Solo Practice University® » Work/Life

Taking Care of Clients and Baby

Rachel Rodgers — Wed, 02 May 2012 11:30:58 +0000

"Our bodies are well adapted to this state of affairs and respond appropriately when conditions deviate from their optimal state. This ability of an organism to maintain equilibrium (balance) by adjusting appropriately to the external environment is known as homeostasis. And there in lies the key to understanding balance. Balance is the taking of appropriate action when circumstances dictate so as to maintain equilibrium." – Stephen Cox, Pick the Brain

I have two babies. One is almost 2 years old. The other is 6 months. One is a virtual law office. The other is a smiley baby girl. Both come with much responsibility and joy (although, admittedly, my little girl is usually more fun than my VLO).

VLO + Baby = Wonderful but Crazy

Needless to say, life can get very messy when you're a stay at home parent and work from home lawyer . . . all at the same time. That being said, I always intended to be a mom that flitted around the world with my child. I pictured myself managing a career with a baby on my hip. Of course, its not quite as glamorous as it was in my pre-parental fantasy (the clothes are not as nice!) but it is pretty awesome.

So far I have taken my daughter to 5 business lunches, 2 business trips and 1 conference. I have found that toting around a cute baby can be a great way to connect with people. And somehow I manage to actually accomplish quite a bit of work each week, to boot. I am very lucky to have some clients who are also parent-entrepreneurs, so it can be a point of commonality.

Of course, it ain't all roses. I have been sleep deprived for so long that 5 hours of sleep feels like a good night's sleep at this point. There have also been times that I've had to make tough work versus baby decisions. For example, I had to bow out of being a presenter at LexThink.1 (formerly Ignite Law) and miss the ABA TechShow because my childcare plan did not work out.

That said, as tough as some days are (and trust me somedays are really killer!), everyday my heart overflows and I feel so grateful to have such an amazingly full life.

What Keeps Me From Pulling My Hair Out

If there is a baby and law office in your future, here are the three things that have prevented me from pulling my hair out lately:

1. A Balanced & Productive Day = Breaks + Eating + Napping + Movement + Actual Work. The hardest part of working and taking care of baby is being interrupted. Its difficult to be efficient when you are in your zone and baby suddenly needs a diaper change. After the diaper change, you've got to get back into your zone. This can go on all day. What works for me is to accept those breaks and use them as opportunities to eat, take a short walk or even a cat nap. Despite the frequent breaks, I keep getting the same amount of work done by the end of each week (much to my surprise, at first). When you're a parent with so much to manage, you can become extremely productive at times because you know there may not be another opportunity for a while. And as a fellow lawyer-mom told me recently, you do start to get used to switching between mom and lawyer all day.

2. Delegation For The Win! I have a virtual paralegal who is amazing and really helps keep work moving along in my practice. I also have a fantastic virtual assistant to whom I delegate administrative tasks and some of my marketing and technical needs. I haven't hired anyone to help me with childcare yet but I plan to in the near future (like next week!). Even if you feel you don't have much money for delegating, sometimes you can work out a trade of services or payment terms (like being billed at the end of the month after you've been paid by your clients) that don't create cash flow nightmares. Even delegating just one or two activities can make a big difference. Delegation is my sanity saver!

3. Good Enough is the New Perfect. When my daughter was just a few weeks old, I listened to Susan Cartier-Liebel's audio interview of Holle S. Temple, the author of Good Enough Is The New Perfect: Finding Happiness and Success in Modern Motherhood. Thank God I did! This provided me with some perspective and started me down the path of letting go of my vision of perfect parenting perfectly balanced with a perfect career (that's a lot of perfect!). While it was hard to accept that making organic baby food from scratch everyday was SO not gonna happen, it was also liberating. Changing my mindset has given me the freedom to just deal with life as it comes and be okay with things not going according to plan (most of the time). At the end of the day if baby is well taken care of and clients are well taken care of, that's one for the win column despite what else remains undone (like the pile of dishes currently in the sink).

Taking care of a baby and running a law practice is not for the faint of heart (or the perfectionist) but it is definitely doable and can make for a wonderfully full life. I recommend embracing flexibility, having a good sense of humor and a little wine (after the children and the clients are asleep, of course).

Written by Rachel Rodgers

How to Dabble in Delegating

Rachel Rodgers — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 12:19:29 +0000

During my college years, I spent a month living in Nigeria. My Nigerian host family consisted of a mom, dad, four daughters, one son and one son-in-law. That is a whole heck of a lot of people to share tasks with. For example, meals were a coordinated ballet and everyone played a role. Two of the daughters were tasked with going to the market to buy the meat, the son's job was to escort his sisters to the market and help carry the packages. The eldest daughters would prepare most of the meal and mom would coordinate all of the these players and tasks. Dad was the provider. And son-in-law would bake desserts.

