#235 Behind the Scenes: The pillars that hold my business together
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There comes a point where business starts to feel heavier. You have more responsibility, there are more moving parts and you might have developed less patience for doing things the hard way. This usually triggers a very honest question.
Does the life and business I designed still fit me?
What keeps me steady is not another productivity hack or a “just push through” mindset. It is support. It is systems. It is having the right foundations in place so the business can run without me holding everything in my head.
I have developed four pillars that I believe are the key to holding my business together:
Pillar one. The calm is built, not hoped for
Processes and systems are my love language. They are the reason my business feels calm, even when it is busy. And for me, it starts with the client agreement. Yes, it has to meet Law Society requirements, but it also has to support the relationship. It sets out scope, fees, timeframes, what happens when out-of-scope work pops up, and how we work together.
All of my work is fixed-fee. That is non-negotiable. I want clients to know exactly what they are getting and exactly what they are paying from the start. I saw too many clients in my litigation days feel overwhelmed by uncertainty and I do not run my business that way.
Onboarding is part of delivery. Discovery call, tailored proposal, clear next steps, DocuSign, payment activated, matter into workflow. We run everything through monday.com so nothing gets missed. And offboarding matters too. I build in a check-in later, and my team makes sure clients know exactly how to reconnect if they need support down the track.
Pillar two. If you built it, protect it
If you have created something unique, protect it. I have a methodology called Legals by Design. It is based on more than 20 years in the law and years in litigation, seeing what works and what falls apart when things go wrong. I have trademarked the name, and I have made sure my website terms and client agreement deal with my intellectual property. That means if someone copies my work or uses my trademarked phrase, I have recourse.
Pillar three. DIY is for Bunnings, not business
I do not DIY things in my business. DIY is for Bunnings, not your legals. And honestly, not your core operational tasks either. My bookkeeper, Accounted For You, is one of the best investments I have ever made. My numbers are current, accurate, and visible whenever I need them. BAS, IAS, GST, payroll, super. I stay in my lane.
I also have a business strategist, Michelle Broadbent, who has supported me for years with clarity, direction, and decision-making. And I brought in PR support with Erin from Chuckle Communications when I wanted visibility in the right places. Just because you can do something does not mean you should.
Pillar four. Compliance is not optional, so stop treating it like it is
Compliance is not exciting, but it is crucial. In my industry, it is non-negotiable. We build it into our systems so it is handled consistently, not reactively. A recent example is the anti money laundering changes, the AML and CTF Tranche 2 obligations. That caught us, so we added extra steps, risk assessments, and policies into our existing framework and kept moving.
It’s safe to say, “I did not know” is not a defence. “I was not aware” does not protect you. And “I had not got to it yet” does not help either.
Questions to ask yourself
Do my agreements do what they should? Is my onboarding seamless? Do I have an off boarding process? Is my IP protected? Am I meeting my compliance obligations?
If any of those make you hesitate, that is your sign. Get support. You do not need to carry it all alone.
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[00:00:00] Welcome back to the podcast, everyone. Thank you for joining me for another episode. I'm going to take you behind the scenes [00:01:00] today and talk to you about the four pillars that support how I run my business. It's about time. We're in a new financial year. I love starting anything new. If you're a longtime listener, you know that, and I thought what better time to share with you a behind the scenes on what supports my business and how I run it than the start of something new The reason I wanted to share this is because a large part of the work I do is supporting business owners, small and medium business owners, run their business, set themselves up for success. We talk about implementation and processes and systems. We talk about documentation. We talk about managing client expectations, exceeding client expectations.
We talk about all of that and so much more, but that is the core of what I do when I support business owners. I do a lot of work on a fractional basis with businesses who don't need lawyers just as an ad hoc. They've reached a point where they know ad hoc reactive legal advice is not what they want.
They want a partner, [00:02:00] somebody to partner along and be a part of the business, be embedded in there in terms of the knowledge, the understanding, be available to offer the support that they need as and when they need it, and that's what I do. And so I do that in addition to my project work, where small businesses reach out and need documents, and we absolutely collaborate and do that.
