Every business owner reaches a moment when the next step is not so obvious. Hosts Brad and Michael kick off Season 24 with the lessons they learned from building their own firm. From the early days of moving fast and saying yes to every opportunity to navigating rapid growth, they reveal the challenges and turning points that shaped their journey. Learn how to avoid common pitfalls in your practice, build systems your team will actually follow, and make confident decisions when faced with the inevitable “what now?”
Listen to the full episode using the player below, or by visiting one of the links below. Contact ByrdAdatto if you have any questions or would like to learn more.
Transcript
*The below transcript has been edited for readability.
Intro: [00:00] Welcome to Legal 123s with ByrdAdatto. Legal issues simplified through real client stories and real-world experiences, creating simplicity in three, two, one.
Brad: [00:13] Welcome to the launch of Season 24. Wow, season 24 of the Legal 123s with ByrdAdatto. I’m your host, Brad Adatto, with my co-host, Michael Byrd.
Michael: [00:23] Brad, we are well on our way to 300 episodes and somehow have not run out of topics to discuss, or more importantly, ways to make fun of each other.
Brad: [00:33] Michael, it really does help that we have so much deep content to make fun of each other.
Michael: [00:37] True.
Brad: [00:37] And tell us, but I don’t remember, what is the theme for this season, Michael?
Michael: [00:42] Here we go. As business attorneys for healthcare practices, we meet a lot of interesting people and learn their amazing stories. This season’s theme is What Now? Each episode will involve a real client story with a high-pressure moment for that practice.
Brad: [00:59] What now? What a great question. I’m actually excited for our audience to learn about this season.
Michael: [01:04] Yes, and we have a fun framework that we’ll use throughout the season.
Brad: [01:08] Yes, and our framework is built on a reference to the high seas.
Michael: [01:13] Yes. Our friend and frequent guest, Dr. Grant Stevens, has a favorite quote that he even at one point made into a T-shirt: “Always be yourself, unless you can be a pirate, then always be a pirate.”
Brad: [01:26] Michael, first, I love that quote, and I want one of those T-shirts. So Grant, if you’re listening, please send me one. Second, Michael, are you suggesting that we’re going to talk about pirates this season? Please say yes. Please say yes. Please say yes.
Michael: [01:38] Well, first, you know the answer, Brad. Second, we’re not yet ready to reveal our framework. I did read an article recently that ranked the top five pirates of all time. Brad, this should be in your wheelhouse, so you can guess the only rule in true pirate fashion is that there are no rules.
Brad: [01:54] Great.
Michael: [01:54] There can be real-life pirates or fake pirates in your answer.
Brad: [02:09] All right. So I’m going to go first with, like, the moment. My opinion, audience members, you can disagree, write in, leave a quote if you don’t believe me, but I think the most famous fake pirates has to be, first off, Captain Jack Sparrow from Pirates of the Caribbean. And then, a little dating myself here, but the Dread Pirate Roberts from Princess Bride, another really good pirate. Maybe Captain Hook, I guess he was a pirate from Peter Pan. I really don’t know that many real pirates. I can think of Blackbeard. I know that he was a real pirate, Michael. But I’m pretty good at movie quotes. Ooh, One-Eye Willie from The Goonies. That was another fun one. That’s again, an ’80s reference, Michael.
Michael: [02:57] Yeah, there you go.
Brad: [02:58] That’s the ones I can think of off the top of my head. What do you have? What am I missing?
Michael: [03:02] It doesn’t surprise me. You did pretty good.
Brad: [03:04] Oh.
Michael: [03:04] Yeah.
Brad: [03:05] Easy.
Michael: [03:05] You did pretty good. So starting with number five, we have Captain Hook.
Brad: [03:10] Okay. All right.
Michael: [03:10] So you got that one. Number four, which I have to admit, I wasn’t familiar with either, Anne Bonny.
Brad: [03:18] Oh, yeah.
Michael: [03:18] Yeah.
Brad: [03:18] She’s a real pirate.