In my little family of three there are far too many tasks that need to be done and not enough people to do them (of course, one of us is only six weeks old so she doesn't have too many chores yet). The same is true for my practice, there are far too many tasks for little 'ol me. Especially since that six week old I mentioned, takes up a lot of my time.

Enter Delegation (or The Fear of Delegation)

If regular folks realize the need to farm out bits and pieces of their random household chores, why don't more solos (especially new and young solos) realize their need to delegate business tasks? The reason is we're scared. Sure, we're scared of not having complete control and scared that they'll do it wrong. But most of all we're scared we can't afford it and scared to increase our overhead.

Unfortunately, we usually need to start delegating just before we are financially comfortable doing so.

Thanks to the rise of virtual assistants and virtual paralegals, there are easy ways to start dabbling in delegation without taking the risk of hiring a full-time employee.

Dabbling in Delegation

Just before hitting the one year mark, I realized that I could not keep working like I was without making myself miserable. Plus, I had a baby on the way, and knew things would have to change once my daughter was born. (Did I mention, that said daughter arrived over 2 weeks early leaving many of my maternity leave plans not quite set just yet?). In addition, there are just some things I don't like doing or that I'm not very good at. Sure, I can enter all of my business transactions into QuickBooks but do I want to? Hell no!

Of course, I also wasn't making as much money as I had hoped I would before starting to hire people. There was a number in my head that I was supposed to reach before having the luxury of an assistant or paralegal. Due to my need to sleep and the fact that I have a finite amount of productive working hours in me each day, I knew I wasn't going to make it to that number.

Burn out is very real. We've all heard horror stories of lawyers winding up in the ER or worse, due to the health complications that occur when you are stressed out and overworked. More likely though, being overworked will sap the joy out of running your practice and you'll stop having the energy or desire to keep doing it. I didn't want that to be me.

So here is how I started to dabble in delegating:

1. Get a referral! I had no idea what exactly I needed to delegate or who I needed to delegate to. So I asked my mastermind group for referrals. I got a list of highly recommended virtual assistants that friends of mine worked with and loved. I set up a consultation with each of them.

2. Choose one time consuming task to outsource. During the first consultation, I told the VA about my practice and asked what types of things I could potentially outsource. She gave me great ideas and helped me realize that there were quite a few administrative tasks that I took a really long time to do because they just weren't my strengths or because I was learning as I went. One of which was management and set up of my mailing list. It took me a long time to set up and it was pretty poorly executed. So I decided that moving my mailing list over to an email marketing service and setting up well-designed newsletter templates would be the first task.

3. Purchase a super small block of time for the first task. I purchased a 5 hour block of time for a few hundred dollars with no strings attached. We both understood that she would handle the first set of tasks and then we would decide whether we were a good fit. If we did enjoy working together, we would work out terms for going forward. Don't be afraid to ask for terms that will fit your business. If you only want to purchase a few hours per month for the first month or two, just ask.

4. Set up a collaboration system. That sounds more complicated than it is. I just set up a free Basecamp account and gave my VA access, however you can choose any secure collaboration service you like. This service made it really easy to set up to-do lists with deadlines, share documents and passwords and send each other messages.

5. Set clear expectations and provide honest feedback. Be sure to provide your VA with a deadline and clear instructions and expectations. I learned from my Nigerian host family that everyone is happier and things run smoothly when each person understands their role. The relationship only helps your business if everybody is clear on what the expectations are. After the first set of tasks is complete, schedule a quick call with your VA to determine how it went. Be clear on what went well and what could be better. Keep in mind that there is a learning curve in the first set of tasks because no one knows your business like you do.

6. Jump for joy! Then rinse and repeat. When you have been hustling hard for many moons, having someone knock out a task for you AND do it well (or better than you would have) will put a big cheesy grin on your face. You will be addicted and you will (eventually) hire someone else. After a few months of working with my stupendously awesome VA, a fellow lawyer referred a virtual paralegal to me. The first project she worked on was done quickly and efficiently and took a whole lotta work off my plate.

Just Do It!

Bottom line: I knew my practice could only grow so much if I didn't start delegating. Having help is slowly but surely increasing my quality of life and growing my practice. I've experienced growth that is directly related to the tasks my team helped me with. Plus, like I learned from my Nigerian host family, working with others brings a sense of community and makes work so much more enjoyable.

Written by Rachel Rodgers

How Long To Work? How Much To Earn? This is a Solo's Real Choice.

