5 Years, 5 Lessons In Entrepreneurship

5 years ago today Momentum welcomed in its first associate lawyers, and I’ve always considered July 13th 2015 our birthday.

In fact, I started laying the groundwork for the firm 2.5 years earlier, when I left the firm I had spent 10+ years at. Like many lawyers who initially venture out on their own, I set up a home office and went about figuring out All The Things I didn’t have a clue about – it turned out that there were a lot of Known Unknowns and even more Unknown Unknowns.

7.5 years later, I am extremely proud of what Momentum Business Law has become and even more so, what it is in the process of becoming. It was a LOT of hard work, so much more than I realized it would be. This post provides my unvarnished thoughts about entrepreneurship, becoming a boss and growing a business into what you (didn’t entirely know) you wanted it to be.

These are my Top 5 Lessons Learned – there are a lot more than 5 and will be more to come, I’m sure.

You Must Love It, or Leave It

Entrepreneurs are optimists. I have come to believe that there is really no way to dive in to building a business and more importantly, stick with it, if you aren’t unreasonably optimistic. Like, seriously unreasonably – we all know the metrics of how many businesses fail in the first 5 years – why would anyone rational jump into building their own business, particularly if they have a stable and well paying job already.

I’m not talking about the version of business which was me sitting in my home office with next to no expenses and a handful of clients to start the business off with. Not at all to take away from the great work that solos (lawyers or other service professionals) do, but that sort of business is relatively low-risk and fundamentally different from one which seeks to grow exponentially, build something new and different, take on employees, space and overhead and make a commitment to an ever growing group of clients that you will take care of them.

There are going to be so many ups and downs (many of which I describe here, some of which are not fit to publish). It is absolutely true that entrepreneurship can be a crushingly lonely business at times. The burdens of making the decisions, team members and clients all relying on you and responsibility for every single thing trickling up to sit with you can be extremely heavy. If you don’t have a seriously intense love for what you are building, it just isn’t worth the heartache and stress which comes with it. 

The other “love lesson” which I’ve learned is that you have to be building the thing YOU love, not the thing someone else loves. What I mean is that we are surrounded by amazing business ideas and the dreams of other people – trying to create something which is based on comparisons to what others around you are doing rarely works long term – find your thing, and grow that. If the market wants it, they will respond, no matter who has a competitive product around you.

Goals, Execution & Pivots

As an entrepreneur, if you don’t have something to move towards, you will lose momentum (see what I did there??). That being said, goals only take you so far: execution is really the only thing that matters. Goals might look nice on a vision board, but without an achievable plan for execution it is all talk.

Here’s the thing – execution is HARD. It takes really long hours, trial and error, frustration and sometimes successful execution doesn’t bring the anticipated results. That leads me to the “P” word which honestly, I had promised to try to remove from anything I said publicly in 2020, but here we are. If you are too attached to the “what” of your dream, you wont be listening to your clients and customers (and as importantly, your prospective clients and customers) and you will not understand the urgent need to tweak and … pivot.

One of the most important ingredients to execution (and pivots) is to surround yourself with the right team members. Rarely does a team of one successfully scale a business and I have been so lucky to be surrounded by the right mix of people on our team over the years. I have the detail people, the “dose of reality” people, the “always up for the next adventure” people. Sometimes all of that in one person! It makes all the difference: for me it is the reason our venture is still going.

Fundamental Economics Matter

In the law firm context, you truly have no idea of the economics of a law firm if you have been working somewhere for years where someone else worries about cash flow – where you have an accounting department to worry about accounts receivable and a firm management committee to worry about overhead and compensation. To my former colleagues – I’m sorry I didn’t know how hard and stressful this part of the business was! To those reading this who work at a big firm – be glad that you don’t have to be concerned with this.

No business can operate on hopes and dreams alone, particularly not one which has payroll and rent to pay. We have heard plenty about that over the past months of the covid-19 crisis – few business owners are sleeping well right now. Even in the “good” financial times – growth in clients/ customers means growth in overhead and the delicate balance which comes with that.

You have to not only learn and understand your overhead and expenses, you need to learn and plan around the rhythms of accounts receivable and the economy in general. In law, you likely come from a world where getting accounts out to clients often took months and then further months to get paid. If you don’t 1) understand this and 2) fix this, you can be extremely vulnerable.

You cannot get behind with your books – you must delegate this if it isn’t a strong skill for you personally (me!) but you must still seek to understand things at a high level.

Curiosity Is The Greatest Personality Trait

Over 5 years of hiring team members, I can say without a doubt that the most important trait for our team, and I’m willing to bet any successful business, is curiosity. I can teach almost anything I know, but the hallmark of a successful contributor is an innate curiosity and desire to figure things out. Curiosity leads to innovation and growth. Curiosity leads to understanding our clients and how we can help them better. I may be wrong and this may apply only to me and my personality, but I’m willing to bet that if you focus on hiring for curiosity (combined with a killer attention to detail) your team will thrive.

People Will Come and Go/ Being a Boss Can Really Suck

This is one of the hardest lessons I learned. One of Momentum’s two initial associates left 6 weeks in. Within the first 18 months of the firm, 3 associates had come and gone. Over 5 years, many more. In a tiny firm environment, these are relationships which fill your day and which become more than just employees and colleagues. These were some of the hardest times I’ve had at the firm. It is simply impossible to not take it personally. It feels like your vision and your dream, like you yourself, have been rejected.

But ultimately, you learn two things through this process: 1) It *might* be you, and it is always important to ask the question, be honest with yourself and make changes where necessary and 2) It probably (mostly) isn’t you. As the saying goes, we are the center of no one’s universe but our own: some of your team members are going to leave to follow their own path and even when that hurts, you have to appreciate what they brought with them in the time they were with you, and seek the fill the void they left.

That, and appreciate and celebrate those team members who are with you on the journey, while they are there. Recognize their successes and help them through their challenges. Ask a million questions of them, and listen to what they say in response. I’m still learning – being a “boss” didn’t come as easily to me as I expected it would and I don’t think I’m alone in that as a lawyer. We aren’t trained in people management and many of the mentors and role models we had didn’t excel either. We have extremely high expectations of those around us and learning to teach the law is a skill set which catches most of us by surprise.

Additionally, clients will come and go. Momentum is extremely lucky that I can count on my two hands the number of clients who I know have gone to work with another law firm over the past 5 years. That is a testament to the strength of our team and our model. However for any number of reasons you will, from time to time, have a client move on. When that reason includes anything you and the firm have done wrong, or failed to do, there is nothing more important than understanding why that happened and setting in place ways to ensure it wont happen again.

Of Course – It has all been worth it

To be where we are at 5 years old: delivering on plans that we have had since the beginning, discovering and breathing life into new visions and having clarity of purpose, is all that I could have hoped for. To our team members along the way, our professional referrals, our technology partners who make so much of what we do possible and, of course, our clients who have placed their faith and their businesses in our hands – I truly thank you. I may not have had the faintest clue how hard this was going to be, but I also didn’t know just how fulfilling it would be. Thank you for being along for the ride and keeping me inspired.

On to the next five!