By Reid Zeising, CEO and Founder, Gain Servicing
There is a phrase I have been using for years that tends to catch people off guard the first time they hear it: I am great at nothing.
I say it deliberately. I am proficient at a number of things. I can see the vision for a business. I can model out the finance. I spent years as an investment banker and ran a hedge fund doing statistical arbitrage before any of this, so I understand numbers as well as almost anyone in this industry. But proficient is not the same as great, and I have learned the difference matters more than most founders want to admit.
I recently talked about this at length with Steve Fretzin on the Be That Lawyer podcast, and it is worth writing down here because the lesson applies just as much to a growing law firm as it does to a company like Gain.
Get Your Ego Out of the Way First
When I started Gain, I could see the opportunity. Attorneys and law firms needed a better way to manage the financial side of personal injury cases, and I could sketch out roughly what that platform needed to do. I could get myself to a three or a four on a ten-point scale of execution. What I could not do was get myself to a nine or a ten alone.
The only way to close that gap was to hire people who were nines and tens in the areas where I was not, and then get out of their way. That is harder to do than it sounds. Attorneys who built a practice through years of being the best in the room at the law itself run into the same wall. The instinct is to hold onto control because letting go feels like risk. In my experience, letting go, deliberately and to the right people, is what allows anything to scale past what one person can carry alone.
The Mistake That Taught Me to Respect Downside Risk
I want to share a version of this story I am less comfortable telling, because it is the one that actually changed how I run Gain today.
Before Gain existed, I led a semi hostile takeover buying out a public company in 2007. In the financial model, I stress tested same store sales at a 5% decline in the downside case. That company had never posted a negative same store sales number, so 5% felt conservative. Then the 2008 recession hit, same store sales dropped to negative 13%, the deal was overleveraged, and I was left holding $22 million in contingent liabilities.
It took five years of negotiating, selling assets, and rebuilding the company to get every lender and lien holder paid. It remains the most painful mistake of my career, and the honest cause was optimism. I did not model far enough into the tail of what could go wrong.
That experience is why Gain builds in reserves and buffers today, and why we test what happens if several things go wrong at once rather than just one. Can the business keep serving clients if a downturn hits multiple parts of the operation at the same time? That question shapes real decisions here, and it is one I would put in front of any law firm thinking about growth right now, particularly given how much uncertainty sits in the broader economy at the moment. Growth and caution are not opposing goals. Ignore downside risk long enough and it tends to find you anyway.
What an AI Agent Actually Is
Most attorneys I talk to are comfortable with AI as a lookup tool. Ask a question, get an answer, move on. That is useful, but it is different from what an agent does, and the difference matters if you are trying to actually scale.
A chatbot answers a question when you ask it. An agent has ongoing access to your information and works on it continuously, without a fresh prompt every time. At Gain, I have loaded the communications and historical data from all seven of my direct reports, across operations, technology, finance, and business development, into an agent I prompt daily. It surfaces where we are missing a target before a monthly or quarterly review would have caught it.
The technical setup is less complicated than it sounds. It comes down to connecting a document repository, a project management tool, and an AI system so they can work with each other. You can build it yourself with some research, or bring in someone who has done it before. The privacy concern that stops many firms from getting started is solvable too. You can build an agent that only analyzes your own documentation while still drawing on outside knowledge, without exposing anything confidential to anyone else.
The Habits Underneath All of This
None of this works without a baseline of discipline that has nothing to do with technology. I do not start my day on a screen. I meditate and read before anything else, and I work out four to five times a week. That routine is not separate from how Gain runs. It is what lets me show up with the judgment to make the calls above, on delegation, on risk, on where to spend my limited attention.
I get up every day wanting to work directly with attorneys, meet prospective clients, and build content like this. Those are the things I will not hand off. Everything else, I have learned to delegate, to people, and increasingly to the tools built to carry that load.
If you want the fuller conversation, I sat down with Steve Fretzin on the Be That Lawyer podcast to talk through all of this in more detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bw5oO0PXZtw