The Road to Version 1.0: Escaping the Reactive Loop

At first glance, Howell Legal looks a lot like it did a year ago. We still have four attorneys. We do the same kind of work for the same kinds of clients. But behind the curtain, we’ve had the most transformative year in our five-year history. What’s changed is our trajectory.

More precisely, we have — for the first time — a trajectory aimed at a target of our choosing, with a realistic, deliberate plan for hitting it.

This is the first in a series of posts about the strategic planning journey we’ve made over the past year. We’re eager to share the results with the world so that we can tell you all who we are and who we plan to be. But we’re even more eager to share the journey. We know that countless businesses face the same difficulty that we felt at the beginning of this planning process and don’t know where or how to start. Today, I’ll talk about how we escaped a planning standstill and got the process started. In coming posts, we’ll explore how we:

• Defined Our Mission,
• Articulated Our Values, and
• Clarified a Vision for the Future of Our Company

Our process isn’t a definitive prescription by any means, but we hope that it offers some seeds of inspiration.

Through hustle and a measure of good fortune, our first four years were a success by most standards. Ted’s original vision for a lean, agile corporate law boutique that focused on early-stage startups had almost immediate product-market fit. Our revenue and earnings grew at a steady clip. Our client base expanded, almost exclusively through referrals from other clients. We went from one attorney to two. Then to three. Then quickly to four. Most young companies only dream of this kind of organic growth.

Yet we were the picture of an immature business — stuck working in our business, and not on our business.

The client work always came first. We never said no to work — and rarely pushed back on urgent turnaround requests — for fear that the next dry spell was right around the corner. There were slow weeks here and there, but much more common were the hectic times, when a couple of large deals would pile onto a long queue of smaller projects. If we had any capacity for work outside of client projects, it was spent on essential administrative maintenance, like paying the bills and running payroll. Over lunch, we’d talk about things we’d like to do to improve client experience and the efficiency of our service. We talked about building products to transform legal services. But we never seemed to have the time to execute on those ideas.

And a handful of times, the perfect storm of deals would hit, and things got really bad. Almost every client but a few got ignored. Commitments were broken. Our service suffered. Sleep was lost. Revenue was good during these patches, but almost everything else that mattered was bad.

The skies would eventually clear. We’d tell ourselves that we needed to add capacity to prevent it from happening again. And we did add people. But we’d just max-out our new, higher capacity again. And the cycle would repeat.

We were stuck in a reactive loop, with the feeling that there was no way out. While the company’s financial health was fine and we were growing, malignancies were festering:

• With increased headcount, silos and inefficiencies crept in
• We were struggling to stay personally engaged with our swelling client base
• We weren’t innovating the way we operated or delivered service
• The company was not reliably bringing us joy

We knew that we needed to take a step back and re-think how we were doing things. While we started Howell Legal from an emphatic place of vision, we always seemed too busy to clarify, refine, and execute on that vision. There was always too much work to do.

After struggling through this impasse for months, we finally broke through it. The answer was the simplest one, but also one of the hardest. We had to be like Neo in the Matrix. The bullets are coming at you, and you just put your hand up, and say….

“No.”

You carve out time for the planning and the execution of that plan, and you defend it mercilessly. You refuse to deliver work product on unreasonable timelines. You decline “networking” meetings without a clear purpose. You spread out your consultations with prospective clients. You [GASP!] let client calls go to voicemail.

As much as anything, this is a matter of priorities. You have to prioritize the business over any given client. If clients are reasonable and respect your business, they’ll understand. If they don’t understand, their dollars aren’t worth your time.

At the end of the day, we’re not talking about a lot of time either. We’re talking about a couple of focused hours a week. You’ll make progress. It’ll be slow at first, but when you look back after months, you’ll be shocked at how far you’ve come. That’s because when you’re working in your business, the best you can hope for is linear results. When you’re working on your business, the results compound, and compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe. From the same inputs, you’ll not only get quantitatively more output, but the output will also be qualitatively better.

Now we’ve got a target on the wall. Even though we’ve been here for five years, that target — which is still some years away — is our real Version 1.0. Having that mindset is more invigorating than we can describe.

In our next post, I’ll talk about the first leg of our journey to Version 1.0: Defining Our Mission. For now, I’ll leave you with a simple plea:

Make the time to decide what to be and go be it. It doesn’t take a lot of time. But that little time that it takes is absolutely sacred.