But there's another element to what I do, which is that embedded ongoing support. That all goes to the core of setting businesses up for success, support, sustainability. So let's dive in, and I'm going to talk to you about how I've set my business up for success, the support I get, and how I've built a sustainable business.
Diving into this, I'm going to talk to you about four pillars, four pillars that are really crucial for me and my business and how I run it, and they keep everything ticking, and they give me the peace of mind that I'm always talking about on here and over on social media, and even on my email list, where I talk about peace being the real wealth.
The first pillar, which will be no surprise to longtime listeners, is around my love language, which is [00:03:00] processes and systems. My processes and systems and our client agreements are without doubt the first pillar that supports my business. Our client agreements need to do a range of things. First, we need to comply with our Law Society requirements.
The Law Society, because we're regulated heavily, there's a ton of things that we need to include by legislation in our client agreements, so ours do that. Ours aren't templates. As you can imagine, the Law Society do have templates that lawyers can use. We don't use that. My client agreement goes so much further because to me, relationships are at the core of what I do.
Relationships are the backbone of my business. So that is reflected from a very early touch point that new clients have with me when they receive our client agreement. So it sets out in there who we are, what we do. It sets out the scope of work, what it is the client has engaged me to do. It deals with scope creep and what we're going to do if you need out-of-scope [00:04:00] work from time to time.
It sets out the fees. All of my work is fixed fee so that it's really transparent and clients know from the very beginning exactly what they're getting from me and exactly what they're being asked to pay That's a non-negotiable for me because that is one of the elements that I pride myself on, is being really transparent about the work, what's included, and what it's going to cost the client.
Back in my litigation days, so before I set up this business, I've been running this business for seven years now, but way before that, the law firms that I worked for were all very much time costing. We bill the client in six-minute increments. We can't possibly know what work's going to be involved, and that is true because the majority of what I did was litigation work, and you can never know with certainty what's going to be involved.
But what I saw back then was clients who were really overwhelmed, fearful, uncertain, because they just didn't know what they were in for in terms of the legal support that they needed, that they were getting, and what it was going to cost. So it just fills [00:05:00] my heart with so much joy to be working now in this business, running it the way that's aligned with me personally and my personal values to support business owners with what matters to them, and transparency around pricing and fees matters to business owners, and I get that.
So that's what I do. So this is all forming part of the first pillar in how I run this business, and it's set out in my client agreements. The client agreements then go on to talk about a whole range of things. Intellectual property, who owns it, payment of the fees, use of AI. I use it for note-taking and summaries and, and workflow efficiency, but I ask clients not to put my advice or my documents through AI, and I explain the risks attached with that in terms of waiving legal professional privilege and confidentiality.
I talk about that in my cost agreement. I talk about the timeframe we have to work together for the fixed fee that I've quoted.
And I talk about how we're going to provide the services, our exit strategy, how the client can terminate, how we can terminate, all the usual things you'd expect to see. [00:06:00] That document is one of the most important documents in my business. It's one of the most powerful tools my business has because right from the very beginning, it provides to my clients all the things they need to know to make an informed decision as to whether they want to work with me or not, because it tells them how I operate What I have found over the years when business owners skip this step or take shortcuts with this step, they're not setting themselves up for success.
They're not setting themselves up for long-term, sustainable, positive relationships with their clients because they're skipping over what matters most, and that's the relationship and valuing the relationship. And they're not managing client expectations and they're not being transparent, but they're also not protecting themselves.
And even though some clients will say to me, and have done over the years, " I bought a template." Some have even said, "I bought a lawyer-drafted template." The time for that is gone. The time for just throwing information at people I genuinely think is gone. It's over. People don't need more information. They can get information now.
People can [00:07:00] ask ChatGPT to draft contracts if they want to. What people need now is support, clarity, aligned documentation, confidence that documentation is right, and something they can be proud of when they issue it to their client. And I hand on heart don't think anybody can be proud when they're issuing a template or they're issuing a, a document that's been issued by ChatGPT because it doesn't do all the things it needs to to be a really powerful tool in that business.
So I'm very proud of our client agreement. As you can no doubt imagine, it forms a part of our initial first pillar in supporting the business. My processes and systems are really important to me, and this is where I spend a lot of time talking to my clients about onboarding their clients.
