#132 What does success look like for you?
We all know that success isn't a cookie-cutter concept. It's as unique as you and the specific needs of your business. When it comes to preparing your legal documents, it might not seem relevant to take into account what success means to you, but it absolutely is and that’s exactly what I’m talking about today.
Whether you're an established entrepreneur or taking your first steps into the world of business, this episode holds valuable insights that can reshape the way you think about success and its relationship with your legal strategy.
As a legal expert, I specialise in helping small businesses navigate the complex world of legal documents. But it's not just about the documents; it's about aligning them with your aspirations. Your legal contracts and agreements need to reflect what you want to achieve as a business owner. Your boundaries, working hours, and communication preferences need to be crystal clear and that's where my role as a legal strategist comes into play – I customise the legal framework to your unique vision.
Your goals aren't just dreams. They are a compass guiding your business journey and trust me, that compass should also influence your legal strategy. If you're aiming for a specific client base or striving for financial stability, your legal documents should be working in harmony with these ambitions. This is where my process comes into play – understanding your business processes, systems, and personal aspirations allows me to ensure your legal framework supports your success every step of the way.
After listening to this episode, I encourage you to take a moment to reflect on your vision of success, both as a business owner and an individual. It's not just a dream; it's a tangible destination. And your legal documents? Well, they're the vehicles that will take you there.
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[00:00:00] Hello everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Rise Up in Business podcast. Thank you for joining me for another episode. I'm gonna dive straight in today to today's topic. And this is a question that is so important on so many levels in business, and I'm gonna give you the context behind why it is that it's something that's important for me to know when I'm designing your legal documents for your business, and this is the question, what does success look like to you? What is success for you in your business? What do you ultimately want to achieve? When you focus on the question, what does success look like? You start thinking about things, hopefully on a holistic level.
[00:01:00] And you talk about from a business context, from a family context, you as an individual because hey, you're not just a business owner, you're an individual as well, and then you're wearing a ton of other hats. When you think, what does success look like to you? You probably straight away think business coach or mentor or performance coach or something like that.
[00:01:20] And it doesn't necessarily link in with what you think you'll be talking about with your lawyer. When I start working with clients, and I share this a lot on the podcast, I talk about how I need to take the time to understand the business and the objectives so that I can do my job properly.
[00:01:37] And part of that is understanding what the client wants to achieve in the business or what does success look like because from there I can design the legal documents to suit to help get you there. So what do I mean by that? So if you say to me, Tracey, as a small business owner, I've started my business because I want more time with my family, or I want more flexibility, or I want to be able to say no more, or I only want to do certain work for a particular type of client.
[00:02:06] All of these things are great examples of what success looks like, and often I hear this weekly, day in, day out. There'll be something here that I've just rattled off on that list that I hear over and over again, and it's different for everyone. But if I know from the beginning, and this is why I ask, because if I know that flexibility's important to you, then your legals need to address your boundaries, your legal documents that you enter into with your clients, whether it's online signups to your courses and programs, or whether it's one-on-one coaching or design, whatever it is that you are offering, those documents need to make it really clear what your boundaries are around your working time, when you are contactable, when you are not, how you are communicate, what your turnaround time is for responses, those types of things.
[00:02:54] And as I always say, these documents that we develop together are so vital in setting you up for long-term success with your clients. These are some of the reasons why. If you say to me, Tracey, it's about choice. Success to me looks like choice and having the ability to say yes and no to clients and only doing my Soul on fire work. Well, we need to have a talk about how it is you onboard your clients, if you have an application process, if you have a vetting process, what does that look like?
[00:03:25] What details are you sharing with people when they apply? Before they engage you, are people's expectations being managed? Because don't forget, this is your reputation as well, and we don't want your reputation to be tarnished because you're saying no to people when people didn't realize you had an application process, for example, and when people didn't realize that you are niching into a certain type of service or you only wanna do certain type of work.
[00:03:50] So if we don't outline that clearly in the right place at the right time, And you say no to somebody, they have the potential to become offended or disgruntled, and that doesn't end well for you as a business owner so your documents need to be supporting you in what it is that you do.
[00:04:06] So you're starting to see why it's important for me to know what success looks like to you so that I can make sure everything's in sync and that everything works. When done right, your legal documents can be so powerful. I talk about that on here so much. And this is just another illustration of the ways that your documents can support you.
[00:04:25] If you come to me and say to me, Tracey, it's really important that I have some flexibility, the choice to say yes or no. I wanna make sure cashflow is solid. I wanna have visibility over my business as cashflow for six weeks, or seven weeks or two months, or whatever it is that you want. I then need to dive in and ask you about your offerings.