Michael: [03:19] A real pirate, yeah.
Brad: [03:20] Oh, yeah.
Michael: [03:20] And she’s-
Brad: [03:21] I forgot about her.
Michael: [03:22] … one of history’s most legendary female pirates.
Brad: [03:24] Yeah, she was not a good person from what I read a long time ago about her.
Michael: [03:28] Yeah. She was fearless, ruthless, and often tougher than the men around her.
Brad: [03:33] If I remember correctly, audience members, she actually got arrested and was in the Spanish Armada or something like that, and then they let her out because she was having a baby, and so they let her free.
Michael: [03:43] You know more than me. Yep.
Brad: [03:45] If I remember correctly, if that’s the same story.
Michael: [03:47] Number three, Captain Jack Sparrow.
Brad: [03:49] All right.
Michael: [03:50] Okay. Number two, Blackbeard.
Brad: [03:52] All right.
Michael: [03:52] Got that one as well.
Brad: [03:53] Yeah.
Michael: [03:54] Number one, Captain Barbossa.
Brad: [03:57] Oh.
Michael: [03:57] Yes.
Brad: [03:58] Sure.
Michael: [03:58] I figured you would get that one.
Brad: [03:59] Oh, yeah. That is the complete one.
Michael: [04:00] The complete pirate package.
Michael: [04:03] Yeah. Ruthless, intelligent, mutinous, funny, stylish, undead at one point, and somehow always back in power.
Brad: [04:12] That makes sense.
Michael: [04:12] A true pirate’s pirate is what the article said.
Brad: [04:16] All right. I guess if you were to ask me what my favorite pirate would be, if I had to, like, narrow it down to even the five you gave me, I’m still going to fall back to Jack Sparrow because I thought he was pretty funny. How about you?
Michael: [04:29] That’s a good one, yeah. I don’t have strong feelings about it, but in my mind, whenever I picture a pirate, I’m either picturing Blackbeard or Jack Sparrow.
Brad: [04:39] Yeah, that makes sense. I agree with you on that one.
Michael: [04:41] All right. Well, are you ready to jump into the first story?
Brad: [04:45] Let’s go. Let’s launch this season 24.
Michael: [04:47] We get to do one of your favorite things, Brad, for this first story.
Brad: [04:52] Don’t tell me. Do we get to talk about me?
Michael: [04:55] Kind of.
Brad: [04:56] Okay.
Michael: [04:57] We’re going to bring to life our nautical framework and talk about ByrdAdatto’s journey in opening our practice.
Brad: [05:04] So I’m going to repeat what I think I just heard you say, is that we’re going to talk about my favorite subject, Brad.
Michael: [05:11] Okay, I’m not going to fight you on this. I know that when I say ByrdAdatto, what you hear is Brad Adatto.
Brad: [05:18] Yeah, seriously. I think you just said Brad Adatto, right? But I am excited to talk about this journey through the lens of this framework you keep mentioning.
Michael: [05:25] Yes, yes. So let’s set it up. We have three different nautical avatars that people act like in their business, and it’ll help frame how we talk about this whole What Now? season. And right now we’ll just get into talking about these different nautical avatars, discuss the characteristics of each, and yes, Brad, the first one, everyone’s favorite, pirate mode.
Brad: [05:55] Pirate mode. Yeah, when someone is in pirate mode, audience, guess what? They’re acting like a pirate.
Michael: [06:02] They’re going fast and breaking things.
Brad: [06:04] Exactly. And it’s fun to act like a pirate. It’s exciting. It’s exhilarating. Almost all new businesses act like pirates in the beginning. They’re swept up in the energy that comes with it, and they’re just singly focused, like all pirates, surviving.
Michael: [06:19] Yes. They’re trying to generate revenues to keep the lights on. A lot of the fundamentals of running a business can kind of be put on the back burner with this singular crazy focus to make their business succeed. And Brad, we always say it’s fun, to Dr. Stephen’s point, Grant’s point, it’s always fun to act like a pirate until when?
