#149 The Powerful Personal Foundations I've Built My Business On
If you've been listening for a while, you'll know that I have founded my business on an ethos of empowerment, which is underpinned by doing law differently. This is something I talk about and put into practice every day when working with my clients.
Today I want to share the powerful personal foundations that I’ve built my business on which allow me to deliver valuable and effective legal services and empower my clients, setting them up for long-term success.
Foundation 1: Connection-First Client-Centric Approach
A connection-first and client-centric approach means delivering for my clients in a way that serves them and empowers them to achieve long-term sustainable success in their business. I take the time to get to know my clients, understand their pain points, and tailor my solutions to fit their existing frameworks and processes. By taking this approach, I set myself apart from other lawyers and ensure that I am serving my purpose of authentic soul-led work.
Foundation 2: Confidence with Fees
The second foundation is transparency with fees. I believe in real transparency around fees and doing away with the traditional time-costing method. Instead, I provide clear quotes and fee estimates, breaking down the individual fees and offering discounted package rates. By being transparent and confident in my pricing, I ensure that my clients know what they are paying for and feel supported throughout the process.
Foundation 3: Preventative Approach
The third foundation is a preventative approach. Having spent years in litigation and dispute resolution, I understand the value of prevention over cure. I work with business owners to set themselves up in a way that avoids unnecessary legal troubles and protects what they are building. By taking a preventative approach, I deliver peace of mind and a calm nervous system to my clients, allowing them to focus on long-term sustainable success.
Foundation 4: Collaboration with Clients
The final foundation is collaboration with clients. I believe in a collaborative style of working, where I take the time to understand my clients' businesses and their goals. By working alongside my clients, I can provide tailored advice and develop legal documents, processes, and systems that truly meet their needs. I do not believe in cutting corners or using templates, as every business is unique and deserves personalised attention.
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Tracey: [00:00:00] Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the rise up in business podcast.
If you've been following along for a while, you'll know that I've founded my business with an empower ethos underpinned by doing law differently.
I talk about doing law differently. I embody doing law differently.
It's something that is ingrained in me, and it's something that we deliver on every day for our clients.
I want to share all about that in today's episode of the podcast.
I want to share with you the powerful personal foundations that I've built this business on, which all relates to the concept of doing law differently.
I want to take some time to step you through what that means to me,
and why I have founded my business this way and how it is that we operate on a daily basis on these personal foundations that are so important.
the first foundation that I've built this business on is a connection first client centric approach.
So to me a client centric approach means delivering for my clients in a way that serves them and supporting them in a way That I know empowers them to achieve long term sustainable success in their business.
If you've been following along for a while, then you'd have heard me talk about the earlier part of my career.
I talk about that a lot on the podcast and I share a lot about that over on social media. If you're not following us on Instagram, please do very active there in sharing.
So, you know, that's the earlier part of my career was spent in litigation and dispute resolution.
And what that meant was for more than [00:02:00] 12 years, I was acting for business owners who were either suing or being sued or embroiled in some sort of other dispute, most of the time about money, other things too, and there was a cost to that.
There was an emotional cost, a time cost and financial cost, and the thing is most of what I saw during all of those years could have been avoided.
If business owners had have known how to better protect themselves, how to position themselves, if they hadn't known what they didn't know.
We all know the saying, you don't know what you don't know, and it couldn't be truer than what I saw in those 12 plus years of my career.
So being client centric and connection first means taking the time to get to know my clients, having the time to spend asking the questions and understanding what's important to them and what their pain points are and how do they operate and what are their processes and systems.
So, if I design some documents for you, if I draft your contracts and design legals that really work, I need to make sure they're going to be integrated into your existing frameworks, into your existing processes and systems, or else what's the point? And I like to make sure that the approach I take is holistic so that when I understand what's important to the business and the business owner.
I can create something that's going to work for them, and I can meet those expectations around what's important.
I provide the advice full and frank, I don't mix my words, all of that, but we want to achieve a result that my clients are really happy with and feel really confident with.
That's all a part of my connection first client centric approach to business.
