Your Zone of Genius - Cheralyn Stevenson - Episode # 012

Solo de Facto

Entrepreneurial attorneys often have a lot to deal with; between making sure they have plenty of clients and keeping their business afloat, it can be a lot to handle. Cheralyn Stevenson is the CEO and Co-Founder of Changists, and she joins host Kory Underdown to talk about different ways new attorneys can help manage their businesses more efficiently.

Takeaways

• Attorneys running their own solo practice need to know it’s ok if they don’t know every little detail about running a business.
• Law school teaches you about law but it does not teach you how to make a living practicing it.
• Never stop being a student. There is always more you can learn and grow from. Join groups of other entrepreneurial attorneys and see what you can learn from each other.
• People lie, numbers don’t. It’s important to show new attorneys the money they are losing if they don’t collect from their clients.
• Anonymous surveys are a great way for people to share their opinions on your firm and it allows you to know what you need to change.
• Work smarter, not harder. Don’t worry about outsourcing some stuff you might not understand to someone who does if it makes your job easier.
• You don’t have to worry about doing business with everyone who wants to do business with you. Some people just aren’t a good fit.

Quote of the show:

0:32 “I think that I would love for attorneys to know, you don't know everything about business and that's okay. Your superpower is building a great team. So building a team, either fractional or full-time whose superpowers are in the areas that yours aren't is really key.

You should really spend time doing what you love and what brings you joy. For example, cleaning toilets and folding laundry does not bring me joy nor can I do those things without stress and an extraordinary amount of time. So I outsourced that. And if you think about law school, it teaches the foundational principles and the theory of law, and often law school erases the creativity and the curiosity that law students come in.

They end up stopping reading for fun. They're not creating, they are not writing fictional stories. I'm not dancing, doing yoga, all of those things. Instead you're taught that there's only one correct way to do things and to think in binary terms. And so because law schools teach about law, but not how to make a living, practicing it.”

Links

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cheralynstevenson/
• Website: https://changists.com/

Ways to Tune in:

• Amazon Music - https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/923f06e0-f8e6-4cb3-9472-5b4f460c496b/solo-de-facto
• Apple Podcast - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/solo-de-facto/id1586010951
• Spotify - ​​https://open.spotify.com/show/6uooFxN96HtKCoFuI3LJ3w?si=ImsDozpARi2_7J4_oWLqDg&dl_branch=1
• Stitcher - https://www.stitcher.com/show/solo-de-facto
• YouTube - https://youtu.be/GMJn8_lnv14