Ep 3: Mid-Journey Checklist – Business Basics for a Balanced Life

Alright, welcome back to the podcast. My name is Doug Sandler from Turnkey Productions. Now this is the episode number three, the Mid-Journey Checklist, Business Basics for a Balanced Life. Boy, there's a lot of alliteration in that. So you've started your business, you've made some money, and now your work-life balance is about as stable as a wobbly table in a bad diner.

I know that one, I'm sure you do too, Ron. Don't worry though, you're not alone. Today, Ron Boxdaller, he's here to walk us through the Mid-Journey Checklist. That's the part that we figure out how to actually run a business without working 24/7 or answering emails from the beach like a maniac. Ron, welcome back to the podcast.

Tell us the first thing we should stop doing immediately. You know, Doug, starting that business is like you're running down that hill and the snowball's right behind you and you're looking back and it's getting bigger and bigger and bigger and next thing you know, you're part of that snowball. And it happens so fast, you don't know what happened and now you're caught up and you can't stop yourself. I think the first thing I talk about is, you know, start your business with the end in mind. Is it the Alice in Wonderland?

Is it Lewis Carroll? I can't remember who actually said originally originated this but if you don't know exactly where you're going, how you know when you get there and isn't being happy all about knowing where you're going and enjoying getting on that journey to go there. So we start our businesses and I've got a lot of friends that have started businesses and they just get caught up and next thing you know, they're going "I don't know why I did this". And maybe it'd be easier, you know, the grass is greener on the other side if I just dropped this business, get rid of it and get a job. And that's what you – you started your business because you didn't like that.

So don't quit going back and forth. Let's just organize where you're at right now. So let's, you know, write down your goals. I think we kind of talk about it in the book, I'm getting ahead of I think maybe getting ahead of your questioning but, you know, understand where you want to go and then back it up and write down, you know, why you started your business and that's – I think that's huge. What's the key?

If you had to come up with a key, what would be the key to running a business without the business running you? Because I think that as entrepreneurs, so many people early on in the game, the business takes over everything. Everything is responded to by I got to check my schedule to see where I am with my business right now. So how do you let your – how do you run the business without it running you? You know, for me, it was sitting down and, you know, I sat with my business and I created my business plan.

I knew where I wanted to go with my business, so I put – and I put a lot of time into doing that. Then I sat down and I sat down with my family and, you know, my wife and we said, "Okay, what do we want to do over the next five years? What do we want to accomplish?" And that had to do with tying together, what are we going to be doing? And so I budgeted that out also and then I put equal importance on both of them, which – wow, from a guy that was a workaholic and I had no problem working for 20 hours, but then there's really no time left to spend with your family. So that second part, which was sitting down with my family and then, you know, thinking to myself going, "How am I going to, you know, get this business off the ground, but still find time to spend with my wife and not have a negative impact on my relationship?" I think there's such a level of maturity that's involved with actually having a mature conversation with your family, your significant other spouse, partner, whoever it is that's in your life and actually having that.

I'm curious how you managed to manage and align something that would fit your lifestyle rather than your business designing your lifestyle. You design your lifestyle with your business in mind, but not because of your business. So when we started Amado, the business I currently run, we didn't know what it was going to be, so we didn't know what it was going to look like when we first started and of course, as you know, 23 years of running a company, it has a lot of iterations and it changes with the world as it changes. So figuring all that out was like a key component. But as we were doing that, we had some key things.

We outsourced key components of what we were doing, that was very important to us. So there's certain things you could bring in house and do and there's certain things that you're not an expert at, so just outsource those. So I was very good at outsourcing and also when I did hire people, I delegated and I let them do their job versus me, you know, the whole idea of hiring someone is so you can save time and not have to do those things. So I was never caught up and I'm going to – I know more than anyone. I mean, first of all, because I don't.

But even if I thought I did, I didn't want to take my time up. So I was very conscious about delegating and giving people the authority to make decisions. It's funny in my company, I would say it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission. So go ahead and make a mistake, no one will get in trouble. But we'll talk about it was wrong and then you just won't do it again and I'm good with that.

Now I'm not so good if you don't make decisions and you're calling me all the time. You probably won't last very long on my company because that's not why I hired you. So I was deliberate. So I think you have to be deliberate of what you want to do and then don't waste your time on things that you don't have to do. Let's talk about for just a second the dollars and cents of owning your own business as an entrepreneur as so many that are in our listening community right now are probably doing.

What's more important, revenue growth? So the growth of your business or cash flow management, you know, without both of those, I think you're in a challenging spot. But what is there a priority that you would place on one of those over the other? Absolutely. Cash is king.

