Remember, the journey to building a successful law firm is an ongoing process that requires continuous learning, adaptation, and a commitment to excellence.
Starting a business is like embarking on an adventurous expedition. It requires vision, perseverance, and the ability to adapt to changing landscapes. The challenge for legal professionals who venture into entrepreneurship is to provide excellent legal services and to grow and sustain their practice. For attorneys like myself, who have expanded their firm from a single location to nine fully-staffed offices across two states, distinguishing between these two realms has proven to be essential. This article explores the importance of focusing on improving business operations rather than getting entangled in the daily grind of servicing clients, drawing extensively from my experienced approach to running a successful legal enterprise.
The Shift from Daily Operations to Strategic Management
As an entrepreneur, your priority during the first year of business is simply surviving. That first year is usually the hardest for most business owners. As a founding attorney and business owner, you will be consumed with the day-to-day operations and servicing of clients. However, if your goal is to grow your business, you will need to shift your focus from being in the business to working on it.
The first step is to strategically place your team members into roles that will allow you to take a step back from working with clients so that you can focus on business management. Planning for the future growth of our business takes careful planning. As you’re able to take a step back from client work, you will be able to fill your days with managing your team, envisioning the future, and optimizing the efficiency of your business. Your role while working on the business is to ensure the firm’s output aligns with its goals while simultaneously charting a course for continued growth.
Collaborative Leadership and Strategic Planning
An effective leadership strategy is to have regular meetings with your leadership team. These should be collaborative brainstorming sessions where everyone pitches in ideas, rather than just an update. By collaborating with your team and allowing them to have input, they can help plan how to execute ideas, identify actionable items, and assign responsibilities to the right team members.
This approach keeps the firm innovative and adaptable to challenges. It also builds ownership and accountability among every team member, motivating them to pursue their goals with enthusiasm and commitment.
Embrace the Hive Mind to Build Collaborative Leadership
Fostering a culture of openness helps emphasize to team members that they are safe to share ideas without fear of judgment. Your role as the owner and leader is to encourage active listening and respectful dialogue. Encouraging cross-functional collaboration broadens problem-solving approaches by giving everyone a voice. As a leader, it’s important to remember that while you are the owner, you don’t know everything. Lean on more knowledgeable team members and then provide them with the resources and support they need to succeed.
Core Elements of Strategic Planning
There are six core elements of strategic planning:
- SWOT analysis,
- Vision, mission, and values,
- Goal setting,
- Strategic objectives,
- Action plans, and
- Resource allocation.
A SWOT analysis is a comprehensive evaluation of an organization’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. This type of analysis helps identify internal capabilities and external factors that influence the business.
Developing the vision, mission, and value statements for a business provides clearly defined statements that articulate the organization’s purpose, aspirations, and guiding principles. Setting specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound goals (SMART) should align with the overall vision and mission.
Once you have identified clear objectives to achieve your goals, and have developed a plan of action by outlining the specific steps required to implement your strategies, it’s time to determine what resources are needed. Resources might include things such as a budget, personnel, and technology. Provide your team with the resources they need to achieve their individual goals and the goals of the overall business will come together!
Coaching and Mentorship
As a business leader, I have approached my role more like a coach than a traditional manager. I have found that encouraging my team from the sidelines helps them grow and develop professionally. This mentorship style has created a nurturing environment where employees feel valued and supported.
Coaching and Mentorship are not one and the same, but both are extremely useful and these roles can be held by different leaders. Coaching is more task-oriented and involves structured training. Where mentorship is focused on work and life and tends to be more personal. In coaching, I typically utilize a trifecta approach. First I lead by example. Here I model the behavior or task so the trainee can observe and see it performed successfully. Secondly, written communication should be provided to the trainee on the process and I would have them take notes and document the process in their own words while allowing them to ask questions. Third, the trainee performs the task themselves from start to finish. Part of the training is learning that failure is not bad and that it leads to the discovery of where our understanding might have failed. Failure shows us what we need to work on. So I encourage trainees to do, fail, learn, and repeat.
By focusing on your team’s strengths and providing the necessary tools and guidance, a business leader can easily build a strong, cohesive unit that delivers exceptional results for clients. I know this firsthand, because this approach has enabled my firm to expand from one location to multiple offices across two states, each staffed with dedicated and skilled professionals.
The Importance of Change and Adaptability
One of my core beliefs as a business leader is the importance of change for adaptability and reinvigoration. Making small changes helps a business stay ahead in a competitive landscape and avoid stagnation. Staying in a comfort zone can hinder growth; embracing discomfort is sometimes necessary. Try to see change as an opportunity for improvement rather than a threat, trusting that stepping out of your comfort zone will lead to positive outcomes.
For example, at my firm, we believe that change is inevitable and preparing for it is key. Living in a space where change is good and stagnation is uncomfortable means that you’re mentally prepared for uncertainty. Change is scary for a lot of folks because it involves a certain amount of risk. There cannot be a reward without risk. Our clients and employees deserve the best outcome and the best work environment with tools that make their jobs easier. Technology is changing at a pace that none of us can keep up with. But this means there are a ton of tools available to us that we can utilize to work smarter and not harder. We have strengthened our firm by taking advantage of technological advances in Finance, HR, and Legal software.
Leveraging External Expertise
Seeking external expertise is incredibly valuable as a business owner. Joining coaching groups and consulting with those who have successfully faced similar challenges helps a business owner learn new strategies and build up a network of trusted experts. By tapping into their knowledge and experience, business owners can shorten their learning curve and avoid common pitfalls.
One important lesson that I’ve learned, for example, is to never wait for perfection. The perfect conditions may never happen, so take action, even if it means encountering some setbacks. This proactive mindset encourages impressive growth and success from the beginning.
Building a Thriving Legal Enterprise
By shifting focus from daily operations to strategic planning, cultivating a collaborative leadership style, and embracing change and external expertise, legal professionals can successfully navigate the complexities of entrepreneurship. By implementing these strategies, you can build a thriving legal enterprise that delivers exceptional client service while achieving sustained growth and profitability.
Remember, the journey to building a successful law firm is an ongoing process that requires continuous learning, adaptation, and a commitment to excellence.
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