Working in Your Business vs. Working on Your Business
There’s a reason you refer to yourself as a “lawyer” and not a small business owner or CEO. Primarily, you practice law. Most of what you do is better captured by the term lawyer than by either of the latter. Or is it?
You may or may not already know it, but your entire role changed when you became the owner of a small law firm. Now, in addition to being a lawyer, you became a manager and an executive. You became an officer and an owner. In short, you took on the role of running a business without giving up your former role as a lawyer. You now have two jobs.
And too many people neglect their new job. They assume that, because they were good at practicing law, they must necessarily be good at running a firm. Nothing could be further from the truth. The two roles are entirely different and require a different set of skills.
Foremost among these skills is the ability to mentally distinguish between your performance as a lawyer and your performance as a manager of the firm. You could be killing it as counsel and still dropping the ball as a leader in your firm. And you already know how to tell whether you’re doing a good job as a lawyer. So how do you go about ensuring that you’re just as competent at working on your business as working in it?
Your Financials
The first step is to get a firm grasp of your firm’s financials. You need to fully understand your firm’s financial statements and what they mean. Balance sheets, income statements, and statements of cash flow are your friends, not your enemies, and they’re all trying to tell you something. They want to tell you about the health and future of your company, if only you’ll listen.
The best way to ensure that you have up-to-date financial statements is by ensuring that the day-to-day bookkeeping is being handled competently. Modern software will automatically generate new financial statements on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis. But in order to get access to what are essentially summaries of your everyday transactions, you need to ensure that those transactions are being entered efficiently and competently. That’s where your bookkeeper comes in.
An effective bookkeeper is the best way to ensure that the information you’re working with when you’re deciding on important matters regarding the present and future of your firm is accurate and up to date. You’re not doing yourself any favors if you take the time to interpret your financials if the data those financials are based on are inaccurate or unreliable.
Contact Us!
Are you looking for a qualified bookkeeper who specializes in the operations of small law firms? Look no further! Contact us today at the form below and we’ll be glad to get you on your way to a fuller understanding of your firm and its operations.