For me, it all starts with a client reaching out to have a conversation. We call that the discovery phase, so that I can be sure that what it is that they need I can help with and that I can add value. And the client needs to get a feel for me because we may not vibe. It may not be the right fit.
From there, once we've had an [00:08:00] opportunity to connect and discuss, I will prepare a proposal tailored to that discussion and that client and I will send that out. And it's very transparent, setting out what we've talked about, what you need, this is how we work, this is our fee structure, our payment options, timeframes, next steps.
It's all really clear. Easeful and clear. The client accepts that. We then move to client agreement stage. They get onboarded into our practice management system, which we have to have not only for good business management, but it's a Law Society requirement, and we have to choose from one of the approved practice management systems.
So I don't have anything sexy and pretty like Dubsado. I have a different practice management system, which is a bit clunky, not quite as sexy, but nonetheless it does the job. And we have
Developed that over the years to best suit our business. So our client then gets onboarded into our practice management system. They get our documentation, we issue everything for signing via DocuSign to make it really easy. [00:09:00] That comes back, payment is activated in whichever payment method the client's chosen.
The matter will then appear in my workflow. For our workflow and for our internal business operations, including all of our marketing and content strategy work, we use monday.com, which is an absolute delight to work with. Confession, I also use it for managing my household in my personal life. I've talked about that previously.
But it does so much and it has so much functionality. We use it to manage our workflow with our clients, but we also use it to manage everything else that's happening in our business, our quarterly planning, our ideas that we want to develop later so nothing gets missed or nothing gets forgotten about, and our business activities, things that need to happen from a c-compliance perspective.
It all gets managed in monday.com. Once a client's onboarded, all of the onboarding steps have been taken care of and the matter appears, that's when I can dive in and start doing what I do best, which is my client delivery work. And it's different for every client. Every business has different [00:10:00] needs, but it'll all be set out in Monday.
that infrastructure is a non-negotiable for my business, as you can probably tell, because there is a system, it works, nothing falls through the cracks. We ensure compliance absolutely as we have to, but we're managing the client user experience or my client journey here to make sure that the client is receiving high-level personalised touch points.
We're nurturing the relationship because as I've said, relationships are very important to me, and then I'm able to deliver the services in the way I said I would in a timely manner so that nothing gets forgotten about. This is really important to me, which is why we have spent so much time setting up our first pillar in the business.
But in a nutshell, that's my processes and sys- sorry. That is my process and my system around onboarding clients and having our client agreements issued to manage those expectations and to set us up for success with our clients
Once I have finished my work or I've completed the project [00:11:00] or, or whatever the case may be, my off-boarding process is just as important to me as the on-boarding process. And this goes to the heart of our systems because they are designed to support us and prioritize what's important to us, which is relationships.
So once I finish the project, I don't just send a client an email to say, "Thanks for that." make sure that in my workflow, I've noted a date in a little while to touch base with them just to check in and make sure that everything's going okay, that everything's smooth, and so that I can answer any little questions that have come up.
I like to make sure that clients have that post-completion support, if you like. So I do that, And then Heidi, very important member of my team, will send an off-boarding email to the clients letting them know how it is they can reach out and get in touch and book in for anything if they need it moving forward, so they have that support. As an existing client, we have exclusive existing client rates.
We have exclusive existing client links to my calendar where people-- Sorry, where existing clients can book in time with me if [00:12:00] they need it. They know what that involves. They know what their options are. They know how to reach out to me if they need some minor document updates in a year or two, or whatever the case may be.
So the off-boarding for me is just as important as the on-boarding, So that my clients know that I'm here, I'm always here, and that they can reconnect any time that they want to. That's really important to me Pillar number two of the four pillars that I want to share with you is IP ownership, so intellectual property.
I won't spend too much time on this, but what I'll say is that IP is very important to me. It's very important to most business owners who have created something new in their business, or in my case, a methodology. So I have my very unique methodology, which is my Legals by Design methodology, and that's the approach I take when I'm developing legal documents for businesses, because that methodology and that approach is unique to me.