Brad: [06:43] Basically you lose a limb or you die. I mean, figuratively speaking of course. We’re talking about businesses.
Michael: [06:49] Yes. Yes, Brad. The problem with acting like a pirate is that it’s a risky way to run a business. The lucky ones bump into a problem early enough in their business existence that it hurts enough that they want to stop acting like a pirate.
Brad: [07:03] Yes, it hurts, but what about the unlucky ones, Michael?
Michael: [07:08] Yeah. They get away with it long enough, and they love it, and they go from acting like a pirate to actually becoming a pirate.
Brad: [07:16] And those are the toughest ones to help. They’ve gotten away for so long acting like a pirate that they think they’re impervious to any of the risk of life of being a pirate.
Michael: [07:28] Yeah. Well said. So let’s kind of move to the other end of the spectrum with our next nautical avatar: acting like a cruise director.
Brad: [07:37] All right, audience members, I’m going to date myself again. Think of Julie McCoy leading the guests on “The Love Boat.”
Michael: [07:44] Oh, there it is. There it is, Brad, your second ’80s reference in the show already. And for the first episode of the season, we’re off to a pretty solid start.
Brad: [07:54] Yes.
Michael: [07:54] But you also probably lost most of our audience with “The Love Boat” reference.
Brad: [07:59] Probably.
Michael: [08:00] Why don’t you explain not “The Love Boat,” but the cruise director.
Brad: [08:04] Yeah, so the cruise directors can be complete opposite of the pirate. Pirate’s moving fast and breaking things, and the cruise director, they’re going to be more rigid. They’re not going to be as adaptable. You get on the boat with the cruise director, and they’re setting their criteria. They’re going to have everything in front of you, and then we’re going to go from A to B to C to D, and this is the route we’re going to take, and we’re not going to move off that route.
Michael: [08:27] Yeah. In terms of business, someone who’s acting like a cruise director may be keeping a checklist of compliance things to do, but the substance does not line up with doing the things.
Brad: [08:39] Yeah, and this could also make the business more complicated than necessary to have too many processes and too many complicated business structures that are back and forth. And this can actually get in the way of their ability to be strategic and visionary, and they have trouble pivoting when life sometimes starts to happen.
Michael: [08:56] Not to play psychologist too much, but someone acting like a cruise director may desire that sense of control by having this intense infrastructure to their business.
Brad: [09:08] Yeah, and I think the downside for the cruise director is they have these blind spots on the risks to the business. They have this false sense of security because they have all those great checklists, and they checked all the boxes, and everything, Michael, that should be done has been done.
Michael: [09:24] And to your point, they also tend to be less adaptable to the change that happens in real-life business and miss opportunities to be strategic in their business.
Brad: [09:33] Yes. And now, audience members, you’re probably waiting. So we’ve gone to two extremes. We got the pirate. We’ve got the cruise director. The final nautical avatar is the goal to hit, audience members, acting like a Navy SEAL.
Michael: [09:48] Love it. A SEAL is first and foremost strategic and protected because they have a team to have their back.
Brad: [09:56] Yeah. And the great thing about being a Navy SEAL is not only you have a team, every single team member knows what their job is and what the other job member is, and it’s because they’ve done a lot of training. And their motto that they use often is, “Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast,” meaning they’ve slowed everything down so much that they’re able to eventually accelerate because they have everything in place.
Michael: [10:19] And let’s acknowledge that you aren’t just one of these things. We use the word acting like because it’s easy to drift into acting like any of these avatars through the life cycle of a business. So for example, Brad, someone can build a team and be executing their business like a Navy SEAL, but then they may feel pressure from growth. They start to build systems, which is a good thing, but then because of time pressure, start acting like a cruise director.
Brad: [10:49] Absolutely, and someone can be acting like a Navy SEAL and be presented with a new exciting opportunity and revert to acting like a pirate to capitalize on this new opportunity because they’ll start moving things fast and breaking things.
Michael: [11:02] All right. This is the moment, Brad, where we get to talk about you. I mean ByrdAdatto.
