Most lawyers are jumping into hot water, both feet first, hoping that hard work and gumption will get them the success they’re looking for. But all that gets them is burnout.
Part-time or full-time, there’s one business decision that changes everything.
When we launch our firms (and yes, even our legal careers), we often do what we think we’re supposed to do, instead of intentionally choosing how much time and energy we will spend. Choosing how much you’re going to put into your business — without a plan and too late in the game — leads to failure, burnout, and unnecessary stress.
Your business will take as much as you give it.
If you say you’ll only be part-time, that’s cool. But chances are, you were conditioned to “give it your all,” so you’ll feel like you’re not doing “enough” (whatever that means), and so instead of working a little, you’ll be working a lot.
Choosing whether you’re part-time or full-time isn’t just about the number of hours you work. It’s about underestimating effort. Without a plan, you’ll most certainly experience financial and operational stressors.
When solos try to push their business forward without a plan that matches their capacity and long-term goals of what they want to see in their personal life, they feel exhausted, disillusioned, and confused.
That’s because they think the way to be successful is to do MORE. But your business will take as much as you give it (and so much more). Unless your resources, systems, and processes are set up right, your business won’t give back.
The business decision that changed everything for me wasn’t whether to go out on my own. It was about what I was willing to give to my business.
You can do what everyone else does, or you can evaluate your financial runway, define your personal bandwidth and availability (what I like to call capacity), and then decide on your level of commitment and how that measures up to your goals.
If you want to feel confident that your firm is giving back what you put into it, you’ve got to do three main things:
- Evaluate your financial runway (and please, ftlog, have a spreadsheet of your expenses)
- Define your personal bandwidth and availability
- Decide on the level of commitment you will give towards your goals (personal, professional, and for your firm)
To be a successful solo, you need to know how you’re spending your energy (financially, personally, and professionally) and you need to be willing to shift to make it align with what feels great for you, not what other people tell you to do.
Your job as a business owner is to determine YOUR best and unique way to solve the issues in front of you: for clients, for yourself, and for your firm.
At the end of the day, all solos want two things: to feel confident as business owners, and for our businesses to be sustainable.
I’ve mentioned a time or two (or a gazillion) that I built a multi-million dollar law firm from scratch. My 100–120 hour weeks. At the office before sunrise, leaving long after the sun set. My blood. My sweat. My many many many wine-laden tears.
And the thing is, we were successful. I was a household name at a certain level in town. People knew me. People respected me.
But did they know how exhausted and burned out and stressed I was?
I doubt it.
Because I didn’t show it.
I was building a successful business, but I was dying inside. I wasn’t running my business. My business was running me.
I wasn’t running my business.
My business was running me.
When I started diving into Human Design, a tool I use for reflection with my clients and for myself, I realized that being a 5/1 Emo Projector meant that even though I COULD DO the work and push through by sheer force and willpower, the truth was that I SHOULDN’T do that.
By doing that, I was draining my life force. My ability to recover. My ability to heal. I was killing myself trying to keep up with what I thought I was supposed to do.
And, if you’re a regulated pro reading this, you know what I’m talking about. You know exactly what it means to push and force and burn out. We all do.
Which is why I changed the one most important thing I could: I changed how I worked.
And when I changed how I worked, my business blew up (in a good way!).
The most satisfying part isn’t that I’m successful. It’s that when I do better, when I act better, when I work better, that I make my profession better.
We all deserve a profession that treats us the way we want to be treated.
In 2021, a solo lawyer here in town approached me. She’d had her firm for over five years, but she was struggling.
She tied her self-worth to her business success, case outcomes, and bank account balance.
She knew lack of consistency and routines, waking up in an unpleasant environment, and not having a clear plan for growth was holding her back. She knew the problems were interconnected — she just didn’t know where to start.
That’s where I came in.
She had a general practice and wanted to narrow down her practice areas. She was constantly reinventing the wheel and spending too much time researching how to do new things and how much to charge. She shifted from family law to criminal defense to wills and successions – all in one day. Then, to top things off, she also had a government contract.
She didn’t have established routines. She started every day feeling badly about herself. Unproductive. Guilty. Trapped.
She was unhappy with her living situation and felt trapped there, too.
She needed help with financial planning and budgeting. She had more money in savings than in her operating account, no retirement, and a f*ckton of student loans. Her debt-to-income ratio was 88%.
She needed help marketing her business. She had no clear direction.
As a 5/2 Sacral ManiGen, she’s meant to make decisions through yes or no options, to move quickly and skip steps, to have her hands in more than one area at a time that lit her up, and to create spaces where she felt safe and secure.
Instead, she had none of those things.
- She berated herself for not having structure when she was meant for FLOW.
- She thought she was failing because she wasn’t doing what everyone else was doing.
It took us two years to untangle what was holding her back, and another year for her to heal from launching out of alignment and under-resourced.
Together, we addressed each of these things systematically.
- She moved into an apartment she actually enjoys living in.
- She gets to court every morning early and wakes up excited to go to work.
- She has a clear set of practice areas and a clear pipeline for new clients.
- Her work qualified her for public service loan forgiveness. We looked at her promissory note. We got her on a better payment plan.
You see, there’s always a way to work on the underpinnings of your life so that you can show up in your business the way you want to.
But if you’ve got stuff underneath the surface, pulling at you and keeping your brain turning all the time, you’re doing yourself — and your firm — a disservice.
The legal industry wants us to run our firms like BigLaw does: fast and furious, jumping without looking, billing unreasonable hours, and focused only on proving our worth through productivity.
I don’t want that for us.
I want us to be aligned; to match our personal energy to our business and career goals.
We aren’t just lawyers. We’re humans.
Humans who want to help others. To do the right thing. To not fight unnecessarily. To not add to the noise or the waste.
Don’t play the game. Don’t pretend you’re someone you’re not.
When you’re struggling, know that you’re not alone. Someone else is always going through what you’re going through. You can keep teetering. Or you can evaluate your financial runway.
Define your capacity. Decide your commitment. Your business will take as much as you give it, but the real question is whether what you’re giving matches what you actually get back.
I’m here when you’re on the edge, ready to feel more confident with sustainable workflows and a real plan that gets you what you want, not what everyone else claims to have. Your best first step: book a Roadmap to Freedom session. In just two hours, we’ll get you the clarity you need on what to focus on first, with a mini-plan to execute. You got this, because I’ve got you.
👋🏽 Hi, I’m🌞 Sheila! I’ve spent 25+ years building and running law firms. I’ve mentored hundreds of lawyers, spoken to thousands more up on CLE stages, and I know what it really takes to run a successful, ethical, regulated business without burning out. I help lawyers and other licensed professionals make smarter decisions, set boundaries that stick, and build practices that actually work for them (not the other way around). 🔗Let’s create a practice and a life you actually want.
#JoyfulAndThrivingLawyer #DoItYourWay ⚖️