Susan Cartier Liebel — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 10:29:47 +0000

This post came to me after I played Northwestern Mutual's Longevity Game. When you work for another, your longevity at a job is at the whim of that 'other.' In a day and age when:

social security is obviously very iffy,
real estate no longer suggested as a vehicle to fund retirement,
personal savings rate is the lowest since before the great depression,
pensions are subject to corporate dishonesty and in this economy being revamped in the employer's favor,
jobs are being eliminated as corporations (and law firms) go overseas in their quest for global domination (not to mention the 10,000 law jobs eliminated in 2009 alone)

we have to think about how long we are going to be gracing this still green earth and how productive we want to be while we are here. Equally important, how long we work is often one of the truest choices of the solo practitioner, entrepreneur. We determine our time table for retirement or not; we determine our professional, emotional, social and financial 'wealth' in this lifetime.

I've recently consulted women who are just embarking on solo practitioner entrepreneurship who have hit the 'new thirty,' (what we have traditionally called 'fifty.') One just got her J.D. They are intellectually vibrant, stimulating active women who see an open world of business opportunity as their own boss. They are being challenged with determining how long they want to work while just starting their new solo practice or business. They are being challenged with life-style considerations, being sole providers for themselves and calculating the economic landscape of their future and actually, wonderfully, thinking in terms of working the next twenty to thirty years. Their mindset is 'professionally I am thirty. Therefore, I have to project out another thirty – forty years.' That may seem folly to some, but is it really? Not one consultation even mentioned traditional retirement in the next fifteen years at the tender age of sixty-five.

Other women I know have mapped out working in some incarnation for the rest of their lives…by choice. It goes to show you how far our society has come when thinking about retirement, how women think about their obligation to provide for themselves, and the latest twist on the 'golden years.'

So, playing this longevity game can be interesting as it gives you the all important insight into the game insurance companies have been playing. Although clearly not individualized for you and your unique circumstances it gives some interesting information.

If you are theoretically going to be living into your nineties, how far out would you calculate your good 'working years?" How long do you want to enjoy and profit from your career? Because we are living longer and life is considerably more expensive, how far out should you be planning when determining the future of your business?

Your financial and professional life and health are up to you. This remains, in my opinion, the ultimate choice when one becomes a solo practitioner. How long to work, how much to earn.

Written by Susan Cartier Liebel

Don't Let Starting a Solo Practice Endanger Your Health

Susan Cartier Liebel — Wed, 20 May 2009 09:00:54 +0000

I was recently reading an article on how those who are facing financial 'tightness' are opting to forgo taking care of themselves.

How We're Cutting Back

32% skipped some preventive care

10% stopped or diminished their use of medicines for chronic conditions

42% say they'll trim health-related expenses in the next six months

Source: American Heart Association

Doing Less in Tough Times

The slumping economy has hurt more than people's bank accounts. A new American Heart Association survey says their health care is also suffering

57% say that the economy has affected their ability to take care of their health

29% are purchasing less fresh fruit, vegetables and other perishable items due to financial concerns

18% have skipped a routine health procedure, such as a mammogram or an annual physical

13% have skipped their flu shot

One of the primary reasons people opt to be employed versus self-employed is health care for themselves and their families. So, whether you are opting for solo practice or being forced into solo practice because there are no jobs is frightening from the health care perspective.

"People under financial stress don't take care of themselves as well." Dr. Timothy Gardner, President of the AHA.

How do you make the right financial choices? And do they include health care? The answer is easy. You MUST take care of yourself and with belt tightening you can still make wise choices for your health.

Prevention MUST be a priority. The article clearly says that U.S. health care needs to shift its focus away from treating illnesses and problems and move toward prevention instead.

I don't have the answers to the U.S. health care situation in this country. But I do know that a healthy mind and body helps you cope with life's stresses better than a mind and body which has been neglected. And when you are going through the ups and downs of starting your own business and feel the additional stress of being an entrepreneur it is going to make your job that much harder if you have neglected yourself.

The average health insurance premium zoomed up more than 95% from 2000 to 2008. At the same time, the number of ininsured Americans has been steadily climbing. As the recession continues, many families are facing tough choices between health care and other necessary household expenses. Even people with health insurance may not want to pay the deductible or co-pay that doctors' visits require.

5 Ways to Lower Medical Costs (summarized from Emily Listfield)

1. Strike a deal with your doctor while you are opening your solo practice. If you are a regular patient and are a little tight, don't be embarrassed to ask your doctor to forgo a co-pay until things get better for you or to even treat you without payment until such time as things get better. The worse that can happen, you still get some type of break or agree to make it up when you are on your financial feet.

2. Visit a Clinic There are more than 7000 community health centers across the country that offer comprehensive medical care ranging from check-ups, immunizations and tests to sick visits. These free standing clinics charge their patients according to a sliding scale and will treat people who don't have insurance. Many university teaching hospitals also operate clinics that run on a pay-what-you-can basis. It is much smarter to utilize one of these clinics then an emergency room. Do the same with your dental needs by going to a dental school where you can save up to 50% on cleanings, fillings and even crowns in exchange for helping dental students learn under the careful supervision of the faculty.

