy dose, a measured dose, hopefully, of unpredictability. You need to constantly reevaluate. You need to make mistakes. You need to learn from those mistakes. Don't expect the world to be perfect. Treat yourself well so you can treat other people well, essentially.

Elise Holtzman: I love all that advice. Good advice for how to grow something, and also how to stay resilient and stay the course. So, Aaron, thank you so much for being here today. I always love talking to you, and I'm glad that my listeners get to listen in on our little chit chat today.

And I'm going to thank our listeners for tuning in as well. If you've enjoyed today's show, please subscribe, rate, and review us at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. In the meantime, be bold, take action, and make things happen. We'll see you next time.