None of this is about billable hours, time costing, financial metrics, make sure we bill this many hours a day. It's not that.
I've actually discarded that approach completely in this business. I don't think it serves clients and to be perfectly honest. I don't think it serves the individuals in the business either, by taking a connection first client centric approach.
not only does it set me apart from the way [00:04:00] so many other lawyers do business. It is my soul's work. And it means that I'm serving my purpose through this business of being able to serve more clients in an authentic soul led way, and that for me is really, really important.
The second powerful personal foundation I've built this business on is confidence with fees. This means real transparency around fees. As I mentioned a moment ago, it means doing away with the six minute increment time costing. How many billable hours have you done this day or this week? It means having confidence in the fee structure that we have and being really transparent about it.
And if you haven't had an experience with a lawyer. I'm sure you've heard of one, which goes something like this. Sure, I can help you. Yes, we do that all the time. I'm an expert. Yes, this is roughly what your fees will be, but oh gosh, I can't fix that. I won't give you a fixed fee estimate. We time cost. So yeah, there's a lot of variables.
So it just depends on what's needed. So, whilst should probably be around this, I can't tell you for sure, you'll find out at the end. We time cost and that approach, let me say, has its place and litigation is where there is a place for that because you don't know what's coming. You don't know what the other side are going to do.
You need to be reactive largely in terms of how things might play out. So there is a place for that approach. And I understand and respect that approach in certain circumstances. But in my view, the circumstances that call for that billing approach are very limited. They're very narrow. The type of work I do in drafting contracts and providing support and advice is not.
What calls for that type of approach, what does call for the type of approach that I take is having confidence in not only my ability and backing myself because I've been doing this long enough to know what this is going to take, how this is going to go, what's going to be required, but the being client centric clients want to know how much am I going to pay.
And why am I paying that much? [00:06:00] And how is that derived? And what are your other fees? And where does it sit comparatively? And we offer packages for lots of clients. So the majority of the time clients will come along and they'll need a series of things. And so if I can sit down. And focus on your business and my heads in your business, it's going to be more time effective and therefore it's more cost effective.
And that should be passed on to the client. So I'll always break down. This is what the individual fees are. But if we're going to package it, it means that I'm going to sit down all at once. Therefore, the package, which is always a discounted rate, let's be honest, is this much and clients can see it and understand it and they know what they're paying.
And then the difference is I'm prepared to back myself and say to the client, I will stick to this. I will honour this for you. So there's full transparency and I'm confident in my pricing. That's a really powerful personal foundation for me because I think in fairness, clients have a right to know what it is they'll be paying.
And if I'm as good as I say I am in my particular area of expertise, then I should know enough to know how much it's going to cost them.
Clear quotes or clear fee estimates are really important to me in this business, and I know how much that's appreciated and respected by clients.
The third powerful personal foundation I've built my business on is a preventative approach.
You've probably heard me say so many times in business, prevention is better than cure. And that represents my approach to this business.
So, like I said, a moment ago, the earlier part of my career was spent in litigation and dispute resolution when things have gone wrong.
So I've taken all of that and flipped it in establishing this preventative approach in business so that I can work with business owners to set themselves up so they can avoid being in the position that my clients were in, in that earlier part of my career.
That to me is really powerful.
It has such impact because I know from personal experience, what can go wrong and honestly, when it comes to what can go wrong in business, hand on heart, I don't think there's anything I haven't seen. [00:08:00]
I use that now to support my clients and educate and empower them to set themselves up in a way where they're protecting what they're building and they're allowing the way forward for long term sustainable success in their business.
It delivers peace of mind, and like I've said, more than once on here, peace of mind and a calm nervous system to me is sexy as hell.
It's really important. And I know it's important to so many business owners. That preventative approach has so much value and the value isn't what you pay me.
The value is the value to you to not have sleepless nights, to not have that sinking stomach feeling when something's going wrong and you think, Oh, I just don't know what to do about this. This is going to come back to bite me. I don't know a cloud hanging over your head. So a prevention is better than cure approach in business is priceless.