We can have all the revenue in the world, but create a revenue model where you're collecting your cash, preferably when you're performing your services, so you're not waiting for people to pay you. You know, some businesses, I realize you can't do that. And I know at some point in time, we have certain circumstances where we don't get paid right away. But no one wants to spend the time chasing the revenue dollar you've already earned. So find a way to accelerate your payments so you can maintain your cash flow.

You have to have cash flow. You can have all the revenue in the world and you're out of business. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't really matter how much money you make.

It's how much you're able to keep. Absolutely. Huge top line, but if the bottom line is in the negative, that means you didn't do a good job of managing the cash flow that's coming in the door or you don't have the cash flow set up properly or your margin set up properly. I would tell you, Doug, so we work with primarily law firms in my business and I can't tell you how many times I've talked to attorneys running their own business and they're like, "Look, I got this $350,000 in collections and as soon as I get that, I'm going to pay you." And I say, "Well, you have a whole different issue. Like I'm not your biggest issue.

Your issue is how you're running your business. You need to change your model or enforce your collections because doing the work for someone and not getting paid, why do the work?" Right. Right. It makes no sense. So would that be one of the biggest mistakes that you think that some business owners have when it comes to handling finances?

Is not understanding the importance of cash flow or is there something else? Oh, boy. I think we all make a lot of mistakes running a business. I think cash flow is one of them and it kind of depends on your model. So, if we're talking about law firms, it's I think organization and structure is probably – you kind of back it all up to not having that organization, not having an operating system in place and so that leads to like the result of not having that operating system as cash flow issues, which leads to stress, which leads to an unbalanced life.

I mean, kind of look at it, if you don't have a well functioning, well fine-tuned machine and operating system within your business, you're going to be stressed a lot and if you're going home at 6, 7 o'clock at night but you're stressed, it don't matter how many hours you plan to spend with your family. If you're stressed out about business, you're really not able to give them your full attention. So you want to alleviate that. So I would probably go back even a step before cash flow and say the real issue is not having an operating system in place that's effective. Well, as you are growing your business, you're bringing on new clients.

As you're bringing on new clients, you create a whole other set of issues with schedule management and making sure that that system and your system is in place and running smoothly. How do you stay connected with clients, especially as you're growing and you want to service them? How do you do that without letting that take over your life, especially from your personal life? Because whenever the phone would ring early on as a business owner, I remember you could have been 8 o'clock at night, 10 o'clock at night, I needed it. I would be in a movie theater, my phone would ring and I'd have to walk out to take the call.

How do you eliminate that from someone in his system? I think quite often that's a personal issue in our own heads, that if I don't pick up that call, I'm never going to, I'm going to lose that business. So you don't want to put yourself in that position of desperation, but you also got to control your life and you're doing no one a favor when you're having to pick up every call that comes in at the movie theater at 8 o'clock at night, you're not helping them, you're not helping the person you're with, you're not helping yourself for sure. So why do it? You know, put processes in place that that phone call that's coming in at 8 o'clock at night while you're at the movie theater is going to go somewhere that were answered by someone or go into a voicemail and then follow up with them in your appropriate times.

Schedule times to call people back, to take messages, they'll wait, people will be there for you if as long as you're communicating, somehow communicating to them that, you know, I'm out of the office, I'll reach out to you at 8 o'clock the next morning. Don't be afraid that you're going to lose a client because you're not. I remember early on when again that 8 o'clock phone call would come in or I'd be in the movie theater or wherever I was and, you know, returning that phone call, you're training your clients that they can reach you at any time and you will give them any answer, which leads me really to the point of how do you learn to effectively delegate some of those responsibilities? I'm not talking about the early on business owner because sometimes they're the only ones that are doing that that role. But as you progress and you mature in your business, you've got to learn to delegate.

What key strategies are there to learn effective delegation? It's like sink or swim. When it comes to delegate, which may be, I don't know, maybe the number one or number two issue that I see attorneys experience is they can't delegate, they really struggle with delegation and maybe this is the difference between the successful attorney and the ones that are really struggling to get by because they think they have to do everything and to me, delegation, it comes down to interview the right people and then hire them either as an outside resource, maybe a fractional support person or a permanent employee. If you feel you've got the right person, let them sink or swim. They're not going to sink your business if they make a mistake but they will change your business and your life if you let them run with what you hired them for.

So take a risk, take a chance and let them do the job you hired them for and step away. And don't be – you're going to be tempted but don't be looking over the shoulder all the time and don't be checking everything they do. Have weekly get-togethers and then you can review together what they're doing and that's how you develop those people. Learn to develop people and you won't be the one that's struggling because it's really more in our own head is where it comes down to. As an entrepreneur, I know that micromanagement is sometimes the biggest challenge that many business owners have as it relates to delegating responsibility, it's just hard to get done.