It's based on more than 20 years in the law. It's based on what I know works. It's based on what I know doesn't work. Spending so [00:13:00] many years in litigation, acting for business owners who were suing or being sued, ripping contracts apart was something that we did all the time, or on the flip side, defending a contract from another lawyer trying to, to rip it apart.
I've taken all of that, and I've incorporated all of that knowledge into my drafting approach, my Legals by Design approach. Because it's unique to me, because it's important to me, I have that methodology name trademarked, which means I have exclusive rights to the use of that name in the classes that I registered it, which is service provider, legal services.
That's important to me. I also have made sure that in my website terms and conditions, I've dealt with my ownership of my own intellectual property. I've retained my copyright in my original work, and I've dealt with intellectual property in my client agreement. That means if someone copies my work, if somebody uses my trademarked phrase, I have recourse.
I have a very [00:14:00] streamlined pathway to recourse if someone does the wrong thing with my IP, because I've done all the right things in my documents. I am a personal brand. Most of my clients have a personal brand. It is important to protect our brand. Most of my clients, like me, have poured their heart and soul into creating something that's unique to them.
Make sure it's protected. I've made sure mine's protected. I spend a lot of time working with business owners to make sure that theirs is protected too. So the intellectual property ownership Is pillar two Of what supports my business. The third pillar is engaging the experts.
I don't DIY things in my business. if you're a longtime listener, you will have heard me say so often on this podcast, DIY is for Bunnings, not for your legals. I stand by that. I honor that. I talk the talk, I walk the walk. I don't DIY things in my own business. It's very important to me that I surround myself with the right people in my business because I can't do it all alone, and I wouldn't have gotten here had it not been for the support I've got with the [00:15:00] experts that I have.
First and foremost is my bookkeeper. The team at Accounted For You have been with me for six years. I think it's six years. I've been in business for seven, so they were very early, a very early investment and probably one of, if not the best investment I've ever made. Just because I can reconcile things in Xero doesn't mean I should, and they do a whole lot more than reconciling in Xero, let me assure you.
The team at Accounted For You have got my back in terms of all of my compliance obligations, my numbers, transparency and visibility, so I can put my fingers on a report anytime I want to, and I know that it is current, it's up to date, it's accurate. That to me is crucial running a business because I don't have time, and nor do I have any desire to be diving into things that I've got no business in, and entering expenses, categorizing, GST, my BAS, my IAS, my monthly reports, to name a few.
Don't even get me started on [00:16:00] payroll and superannuation, but I don't want to be in that, nor should I be, and because I have such excellent support in that, I don't need to be. So that's number one in terms of my experts. Two is my business strategist. Michelle Broadbent has been with me for about the same length of time as Accounted For You, actually.
Gosh, that makes me feel very old because time has just whizzed by so quickly. But Michelle has been by my side throughout the entire business journey, and sometimes I call on her more than other times, but she's always been there as that pivotal support whenever I've needed sounding board, support, new idea, new concept, struggling with this, challenges, wanting to just give it all up and go and work somewhere.
I have had a moment like that once. Michelle's been there to support me through all of that, and she's so crucial continuing to this day, so crucial, as a support member to guide and help direct the ship, if you like, in terms of the business and all the things that I've done in the business and all the things I want to do in the business.
So that's-- [00:17:00] There's so much value in having someone like Michelle by my side. I wouldn't be here delivering this particular podcast if it wasn't for the clarity that Michelle's helped me gain over the many, many years that we've been working together. So there's that. PR is relatively new to my business. I engaged Erin from Chuckle Communications to help with some PR exposure for the business, traditional PR, which I'd never done before. And Erin was such a delight to work with, and it was really important to be able to get visibility in some of the places that I wanted to, and she was able to provide that support.
I know there's many DIY your PR courses out there, but again, staying true to my values, I don't DIY things in my business. I get the experts. So it's been very valuable working with Erin in the PR space. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. I genuinely think that goes for PR too
that's all I'm going to say on the experts. I do talk a lot about the value of who you surround yourself with in business matters, and I really love that [00:18:00] other businesses call on me to be the expert in their business and support them on their business journey, either on a project basis as needed or on an ongoing basis in that fractional in-house lawyer capacity, because there's some businesses who have reached a point where they want more than ad hoc reactive legal support, and I'm so here for that
Pillar number four. The fourth and final pillar that I want to talk to you about in this episode, not as sexy, but compliance and staying ahead. Compliance and staying ahead are so important, one, because that's my personality and, and that's how I like to run things in my life, but two, in the legal profession, compliance is a must.