Brad: [11:06] ByrdAdatto. Got it.
Michael: [11:07] Yes. So let’s bring it to life and talk about our journey at ByrdAdatto. Brad, you need to be vulnerable.
Brad: [11:15] Okay.
Michael: [11:16] Okay. This is the part where you get to reveal all, but not too much because we are on video.
Brad: [11:23] Okay.
Michael: [11:23] So why don’t you start and talk about did we ever act like pirates?
Brad: [11:30] Yes, audience members, we definitely were acting like pirates when we started this firm. It was real exciting. We had lots of things to do. We basically took every single job on. I mean, again, audience members, understand it was just seven people, and Michael and I were moving real fast and making quick decisions. In fact, most mornings Michael and I had a routine where we would drop off one of our kiddos and immediately, as we were pulling out of the carpool line, get on a call and start having conversations about the things we need to take care of that day, that week, that month. I mean, we were making big decisions because we were pirates. We could just shoot from the hip, literally.
Michael: [12:07] And we came from a cruise ship.
Brad: [12:09] Yeah.
Michael: [12:09] So it was really exciting.
Brad: [12:10] Yes.
Michael: [12:10] We had 23 partners at our prior firm. It was a great firm, but it was a cruise ship, and we were acting like cruise directors. And so getting to act like a pirate, I mean, Brad, I think we would have grown our hair out and gotten eye patches if they would have let us.
Brad: [12:29] Absolutely.
Michael: [12:29] I know. But there were some problems with acting like a pirate, right, besides the fun.
Brad: [12:34] Yes.
Michael: [12:35] We bumped into a few challenges along the way. And the one that sticks to mind the most is about a couple years into it, we hired our current director of people and culture, Chriselda, and she would come to us often, daily, as she was getting acclimated, and ask us what our policy was for this or that. Do you remember what we would say? What’s the policy?
Brad: [13:14] We have something like that somewhere in the ether. Or we thought we had one, but I guess it never got put together.
Michael: [13:28] Yes. Yeah, so it was a moment in time where we realized that it was time to grow up a little bit.
Michael: [13:40] I know.
Brad: [13:41] I know.
Michael: [13:41] We had a growing team, and so—
Brad: [13:44] Put the pirate hat away and pirate patches and—
Michael: [13:47] I know. I know.
Brad: [13:48] Monkey. Where is that monkey?
Michael: [13:49] I know. So we started adapting—
Brad: [13:54] Yes.
Michael: [13:54] And started building policies.
Brad: [13:55] Yes.
Michael: [13:57] Why don’t we pivot—
Brad: [14:00] Okay
Michael: [14:00] And—
Brad: [14:01] Other end of the spectrum, so pirate—
Michael: [14:02] Yes
Brad: [14:02] To cruise director.
Michael: [14:05] And we have acted like cruise directors before as well, right? Yeah. So we started adopting these policies, and I can remember you and I having conversations all the time. We would get so frustrated because we’d be like, “We said this, and it’s not happening,” or, “We adopted this policy, and it’s not happening.” And we had started building, and still currently have, a huge directory of policies that our team helped put in place to help deal with how do we do each things. But what we realized is that we had that false sense of security because once it came out of our lips, it was done, and we could move on to other things in our mind.
Brad: [14:49] Totally agree. I mean, that’s the problem when you’re acting like a cruise director, is that you can buckle down, really start putting together great policies that you really believe heavily in, and then you say, “Check the box. Everything is good. Let’s stay on target. Keep going down this route that we’re on.” And you’re spot on, Michael. You have this false sense of security that because Michael and Brad completely understand the policy, that then means everyone else on the cruise ship understands that same policy and/or that that’s a good policy.
Michael: [15:30] Yeah.
Brad: [15:30] So that’s the catch about getting so caught up in moving from one spectrum of the pirate all the way to the other end. You again have this, hate using the same word, but you truly have a false sense of security.
Michael: [15:44] So what did we do to solve that problem? How did we bring those policies to life?