Which really brings me to the point of in today's technology-driven environment that we are in, the idea of do we outsource or do we hire somebody for that role? Is there a fine line between when you know it's time to outsource versus when you know it's time to bring somebody in-house? I mean, I'm a numbers guy and I think I write in the book, it's all about the numbers. So if – a key thing that I see is an attorney that says I'm going to hire my own paralegal but you really have about 18 hours a month of paralegal work but then you're going to backfill with admin and secretarial and, you know, crap work that that's really not what that paralegal is trained for nor is it what you're paying it for because you're generally paying a good top dollar to get a good paralegal in. Well, that's a mistake.

At that point, if you've got 18 hours of paralegal work, hire a fractional paralegal. And then if you have other types of work, maybe you hire an admin to do that work or – depending on how much work you have. Run the numbers. If, you know, a full-time employee works 2080 hours a year, if you have 2080 hours to give them, and especially if you can bill it back, then yeah, hire a full-time person. If you have a thousand hours, do you really need a full-time person because you can hire that fractional or that part-time person for a lot less than you're going to pay a full-time person.

So just look at the numbers, get the emotion out of it and just look at the numbers. I think your advice is solid as it relates to take the emotion out of it, you know, the idea of, well, I don't want to be a workforce of one and outsource, you know, the other 18 jobs that I have within my organization, it feels better to have employees. Well, it doesn't feel good when you're writing that check every week for that team member that you're potentially overpaying because you have to give them other things to do, as you eloquently said, to backfill their responsibilities. There's a great point right there because you're running your own business and say you are outsourcing those 18 positions. Well that means if you have a retirement plan, you're saving more for yourself.

Now you start bringing them onto your own payroll. Now you got to kind of put that retirement plan in place for them also and that's coming out of your potential retirement plan. There's a lot of ways you could be saving money and doing some tax deferred business. We talk about that but that's once again, that's outsourcing a financial consultant to help you with those things. Don't try to be the expert at it.

But you definitely need to be saving for your future. But go back to when I was in the outsourcing world and I would run the back office for really big law firms, they am 100 law firms and every one of those law firms, they outsource those low paying jobs which are the receptionist, the admin work, the people in the mail room or the copy room or the records department. Those are all outsourced. They don't want them on their payroll for one key – well, probably two reasons but one key reason is they don't want to have to dilute their retirement plans by having to put that out there for people on the lower end of the scale. They want to keep it at the partner of the attorney level.

So why wouldn't a small solo practitioner or a small firm do this same thing? I agree with you. I agree with you. Thinking about the age old adage, nothing happens until you sell something. For the entrepreneur or for the solo practitioner that's practicing law right now that's trying to make it rain within their own firm, the importance of having a sales process, I mean, it's key.

You have to have a sales process but at the same time, very similar to that scenario I set up, if you're at 8 p.m. and your phone rings and you're just, you know, on the tail end of dinner and the rest of the family's sitting at the table, how do you stop yourself from walking away from the table? So can we talk about the sales process and the work-life balance and how they integrate? Sure. Well, let's call it, because as a solo practitioner, we're talking about, let's talk about a sales/marketing process.

So the first thing is you've got that marketing apparatus that's always keeping your name in front of others even when you're not out there networking. So you want to have something that's always keep, it's always running so you can kind of walk away from it, it keeps running, prospects keep coming in and then you're on the phone talking to them and making them clients. Well, you want to make sure that you're never so desperate that you got to pick up the call at 8 o'clock because you're just, I have to get that next call. And what happens so often is that roller coaster, I mean, you know sales, right? So we get into the salesperson, we get on the roller coaster, the ups and downs, I've got all kinds of work right now, I'm super busy, I'm doing no prospecting.

I don't have any apparatus out there prospecting for me, so all of a sudden I finish all that work and I dry up and now I'm at the trough and I'm like, oh my gosh, I got to go back out, get all that – generate some activities again, that's just a horrible way of life. But unfortunately, most of us have gone through it at some level. So the first thing you want, you have that marketing process that's out there always promoting yourself, your name, your business, your law firm so that you're not actually doing it. So that's one way of outsourcing, I guess we look at that as that's outsourcing, something's doing it for you. And then this day of technology, social media can be doing it for you, you could have whatever your marketing area apparatus or maybe have a fractional CMO that's out there pushing things out for you.

I know in my case, there's all kinds of stuff that's going out there that looks like it's coming for me that I don't even know anything about. I probably get more activity and people, you know, reaching out and wanting to have meetings with me and my assistant has to take those and then when I get those meetings, I'm like, good thing there's notes there because I have no idea but they think that I originally started talking to them but it was nothing to do with me. So you got something out there that's always making that happen. Then that second part is when they do call, you got to have that confidence that you know where you're at and you've got to have your scheduled times. I'm going to call everyone back from 9 to 11 in the morning, I'm going to be on the phone talking to all my prospects and anyone that's coming in and this is my discipline.