There's legislation that we have to comply with. We have to comply with that each year in order to renew our practicing certificates, and there's a whole host of things we need to do from a compliance perspective. And in true Tracey fashion, visibility is really important to me, so I know what's on the horizon and I know what's coming.
In terms of compliance, my practice management system sets me up for success. We manage our trust account that way. [00:19:00] We've got monthly reports we need to do for the trust account, and we have an annual external examination that we need to undergo each year on the trust account. There's massive compliance obligations there.
But because I have the systems in place on how we onboard and deal with all the things with our clients, and because we have the practice management system in place that works like a well-oiled machine, our monthly and annual obligations are just another part of the system that works really well Our Law Society regulates what we do on a day-to-day basis with our clients, hence the compliant client agreements, our continuing professional development obligations that we need to meet, our disclosure to clients, our communications.
That's all captured and executed seamlessly through our processes and systems. A really timely, example I can give you in the context of staying ahead are the recent legislation changes around anti-money laundering. You may have heard of the AML/CTF Tranche 2 obligations that have come into effect [00:20:00] for many lawyers, accountants, real estate agents.
Yes, we are one of those law firms that's captured by that, so we've got some extra obligations that we need to incorporate into our processes and systems. For us, it was no big deal. For us, it was just a matter of adding a few extra things into our already well-established processes and systems so we can keep up to date with compliance and we can continue looking ahead.
There was, there was some work to do around risk assessments and developing more policies, but because I have a framework for analyzing and interpreting legislation and policy and developing and drafting new policies for our business, we were able to use our existing processes and systems to assess our obligations under the new legislation and then fairly easily, it wasn't actually all that onerous, implement additional steps into our processes and systems to ensure compliance with the new regulations and the new legislation.
So as I say, pillar four is not as sexy, compliance and staying ahead, but [00:21:00] it is crucial because when a business fails to meet its compliance obligations, the business can fail at that point. It can be no longer. It's that serious. that's not the path I intend to go down, and that's not the path I intend my clients to go down.
So compliance is something that I do work with business owners to achieve across a range of industries because it's so important. So it forms one of the pillars. It's not the most sexy, but it's crucial, which is why it's a pillar. So that is the behind-the-scenes episode on what goes on in running my business and what the four pillars are that support the operational side and the compliance side of my business.
Number one was systems and processes and our client agreements, and as you know, systems and processes are my love language. I really love it. Number two is IP ownership. That's important for every business owner. Number three is the engaging the experts, because who you surround yourself with in business really matters.
And number four is compliance and staying [00:22:00] ahead. You cannot afford to fall behind on that. And if something were to go wrong, saying, "I didn't know," or, "I wasn't aware," or, "I hadn't got to it yet," is not going to help a business owner one little bit. So staying on the front foot is really important. really hope you've enjoyed this episode.
I've really loved sharing this with you on a very personal note on how I run my business, and I'm hoping that you've been able to take some little nuggets of gold, hopefully, as to what might help you elevate or enhance your business operations, or even if there's things you hadn't thought of and you thought, "Gosh, that's a really great idea.
I need to spend some time thinking about that." That's my intention in sharing. I hope it's been of value. If there's anything here that you need a hand with, if you sit down and ask yourself the questions, do my agreements do what they should? Is my onboarding process really seamless? Do I have an off-boarding process?
Do I have my IP protected? Am I meeting my compliance obligations? If you're asking yourself any of those questions and you're not sure about any of them, I would love to hear from you. Please feel free to reach out. You can reach me over on [00:23:00] Instagram, LinkedIn, via the website, tmlegalatelier.com.au. I'm always happy to hear from you, and I'm always happy to help in any way that I possibly can to elevate and enhance your business journey.
As always, thank you so much for listening. I'll catch you next time
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