Brad: [15:50] I don’t know, Michael. Maybe we should be talking about that in the second half of this podcast, so keep people around.
Michael: [15:56] Okay. Well, let’s go to break, and on the other side, we’ll talk about things that we’ve done well, the things that we’ve done well when we’ve been acting like Navy SEALs, and have some practical takeaways for practices that are opening a practice.
Access+: [16:10] Many business owners use legal counsel as a last resort, rather than as a proactive tool that can further their success. Why? For most, it’s the fear of unknown legal costs. ByrdAdatto’s Access+ program makes it possible for you to get the ongoing legal assistance you need, for one predictable monthly fee. That gives you unlimited phone and email access to the legal team, so you can receive feedback on legal concerns as they arise. Access+, a smarter, simpler way to access legal services. Find out more. Visit byrdadatto.com today.
Brad: [16:44] Welcome back to Legal 123s with ByrdAdatto. I’m your host, Brad Adatto, with my co‑host, Michael Byrd. Now, Michael, for those who don’t know, we have a new season, and this theme, it’s What Now? This first episode, we are exploring what now when someone makes the decision to open a legal practice, maybe called ByrdAdatto, illustrating our favorite topic, honestly, me. I mean, talking about me, more about me than Michael. But as we keep our audience on track, let’s really start talking about ByrdAdatto again, and we were talking about a little of the pirate moments. Maybe give some more recaps on some of our pirate moments.
Michael: [17:22] Yeah, and really, we are talking about us because these principles apply to opening a medical practice.
Brad: [17:29] Sure.
Michael: [17:29] And so first, kind of a reframe, we have the three nautical avatars. We got the pirate mode, which is so much fun.
Brad: [17:37] It’s so much fun.
Michael: [17:37] I’ll talk more in a minute. We have the cruise director, kind of that rigid, have a lot of policies, sort of thing..
Brad: [17:50] Stick to your playbook.
Michael: [17:51] Stick to your playbook. And then we have the ideal Navy SEAL mode, which we haven’t talked a lot about yet other than illustrating what it is.
Brad: [18:00] Yeah.
Michael: [18:00] But I can’t help but reflect thinking about pirate mode and how much fun that was. I remember one of the first days that we were down in our office, so we’d probably been open for a month or so, because in true pirate fashion, when we opened our practice, our space wasn’t ready.
Brad: [18:23] Correct.
Michael: [18:23] Our website wasn’t ready.
Brad: [18:24] Correct.
Michael: [18:25] And our system wasn’t ready.
Brad: [18:27] Correct.
Michael: [18:28] And so we were in cardboard tables in a temporary space using cell phones and hotspots to contact our clients, and still had a blast.
Brad: [18:39] Still had a blast.
Michael: [18:40] Tell us about our first sign that we had.
Brad: [18:43] Oh, yeah. And we had a glass door that was the way to get in and out of the temporary space. And so my daughter, the day before we opened, decided that first everyone needed their own little welcome to the firm. So she drew a picture for each person and then drew our logo that we then taped, in violation apparently of the building’s code, to the door. We still have that framed in one of the offices. But it was really funny because several of the ladies on the floor that weren’t part of our firm stopped me in the hallway and said, “I love your logo.”
Michael: [19:18] And I remember when we first got into our actual space, and we had all this new furniture, and it had to be the first day, and you came in at the end of the day holding a Miller Lite, and you opened the cap and flipped it at me, and it went behind the furniture, the brand new furniture. And it, by the way—
Brad: [19:38] It’s still there.
Michael: [19:39] Is still there to this day. And I just remember thinking, “Wow, we can do whatever we want. We can have a beer at the end of the day if we want to.” And we kept beer in the fridge, so there would be impromptu happy hours at the close of the day, and there was so much kind of fun energy. You can’t recapture that.
Brad: [20:01] No, that’s some fun pirate energy there. So let’s talk about some mistakes when we were acting like a pirate or a cruise director. Let’s talk about how Brad, yes I am now referring to myself in third person since it’s all about me, was able to save the day and start really acting like he’s always been, the Navy SEAL that he is.
