Chuck Newton has a great post today called, How to Build a Home Office Without Staff — Answer Lawyers. Chuck really nails it on the head with this one.
Chuck, like many of us who work out of our homes, had a firm at one time. And he explains,
This firm taught me the valuable lesson of fixed costs, and we had a lot of it. Money came in and money went out. When times were good, they were not that good because of our fixed costs. When times were bad they were horrible. Again, fixed costs was the culprit.
Chuck further mentions “that as you grow older you realize in your own practice that you do not have to own the market. You do not have to be king of your practice area.”
And in my opinion, you than come to realize that you don’t have to have the “ivory tower” office downtown right across the street from the courthouse. You don’t have to have the fancy reception area, big conference room with that fancy conference table. You realize you don’t have to have that huge staff with its huge overhead cost.
As Chuck states:
You come at a Third Wave practice gradually. You first begin to look at how to even out your cashflow to make life easier. This leads you to look into how to decrease overhead. It all leaves you asking “how do I bring home the money I deserve as oppose to working to support others”? And, finally this leaves you asking how you can do this and stop working away from home, and away from my family, 60 or 70 hours a week.
You come to realize you don’t need to spend all your time taking cases, just to make money to cover your overhead. I came to realize this when I was paying out more in wages to my staff than I was taking home myself. Bells started to ring and lights started to come on. I actually woke up one morning and decided, enough is enough. I closed the downtown office within a month of making the decision.
Most lawyers get in the mindset that they need help. The think they need an outside office, a secretary, a paralegal. They get these things and then they need more cases to pay for all of this. They find a way to bring in more cases and they cannot handle these cases. So they need more staff, larger offices, more lawyers and more overhead. This leads to a need for more cases. And then it snowballs. You feel on top of the World sometimes because you are building a firm, a sizeable operation, but what you are not doing is building a family, a comfortable living, personal time, or a larger salary. You find yourself working 90% of the time managing and working for the benefit of others.
And he is exactly right. You get in the mindset you do need the help. You can’t do it yourself. You have to have all your staff under your roof so you can make sure they are doing their job. Well, no more. With the technology available and the fact, even paralegals and legal assistants are wanting to have a life outside the firm setting, you don’t have to have that expensive downtown office.
Take advantage of the technology. Find yourself a good paralegal that wants to work at home too. And you will find yourself actually enjoying life again. You will find yourself spending more time at home with your spouse. And you will come to enjoy life and practicing of law again. I know that is what I did and that is what happened for me.
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