I’ve been booked to speak on the main stage at this year’s Law Firm Ambition event on the 17th of June in London (if you’re going, please say hello!), and they wanted me to speak about what makes one law firm owner so much more successful than another.

After some reflection, I realised that I had to look closely at the journey one of my clients went on to break down how they got from where they were before to where they are now, enjoying some well-earned success.

My client Habib came to mind.

Here's the LinkedIn recommendation he wrote for me:

"When Dan was first referred to me, I was sceptical. I had read the glowing success stories on his site but doubted it would work for me.

At the time, I was leading a 68-person law firm, starting work by 6 or 7 a.m. and rarely leaving before 8 or 9 at night. I was utterly exhausted. I was doing everyone else’s job, constantly firefighting office issues, and didn’t trust my team enough to delegate. I believed this level of stress and chaos was just part of owning a law firm.

Family holidays weren’t really holidays—I always brought my laptop and worked as usual. There was no time or space to truly grow the business.

Then I started working with Dan.

Dan broke down business leadership in a way I’d never seen before. He guided me through building structures, identifying the strengths and weaknesses of my team, and creating a clear three-year growth plan with focused weekly actions. It wasn’t just theory—every session led to real, implementable change.

Just two months in, I began to notice a shift.

Fast forward a year, and everything is different. My team no longer comes to me with problems—they come with solutions. I finally feel like I have a team I’m genuinely proud of, one that cares deeply about the quality of their work.

What’s more, I’ve been able to pass on what I’ve learned to my department heads, who have embedded it into their own teams. The cultural shift has been remarkable.

I’ve reduced my working hours dramatically. I can take time off, meet clients across the country, or go on holiday without working. I’m no longer doing billable work or micromanaging, and I’ve created the space to truly lead.

In the past year, our revenue has increased by 15%, and I’ve hit my personal financial target of £500k take-home. Instead of pocketing it, I reinvested in acquiring another firm, setting us up for even greater growth.

None of this would have been possible if I hadn’t learned how to lead.

Thanks to Dan, I now feel like I can take on the world."

So, what was the actual work that we did that enabled Habib to achieve such results?

Here are three core leadership practices that he implemented under my guidance.

⒈ Habib set up weekly one-on-one calls with each head of department to find out what they wanted.

Once Habib knew what each of his department heads (team leaders) wanted, he could work with them to agree on a target they could achieve, and in meeting it, as a byproduct, would have them get what they each wanted.

This resulted in one team leader getting Friday mornings off for singing lessons, another wanting a month off in summer to travel, and another genuinely interested in becoming a partner at his firm got the career progression he yearned for.

Habib was then able to collaborate with each team leader, making them feel valued and inspired to get what they wanted out of their participation in his firm.

The art was that each team leader did the same with each of their team members.

Within three months of us implementing this, everyone across his firm had a weekly one-on-one support call to ensure they had everything they needed to fulfil their agreed targets and succeed in getting what each of them wanted.

As a result, his firm-wide performance skyrocketed.

⒉ We didn’t raise but lowered everyone’s billable target.

When we looked at how reliably his team hit their billing targets, I discovered that they were under what Habib had told them they had to achieve.

This is because they were too high at 1680 per year, per fee earner. That was 35 per week, seven a day. It seems reasonable that every associate should complete 7 hours of billable work in an 8-hour day, but it’s impossible for Habib, as with most law firms I work with.

Each hour of billable work comes with admin. Not only this, but when fee-earners only have time for billing, they don’t have time to solve operational problems that arise and even worse, they cannot take care of clients properly, ensure they are pleased and win more work.

Then there’s lunch, illnesses, family emergencies, children to take care of, the list goes on and on.

For this reason, only a few of his team ever hit their monthly target, which was rare at best. Most didn’t get anywhere near hitting this target.

How would you feel if, however hard you worked, you never hit your targets? You’d lose motivation quickly.

So we lowered all the associates’ billable targets to just 1200 per year. That’s 25 a week, five a day. It seemed low to Habib, but once I got him to calculate how profitable his firm would be if everyone hit these targets, he lit up.

He then got to work to communicate this in his weekly one-on-ones with each team leader, and each team leader relayed this to their team members in each of their one-on-ones.

Within just a few weeks, the profitability of Habib’s firm began to increase nicely, and over a year later, it has remained sustainable.

⒊ He stopped tolerating poor performance and replaced key team members.

Habib had the problem that things would be poorly done whenever he was in his office, but at least they’d get done. But everything fell apart when he went on holiday, especially handling the money and collections.

When we looked at this more closely, I discovered that Habib was letting his heads of department take advantage of him by not doing what was agreed and not holding the associates accountable for their targets.

Also, he was the one who would often get involved with money issues and collections, which meant he was allowing the people who managed collections to never participate properly in their role.

Once we discovered this, I guided Habib in making clear requests with agreed deadlines and holding his seven team leaders effectively accountable.

In the end, two of them couldn’t handle it because up until then, they’d got away with earning their pay for doing the bare minimum. So as a result, Hobib contacted a recruiter I connected him with and replaced two of his team leaders in around two months.

The result was that he then finally had all seven department heads operating reliably, which lifted a lot of anxiety and stress from Habib.

I know it’s working well because when I emailed him recently, I got an automated out-of-office reply saying he’ll be away for 10 days and has no email access.

I feel so happy for him.