Michael: [20:19] Okay. Well, I’m not going to debate you because it’s not even worth it to correct you at this point, but let’s do talk about some wins that we had in acting like Navy SEALs.
Brad: [20:31] Yeah, and I’d like you to go first, though.
Michael: [20:33] Okay.
Brad: [20:33] Think back to the beginning as we were having our little pirate remembrance there. What were some of the shifts that we made to leave pirate mode and really start acting like Navy SEALs?
Michael: [20:48] Well, we had a couple of advantages that kept us in check. First is that we were part of leadership for a firm, and so we had some experience in running a business. So we somewhat knew what to do. But I would say the biggest advantage is that, earmuffs, Brad, we had each other.
Brad: [21:09] Yeah.
Michael: [21:10] Having a team from the get‑go helped us with focus and being strategic. We were really committed to not chasing shiny objects.
Brad: [21:19] Yes.
Michael: [21:20] Even though we were going fast and breaking things, we would not allow ourselves to get distracted, and we would hold ourselves to that because it was so tempting—
Brad: [21:28] Yeah
Michael: [21:28] Because it was so much fun.
Brad: [21:29] And I will say that not only holding ourselves accountable, but that focus was important. When we started, we had all these opportunities of other attorneys wanting to join our firm, and we were very focused on who we were as a firm, which allowed us to stay who we are today.
Michael: [21:44] Exactly. And we had our partner Jay by our side, and we had outside help. I love our strategy that we deployed of doing a lot of outsourcing at the beginning. And so we had experts. We had marketing and CFO services who played a huge role in helping us build our business and build our practice at the beginning. And so I would say our biggest win, us acting like Navy SEALs even in the early years, was that we created a plan that grounded us in this focus we’ve been talking about. And to your point, we were able to not get distracted by some exciting opportunities that weren’t exactly on point with what we were doing.
Brad: [22:35] Yeah, and I’ll add to that is one of the things we were able to do in our first year, leaving a firm that was acting like cruise directors, although we were acting like pirates, there was a Navy SEAL moment near the end of our first year where we said, “We need to have an offsite to make sure we are good with our vision and what other things we need to focus on—our mission and our core values,” which every single year, audience members, we still do. We still have an offsite where the partners leave and continue to look at what is our vision. So that was another example. Even though we were in pirate mode and having fun, and I believe we did shoot guns on our very first partner—very Texas like—but still.
Michael: [23:17] Yeah. I do have a question too, Brad, because you mentioned we set out this vision, and yet probably within months after laying out that vision, we had an opportunity to do something that wasn’t a part of that vision. So talk about how we approached it, and did we act like pirates or Navy SEALs?
Brad: [23:44] That’s a great point. We had an opportunity. There was a gentleman that you met in Vegas named Alex Tiersch, who had this trade association called the American Medical Spa Association, sometimes called AMSPA. And he had this vision of growing this trade association, but it really needed to partner with lawyers who actually understood this area. And for some reason he thought you might, but when he met me, he realized that I did.
Michael: [24:15] You were the closer.
Brad: [24:16] I was the closer, obviously. We had this opportunity to open a Chicago office, and that was not in our next 12‑month plan.
Michael: [24:24] Or five‑year plan.
Brad: [24:24] Or five‑year plan, or probably 10‑year plan. And the interesting thing was, going back to a little bit of a pirate‑mode moment, we made that decision while we had just dropped off our kids and said, “Okay, we’re going to decide to open a Chicago office.” Now, making that decision, we then went into Navy SEAL mode. We said, “What does that look like? Who’s going to be joining? What is the space like?” And the day we opened the Chicago office, I flew up there with a team member, and we spent a lot of time training them on who we were as a firm, what the expectations were, our systems and processes, and how to operate day to day. It was a very calculated process. From the moment we spoke with Alex to the moment we opened the firm was probably about four or five months.
Michael: [25:18] Yeah.