I'm going to be very disciplined to what I'm doing and when I'm doing it and you're going to have that sanity and you're always going to have a flow of work that's working. And you can get on a phone with a client and they say, "Look, I need this done." You say, "That's great. I can get you in in two weeks. I can start that process." Well, chances are that client's going to know that's great and if they say, "No, I really need something immediately," well then you got someone else that you can refer them to and then you're getting the referral fee, right? So you've got to have things in place.

That's that process that's in place that's working for you so you have control of your life. – You mentioned so many great nuggets of information and you mentioned the word a couple of times technology and I just want to talk about this for just a second. You know, we left behind decades ago the age-old, you know, smiling and dialing process. Technology can do so much for us. There's so many ways to either outsource or have, like you said, a chief marketing officer or even a fractional CMO with you on your team.

Talk about how technology can help business owners gain more of their time freedom back. – So, well, let's go back because you and I both remember a Rolodex. – Of course. And nothing's – the process itself hasn't changed. So once you understand what the process is, the only difference is your Rolodex today is digital.

– Mm-hmm. – No, we use a product called HubSpot as our CRM. – Yeah, same. – Everyone has some kind of a CRM or they should have some kind of CRM that allows you to – you talk with someone, you put notes in your CRM, you set a follow-up call. Maybe it's in 90 days.

Then in that follow-up call, you refer to your notes and you make a call, you get on the phone with them again and you're keeping yourself in front of that client. Nothing's changed from 50 years ago. Now, technology allows us – maybe we're not – we don't have an index card. I don't got a 3×5 index card called under the 30-day tickler. But it's the exact same technology, it's just automated now.

And now, you have something when you look at your Outlook, a message pops up that says call Joe today. And then you're like, well, who's Joe? And then you go back and read – you go to your CRM and you read your card, your digital card and you go, oh, gosh, I remember that call now. And then you pick up the phone and you call Joe. And then you help him remember the call by referencing things you talked about.

And now, you're building a relationship. And before you know it, you have a client. So technology takes the old process that we used to have to use paper for and made it a lot easier. You know, you don't need an eraser anymore, you just – you type it in, there you go. And here's even the greater part, is multiple people within your organization can use that technology to share your Rolodex, which is – in our case, that happens all the time.

People see that, oh, Ron just talked to this guy a few months ago. So as the salesperson might be calling, they might be referencing the call with their CEO. So there's – now it's a warm call for that person, the salesperson that's making that call. Yeah, it seems like you're in my HubSpot account right now because that's exactly what I do. Oftentimes, I'll be arriving at my meeting a few minutes.

I set a buffer zone between my last appointment and my next appointment. Sometimes I have to see, hey, how do I know this guy? And sometimes it's – you've had two or three meetings with him and it's still not installed in, you know, in your brain. But that's the beauty of technology and where it absolutely will work for me as well. But HubSpot or any CRM that works for you, you know, what's the best CRM?

The one that works for you. It doesn't matter what your brand is, if it works for you, great. You know, we – I use HubSpot, you use HubSpot, I know a lot of the law firms will use their practice management software. We partnered with Clio, Clio within its instances has a CRM. A lot of our clients, you know, are like a receptionist can just work right in that CRM and enter the information and then set up an alert for the attorney to make a call.

So, you don't miss anything, something's popping right up on your screen and you don't – you're not even having to do anything except, oh, I got to make that call. I know we covered a lot of information today about technology, business practices, systems, the operating systems that are involved when you're building your business. It may be hard to narrow it down to just one, but if you could, what would be one business practice that has made your life easier, Ron? I think putting in an operating system within our company allowed us to do everything we've done. It allowed me to walk away from day to day and have confidence that the business is running well and now I'm not having to think about the business when I'm on my scheduled time with my family or personal time.

But I think having an operating system of some sort, whatever it is for you, that's a process that you can teach to someone else and let them do it is the number one thing. Well, excellent. Well, I appreciate you sharing your expertise and your vision today. Thanks for being here. Big thanks to Ron Boxdaller, all of his information including insights that he shared today, how to balance your life, how to balance your business without losing your sanity.

If you want to dive deeper, grab a copy of his book, don't lose your balance, live life or build a business. Well, you can do both. It's packed with real-world advice, practical steps, and a few hard-earned lessons that you won't want to miss. Thanks Ron for sharing your expertise today. Thanks, Doug.

I appreciate it. If you enjoy this episode, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with a friend who really needs some work-life balance in their life. Thanks for listening. We'll catch you next time. [MUSIC]