3. Change the frequency of your visits if medically OK. If you are getting on-going treatments, doctors and hospitals will negotiate with you without compromising your care.

4. Get free tests and screenings. Many drugstore chains and supermarkets offer free blood-pressure screenings. Hospitals and clinics frequently offer free screenings for various illnesses such as skin cancer, kidney disease, and diabetes.

5. Save on Medication. Pharmaceutical companies have been known to cut the costs of medications for those in trouble financially. Warehouses such as Walmart and Costco provide low cost flu shots.

The bottom line is, life will be different as will your approach to health care but do not compromise your health or you will not be able to sustain your business which requires you to be in good shape both mentally and physically.

A couple of my tips:

Spend the money on healthy food. It's smarter to spend a little more on high quality healthy food then use it for medical co-pays.
Walk 30 minutes a day. It clears your head. Is good for you and it's free

What tips do you have to stay in good mental and physical health while starting your solo practice?

Written by Susan Cartier Liebel

Will Women Rule Business in the Next Decade?

Susan Cartier Liebel — Mon, 18 May 2009 02:21:00 +0000

There is a powerful and thought-provoking article in the May 25th edition of Time Magazine which should be read called Women Will Rule Business. Not only should women read it and reflect upon it when thinking about their own career choices but also think about it in terms of how businesses will operate in general.

Women are also less competitive, in a good way. They're consensus builders, conciliators and collaborators, and they employ what is called a transformational leadership style — heavily engaged, motivational, extremely well suited for the emerging, less hierarchical workplace. Indeed, when the Chartered Management Institute in the U.K. looked ahead to 2018, it saw a work world that will be more fluid and more virtual, where the demand for female management skills will be stronger than ever. Women, CMI predicts, will move rapidly up the chain of command, and their emotional-intelligence skills may become ever more essential.

That trend will accelerate with the looming talent shortage. The Employment Policy Foundation estimated that within the next decade there would be a 6 million – person gap between the number of college graduates and the number of college-educated workers needed to cover job growth. And who receives the majority of college and advanced degrees? Women. They also control 83% of all consumer purchases, including consumer electronics, health care and cars. Forward-looking companies understand they need women to figure out how to market to women.

It begs the question, "Is now the perfect time to go solo?"

When I read this article is was chock-full of undeniable statistics. It also provides a guide post for the future of business and how it will operate regardless of gender.

Please read and let me know your thoughts.

Written by Susan Cartier Liebel

"Tip of the Week" – You Must Understand What Balance Is Before You Can Attain It

Susan Cartier Liebel — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 12:00:33 +0000

As solos we are always hearing those who go solo do so to achieve 'balance' in their lives. Yet, what is balance really? Some describe it as a different percentage distribution between personal fulfillment and work fulfillment then one gets while working for another as if somehow when we work for another we are not permitted to give our family or personal relationships 'priority' like we do when we work for ourselves. But it is a concept which is both slippery and elusive and ever-changing and I think we need to get out of the work/life balance conundrum and go back to nature to understand what balance really is. Only then can we hope to achieve it.

A recent piece from Pick the Brain I think states the concept of balance very well:

Life really is one thing after another. The physical environment we
each live in is in constant streaming flux. Physically when it’s cold
we shiver to bring our body temperature up. When it’s hot we sweat to
bring our body temperature down. As living organisms we live in a
constantly changing environment. Our bodies are well adapted to this
state of affairs and respond appropriately when conditions deviate from
their optimal state. This ability of an organism to maintain
equilibrium (balance) by adjusting appropriately to the external
environment is known as homeostasis.

And there in lies the key to understanding balance. Balance is the
taking of appropriate action when circumstances dictate so as to
maintain equilibrium. It is said that the great achievement of the
sages of old was the achievement of great balance as human beings. How
did they achieve great balance? In the present moment, when things
would come up, they would respond accordingly.

“There is no secret to balance. You just have to feel the waves.” – Frank Herbert

*******

Finding a sense of balance and harmony at some point in any aspect of
life will soon turn to disharmony and loss of balance if you try to
hold on and freeze that moment forever. Such action is futile……

Being able to maintain equilibrium in an ever changing world IS key to a satisfying professional life. For the solo it is a necessity because of the nature of solo practice which has tremendous ups and downs. Your ability to maintain your balance through these ups and downs is critical. And your ability to do so allows you to maintain 'balance' between your personal and professional life, too…that which you originally were trying to achieve by going solo.

How do you respond to the 'waves' in your life?

Written by Susan Cartier Liebel