Brad: [25:19] And it launched and did great. That was more of a Navy SEAL moment because we did have to slow down, but we were able to accelerate after that fact.
Michael: [25:28] Slow is smooth, smooth is fast, right?
Brad: [25:30] Yeah.
Michael: [25:31] All right. I want to flip it to you for another question so you get to do your favorite thing and keep talking. Let’s talk to the audience about how we started acting like Navy SEALs back when we realized we were acting like cruise directors with all those policies that we were getting frustrated weren’t getting implemented.
Brad: [25:54] Well, and we realized, audience members, was that you could have the best policies ever, but if no one knows about them, they’re irrelevant. So we spent a lot of time thinking about, “Well, how do we train people?” And that’s the, uh, the idea was birthed, was birthed at Out of University, which is an accredited, uh, legal organization that actually teaches lawyers and its staff, um, about how to run a, a firm. And so, uh, some of it has to do with legal, you know, dealing with regulatory implications, corporate structuring, down to the details of management service organizations and employment agreements. Um, but a lot of it also has to do with workshops and better understanding systems and trainings and how to use, um, how to follow policy and why the policy’s important. And what I’m really proud about was because of the uniqueness of us being a, a business law firm working with healthcare clients, we were able to really, uh, focus our team on what they need to know. A lot of these large trade associations for lawyers, when we look at this, what they call them CLEs, continuing legal education, when we look at those things, there really weren’t anything on point as to what we were doing, and our, and our focus was so strong in certain areas of healthcare that we really wanted to train our, our team. So that was a really great moment in time when we had that aha moment where we believed we are, we were already professionally speaking at medical trade associations. Why can’t we do that with our own?
Michael: [27:19] Yeah.
Brad: [27:19] And so the ability to build that internal system, which we now have with Monday School, Grand Rounds, and ByrdAdatto University, and continuing to diversify and keep training at the forefront, has become a very important element of the firm.
Michael: [27:32] I have to give you credit, Brad, because ByrdAdatto University really became your passion project and has become an integral part of how we do things beyond the trainings and the ongoing education. Another thing that I thought we did well acting like Navy SEALs was realizing around that time of friction that we needed another team member to help us in certain areas. So we started working with a business coach and advisor to help us identify blind spots in our leadership skills, grow those skills, and be that outside voice. We’ve been working with him now for almost 10 years.
Brad: [28:22] Yeah, exactly. And that outside voice really challenged us. But Michael, we’re almost out of time, so I’ll give my first takeaway, followed by you. I’ll say it this way: although I love Grant’s shirt that says, “Always be yourself, unless you’re a pirate, then always be a pirate,” because we all want to be a pirate when starting a business, I hope we demonstrated in today’s podcast that to be successful, your business eventually has to move away from acting like a pirate and move more toward acting like a Navy SEAL. That’s what truly allows a business to grow and scale. Your final thoughts.
Michael: [28:58] Yeah. For anyone opening a practice, I would start with this: really spend the time to develop your vision. What does success look like for you? You need a North Star, or you don’t know where you’re going. You don’t have a map for what you’re trying to achieve. Then start building your strategy and your team. If you do those things, you’ll start implementing the Navy SEAL energy we’ve been talking about.
Brad: [29:30] Perfect. Well, audience members, we will continue with season 24. We’ll be back next Wednesday when we explore adding a partner—what now?
Brad: [29:38] Thanks again for joining us today, and remember, if you liked this episode, please subscribe. Make sure to give us a five-star rating and share with your friends.
Michael: [29:46] You can also sign up for the ByrdAdatto newsletter by going to our website at byrdadatto.com.
Outro: [29:53] ByrdAdatto is providing this podcast as a public service. This podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast does not constitute legal advice, nor does it establish an attorney-client relationship. Reference to any specific product or entity does not constitute an endorsement or recommendation by ByrdAdatto. The views expressed by guests are their own, and their appearance on the program does not imply an endorsement of them or any entity they represent. Please consult with an attorney on your legal issues.