[00:04:44] How are you packaging up your services? How are you sharing these with your clients? At what point do they sign with you? At what point do they say yes with you? I need to know. I need to know whether you have an application process on your website, whether you do discovery calls and then said tailored proposals.
[00:05:02] I need to understand your processes and systems. I need to understand what you're trying to achieve because then I can give you advice, structurally and legally, about whether or not your processes and systems and your documents are supporting you get where you want to go because they're so integral in creating the business that you want, that if you have a misalignment or if you don't have systems and processes and documents that are supporting you in the way that they need to, you are never gonna get where you want to go, so that's why I take the time to ask. I had a client say to me last week, gosh, Tracey, this is so refreshing. Thanks for jumping on this call to clarify this. No one's ever asked me this before. And I was sort of taken by surprise because to me it's one of the most basic and obvious starting points in any conversation with a business owner.
[00:05:50] When I'm working with them as a professional service provider, but no one had ever taken the time to ask her. The service providers that she'd worked with had simply said, what do you want? Tell me what you want. I'll do it. And they would just do what she asked for, but she didn't know the significance of what it is that she wanted, and she didn't know certain things she needed to think about and get clarity on to share with her advisors to tell them what she wanted. So the level of support that I was able to offer her was not only comforting for her, it was empowering and gave her so much confidence because we really are a team. We're on the same page in working through that.
[00:06:27] So the takeaway that I hope you are getting from this very short and sharp episode this week is, Think about what success looks like for you. Take a moment to pause or reflect. Take longer than a moment if you need to, but think about it holistically for you as a person, for you as a business owner, what does success look like for you in terms of a synergy between your personal life and your business life?
[00:06:52] I always talk about the two, because they do weave in and out. There will be an overlap, so we need to have clarity on both. What does success look like for you? Then once you've started kicking that around and you're getting some clarity, and I'm hoping you find it really exciting, but once you start kicking that around, have a look at your processes and systems and your legal documents and frameworks in your business.
[00:07:15] Are they aligned? First of all, do you have them? If you don't have them, that's okay. We can get them. We can start designing those for you and putting them in place. That's all right. But if you do have something in place and you do have documents, most clients have something. Something that they've used and they've cobbled together from somewhere earlier on.
[00:07:33] Have a look at what you've got and ask the question, is it aligned with your vision of success and where you wanna go, and is it serving you? I'm thinking business structure, legal documents and processes and systems, they all work together. So is what you have serving you, is it aligned? If you don't know the answer, that's okay.
[00:07:54] If you're not sure if what you have in place is supporting you, if you're not sure what you need, and if you don't know how to articulate it, it might be time to think about jumping in for one of my one-on-one sessions. So somebody who I work closely with, on and off over the years in my business said to me last week, I didn't even know that you had an offering, Tracey, where we can work one-on-one with you just for little pockets, just when we need to. And I thought, gosh, I feel like I go on about these all the time, but clearly I don't. So let me share it with you here.
[00:08:25] Trying to work out where you're headed, what you've got in place, the support you need in the frameworks is ideal for one of my one-on-one strategy sessions. We spend some time together. I do the prep work. We've got just over an hour together. We do it on Zoom. You get a wrap up email, you get answers to all your questions. I give you the advice that you need. You get clarity most and foremost around what it is that you need to do from here and we put a roadmap in place. That's a strategy session with me. I absolutely offer them. A lot of new clients will start there and then we scope out a proposal and a framework for what needs to be done, and we work together from there. So strategy sessions are rarely a one-off.
[00:09:03] Sometimes they are. Sometimes you just need to jump in and out and get answers issues that you're facing or questions that you've got. That's okay, but they're there. The link is in the show notes. You can jump onto the website and check out all of these things, but the point is, Ask the question, take the time to get the clarity that you need.
[00:09:20] So what does success look like for you? Have you got the framework in place? What do your processes and systems look like? And are your legal documents supporting you to get there? That's the question today, and that's what I want you to think about.
[00:09:32] I hope you found this to be helpful. My objective here is to give you food for thought that's really practical and things that you can action in your business right away to help you move the needle and to help you set your business up for long-term sustainable success. If you know somebody else who's running their business or in business who would benefit from listening to this episode, please share it.
[00:09:51] This is how we help get the podcast into the ears of even more business owners to make an even wider impact. Thank you so much for listening. As always, I'm so grateful for your time and I'll catch you next week.
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