Most lawyers who start their own firm have a plan. Gordi Mikalacki had four cases, a ring light, and a ton of grit.

She opened Elmm Law Group in 2020. Two weeks later, the whole world shut down.

No partners. No playbook. Just her phone and a conviction she could build something better than what she'd seen from the inside. So she built her firm around a simple pledge: she’d never take more from a case than the client takes home.

Gordi posted content from her car when no one was watching. She hired people she paid more than they asked for. But when she finally stopped doing everything herself, her firm grew 50% in a single year.

In this episode of The Fireproof Podcast, we covered:

→ How she used Instagram to compete against firms with massive ad budgets

→ The pledge she makes to every client on net settlement proceeds

→ What burnout taught her about hiring and letting go of control

→ The community work that's become the core of her firm's culture

→ And what finally changed when she joined Fireproof

She doesn’t pretend the early years were easy, or that she had it figured out… Gordi was a single mom running a law firm off her cell phone fully convinced she could handle it all. But she can attest that everything changed the moment she chose to trust other people.

Thank you so much Gordi for coming on and being honest about the hard parts of building something from scratch - your story’s going to hit home for a lot of people in the Fireproof community.

Chapters

0:00 - Introduction & Welcome

0:51 - How Gordi Built Elmm Law Group From Scratch

2:43 - Why She Left Her Old Firm to Start Her Own

5:27 - Why She Waited a Year Before Joining Fireproof

7:16 - Hiring Strategy and the 50% Growth Year

8:00 - Using Instagram to Compete Without a Marketing Budget

12:18 - The Client Pledge: Never Take More Than the Client Gets

16:55 - Burnout, Bottlenecks, and the Cost of Doing It All

20:26 - Community Events and Staying Top of Mind

21:13 - The Backpack Program and Giving Back

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