I’m out of the office for a week.  A whole seven days.

I’ve been out of the office before but not while I’ve had the caseload I have now and not while I’ve had associates to manage.  Your law practice gets harder and harder to manage because the business and the firm is growing.  However, the trick is that you want your profits to grow exponentially, while your expenses grow linearly, and your work load to stay flat.  In order to achieve this, you need systems in place.

A solo practitioner is all hands on deck.  You do everything.  If you’re not running the business, it stops.  You are the operator and the engineer.  As your firm grows, that won’t be possible and it’s not a sustainable and scalable business model because you still only have 24 hours in a day and you do need time to eat and sleep.  Systems, ideally, should be in place so that it comes between you and the firm.

You build the Systems that run the Firm.

Using proper systems, you can be taken out of the picture but your firm should still be running because your systems are in control.  Systems needs to be cleaned and adjusted with time.  Your firm will grow and your systems will grow and change with it.  The engine that drives your firm needs to be so that if you dropped what you were doing today, someone else could come in and take over, without missing a heartbeat.

Do you have systems in place?  If you want to grow beyond a solo operation, now’s the time to start development.