Great Attorneys Don’t Automatically Make Great Business Owners. FreedomOS Bridged That Gap for West & Dunn
How structured business coaching gave a thriving Wisconsin law firm the financial clarity, operational systems, and accountability to scale with intention
About West & Dunn
West & Dunn is a full-service Wisconsin law firm founded in 2016, headquartered in Waunakee with additional offices in Baraboo, Manitowoc, and Lodi. The firm serves individuals and businesses across Wisconsin in criminal defense, estate planning, business law, civil litigation, and municipal law and supports veterans nationwide in pursuing VA disability benefits. With four equity partners and a team that has grown to nearly 50 staff members, West & Dunn has built a reputation for transparent, high-quality legal counsel across a remarkably diverse range of practice areas.
The Challenge
Running a Law Firm Is a Skill Law School Doesn’t Teach
West & Dunn had been practicing law for nearly eight years when they began working with SMB Team. In that time, they had built a genuinely strong firm — respected attorneys, multiple practice areas, a growing client base, and real momentum. What they hadn’t built was a business operating system to match.
There was no formal budget. No established framework for evaluating what a good profit margin looked like, or what percentage of revenue should be going to payroll. Marketing investments were evaluated by gut feel — if the checkbook showed room, they’d say yes. And while the firm had begun using external marketing services, the reporting they received was disconnected from the outcomes they actually cared about: qualified leads, booked consultations, signed cases, and revenue.
Internally, the firm’s four practice areas shared a single blended financial view. There was no way to evaluate which areas were carrying the firm’s growth and which might be quietly underperforming. Hiring decisions were reactive — when attorneys felt overwhelmed, they looked for someone to hire, without a financial model to evaluate whether the timing or the role actually made sense.
“We didn’t know what our budget should be, what a good profit ratio looked like, or where our leads were actually coming from. When someone pitched us a marketing opportunity, we’d look in the checkbook and decide on the spot. There was no plan.”
None of this reflected a lack of capability. It reflected a reality that’s nearly universal among law firms: legal training prepares attorneys to practice law, not to run a business. West & Dunn had reached the point where the gap between their legal talent and their business infrastructure was becoming a ceiling on their growth.
The Solution was SMB Team Coaching
West & Dunn found SMB Team through a webinar and were drawn by something specific: the combination of business coaching and marketing under one roof. They had already experienced the limitations of marketing without operational context — reports full of metrics that didn’t connect to revenue, and no internal system to evaluate what any of it meant.
What they needed was someone who could help them build the business framework first, then connect it to everything else.
“The coaching piece was really attractive because attorneys don’t learn how to run a law firm in law school. Having marketing and coaching together helped us understand all the layers involved and what we needed to do on our end to make any of it work.”
SMB Team Coaching Strategies
A Financial Architecture That Works
The first order of business was giving the firm financial visibility it had never had. Each practice area was separated into its own reporting structure — independent revenue tracking, cost attribution, and profitability analysis. For the first time, partners could see clearly which areas of the business were growing and which needed intervention, rather than relying on a consolidated number that masked the variation underneath.
Each practice area was assigned a minimum growth target, and performance against that target became a standing agenda item — not an annual conversation, but a consistent accountability rhythm.
Alongside this, the firm began examining its compensation-to-revenue ratio in a structured way. Understanding where that number sat relative to industry benchmarks — and what it would take to move it — informed decisions about hiring, distribution, and how aggressively to pursue growth in each area.
Surfacing a Hidden Intake Problem
One of the most consequential moments in the engagement came not from a planning session, but from a closer look at data. Call tracking had been in place but wasn’t being reviewed systematically — and when the numbers were examined, they revealed about 30% of incoming calls were going unanswered.
The coaching response was unambiguous: this was the priority, and nothing else would move forward until it was resolved. Adding marketing spend on top of a 30% intake leak would compound the problem rather than fix it.
“Our coach made it clear — this was the only thing we were going to work on until it was fixed. He put the urgency in front of us in a way we couldn’t rationalize around, and then held us to it.”
The firm extended call coverage beyond business hours, brought in overflow answering support, standardized intake scripts, and trained staff — with direct support from the SMB coaching team, including recorded training resources. A funnel tracking tool was introduced that made every stage of the lead-to-client journey visible and measurable for the first time: contacts made, consultations scheduled, show rates, signed engagements.
The missed call rate dropped from over 30% to under 10% and continues to decline.
Intentional Hiring and Team Growth
With clearer financial models in place, hiring decisions changed fundamentally. Rather than responding to a feeling of being overwhelmed, the firm could now model what a new attorney or staff member should be expected to generate, what they would cost, and whether adding them made financial sense at that moment.
“We went from hiring when we felt slammed to hiring because the numbers supported it. That sounds like a small shift, but it completely changed how we thought about building the team.”
The firm grew from approximately 10 employees to nearly 50 over the course of the engagement — not in a rush, but in a pattern that reflected deliberate planning rather than reactive expansion.
West & Dunn implemented a formal quarterly goal-setting framework alongside firm-wide KPIs. This gave the firm a consistent structure for evaluating performance — for attorneys, for staff, and for the practice areas themselves — and created a rhythm of accountability that extended well beyond the coaching sessions.
“SMB gives you the spreadsheets, tells you what data to track, and then shows up every week asking whether you did the things you said you were going to do. That external accountability is what makes it stick.”
Building Toward Long-Term Enterprise Value
As the firm’s revenue picture improved, the coaching conversation expanded to a longer time horizon. West & Dunn had developed a pattern of heavily distributing profits at year-end — a natural impulse, but one that erodes enterprise value if it becomes the default.
The coaching engagement introduced a more intentional framework for how the firm approaches profitability and distribution: one oriented around the kind of financial profile that makes a business worth something beyond its current cash flow. Vivid Vision work and core values development became part of this — grounding day-to-day operational decisions in a clearer picture of what West & Dunn is building toward.
Outcomes At-a-Glance
| Metric | Before SMB Team | With SMB Team |
|---|---|---|
| Annual Revenue | $3.1M (2023) | $5.7M (2025) |
| Missed Call Rate | 30%+ | Under 10% and dropping |
| Team Size | ~10 employees | ~50 employees |
| Operating Profit Margin (normalized) | ~5% | ~16% |
| Practice Area Financial Visibility | Consolidated / no separation | Independent P&L per practice area |
| Hiring Approach | Reactive | Financially modeled before offer |
The Bottom Line
The business case for investing in coaching at West & Dunn was clear. The firm had legal talent, a growing reputation, and genuine ambition. What it lacked was the operating infrastructure to channel those advantages into predictable, sustainable growth — and an outside voice with the standing to identify what wasn’t working and hold the firm accountable for fixing it.
Two years in, the transformation is visible not just in the revenue number but in how the firm operates: with a budget, with financial targets by practice area, with a hiring process grounded in data, and with an intake system that captures the leads the marketing is working to generate.
“Coaching changed how we think about the business. We’re not looking in the checkbook anymore. We have a plan, we know how to evaluate it, and we have someone making sure we follow through.”