And that's why I founded my business in the way that I did so that we can offer that support to business owners now, rather than digging them out of a big black smoking hole later, when something's gone terribly wrong and there's already been significant emotional, mental, and sometimes physical cost to the situation that they find themselves in.
Financial cost goes without saying, but the value that can be delivered from preventing that, that's priceless!
The fourth and final powerful personal foundation that I want to share with you on how I built my business is a collaboration with clients.
When I say collaboration with clients, what I mean is as a part of serving clients and being a client centric business, it means no cutting corners.
So it means taking the time to collaborate with my client, to understand them and their business and what they want to achieve and what their pain points are so that I can give the advice that they need to develop for them the documents, the processes and systems that I know that they [00:10:00] need, and that I know work, to set them up for long term sustainable success.
So it's a collaborative approach I take when working with clients in their business to reduce their risk. We want to reduce their risk. We want to protect what they're building. And I can only do that in a collaborative style. I can't do that if the client says, I don't want to talk to you. I don't have the time. I'm not interested. They want tick & flick.
There are lawyers out there for that. It is not me. It is not me. It is not this business. And I say that very openly and frequently. I'm not the lawyer for everybody. I want to talk to you.
I offer high touch point service. I make sure I understand before I start drafting away and I make sure by the end of the project that we're working on, that you understand what it is we've done together and why, and you're really confident going forward and I can only achieve that through a collaborative style.
This means no templates. Said it before, say it again, DIYs for Bunnings. Not for your legals. Legal documents are a fundamental part of your risk mitigation strategy in business. They are critical in setting you up for long term success and to avoid you becoming one of those clients that I acted for earlier in my litigation career.
We don't want that so we don't use templates. You shouldn't use them either. When it comes to your legal documents, they deserve the time and respect that is attached to something so important.
Every business is different and that's why I like to take the time to get to know the business owner and the business so I can create what's actually needed. It's not tick and flick. It's not tick a box. And I know that there's lawyers out there that practice very differently and horses for courses.
This is not a podcast episode where I'm judging. This is a podcast episode where I'm sharing with you the powerful personal foundations that I've built this business on. So I don't deliver clients a document at the end of our process together and say, there you go good luck. Far from it.
We work together, we collaborate, we converse, we have touch points. I explain, I ask questions, you ask questions, I provide answers, I edit, [00:12:00] I revise. There's no limit on the number of edits and revisions you get with your documents, because if I'm doing my job properly, there won't be that many.
So all of this is centered around that client centric, connection first approach. The focus on prevention being better than cure. And the desire that I have to collaborate with my clients so that I can really understand what's going to best serve them. And so that I can then work with them to explain what it is that we're doing and why, so that clients can go on their way with confidence and peace of mind, knowing that they are protected and that they've got someone in their corner to call on if they need it.
I very rarely work with clients as a one off, it just doesn't seem to work that way, which I'm eternally grateful for. I have immense gratitude for clients that I have relationships with that keep coming back to ask the questions.
“Hey, Tracy, a client's asked me this, how do I answer it?”
Or “now I need this”
Or “I'm actually thinking about doing that. Can you help?”
“Can we bounce this idea” or a whole range of things, but it's collaboration and that's to me where the magic happens.
So that's what I wanted to share with you in this episode. I hope that you have enjoyed listening along to me, sharing with you the powerful personal foundations I've built my business on to recap. They are connection first client centric approach, confidence with my fees. Very much a preventative focus, prevention is better than cure, and fourth, the collaboration with clients is just so important to me.
If you don't follow along on Instagram yet, please take a moment to follow. The handle is @TMSolicitor. I share so much on there, just like what I'm sharing here with you now. I share so much information and insights and value and I answer questions and there's always a lot going on. So I would love it if you followed along.
If you have anything you want to ask, if you have anything you want to run by me or anything that you think we should be working together on in your business, please reach out via the website, booking a time for a free chat, the links in the show notes, and you'll find it on the website. I'm always happy to hear from you and I'm always happy to help [00:14:00] as always.
Thanks so much for listening. I'll catch you next time.
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