Achieve Your Financial Goals With These 5 Key Financial Players with Chelsea Williams

best law firm business development delegation financial habits financial players financial strategy mindset Aug 25, 2022

Anyone who runs a business or law firm can’t have the same setup forever. If you want to grow and achieve your financial dreams and have time for yourself, you need to start gathering the five key financial players into your team. You can’t do everything alone, and that’s not a bad thing. In fact, you can do so much more when you have the right people supporting you.

In this episode, Chelsea Williams returns to the show to discuss the five key financial players and how they all contribute to your firm’s financial strategy. She also talks about how to create good financial habits.

If you would like to learn more about achieving your financial goals through the help of these five financial players, then this episode is for you.

Here are three reasons why you should listen to this episode

Discover the role and responsibilities of the 5 financial players for better delegation and communication.
Learn how to grow your team and achieve financial goals by hiring the right people.
Understand how your personal habits and mindset will impact the way you manage your law firm.

Resources

Interested in creating a crystal clear vision for your "ultimate law firm success”? Grab a FREE Law Firm Expansion Coaching Session with one of our coaches. Slots are limited, so grab yours before they’re gone!
Want to implement what you’ve learnt in this episode? Download the Action Guide, a workbook designed to help you process and implement the knowledge gained from this interview.
Check out these previous Profit with Law episodes:

Connect with Chelsea: Email I Facebook I LinkedIn I Instagram I Website
Profit First: Transform Your Business from a Cash-Eating Monster to a Money-Making Machine by Mike Michalowicz
Who Not How: The Formula to Achieve Bigger Goals Through Accelerating Teamwork by Dan Sullivan
The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It by Michael Gerber
Find Your Unicorn Space: Reclaim Your Creative Life in a Too-Busy World by Eve Rodsky

Episode Highlights

Know Your Team Members and Their Duties

We need to know what we don’t know. Most of the time, there should be different people for different parts of the business.
When Chelsea wanted to figure out her marketing, she used to think it was a one-man team; in reality, it was a team of four or five people.
This also applies to your financial team. You need to understand that there’s a difference between a bookkeeper and a CFO.
In the episode, Moshe shares how there should be two people in the sales process. One gets the client excited about the opportunity, and the other closes.

Why You Should Grow Your Team

For entrepreneurs, their business is a reflection of their habits and mindsets.
Remember, as your law firm grows, you need to hire others to do work (like bookkeeping) for you.
If you still insist on doing work unrelated to your expertise, think about how many billable hours you’re trading off.

Moshe: “The reality is if you put people into those positions, you're going to achieve your success much faster, you're gonna accelerate that. It's going to require you to front some cash, which means that you need to have some investment in your business. The reality is that is the difference between if you look at the people who succeed fairly quickly and the ones who struggle and take forever because the ones who struggle and take forever are constantly asking, ‘how can I do this?’”

The Power of Delegation

Don’t think that if you want something done right, you need to do it yourself.
Instead, implement SOPs (standard operating procedures) so you can create consistent results no matter who takes the role.
Entrepreneurs and business owners will find themselves being pulled to different directions. Learn to be very intentional about what you do.
Find your unicorn space or something you love and excel at. If you’re a law firm owner and your unicorn space is not law, just bring on someone who will take that role.

Chelsea: “There's a lot of different directions we can get pulled as business owners, we have to be very intentional with the direction that we allow ourselves to get pulled based on what that is.”

The Bookkeeper vs the CFO

The bookkeeper or accountant makes sure your finances are in order month to month.
The CFO then makes sense of the numbers and designs a financial roadmap. They should create KPIs and assess ROIs.
Key performance indicators are the needle movers that help businesses reach where they want to be.
Bookkeepers are not CFOs. You need to have a basic understanding of financial concepts, but you’ll eventually need to hire someone to be the CFO.

The Role of Tax Preparers

People involved with taxes also have different roles. Tax preparers are different from someone who prepares a tax strategy.
Tax preparers are focused mainly on preparing tax returns.
Meanwhile, tax strategists look into your financial goals, entity type, tax strategy utilization, and more.
Chelsea recommends looking for a tax preparer who can also create a tax strategy.

The Role of the Advisor or Retirement Planner

It is never too early to get a financial advisor. It’s good to know when you can jump in when you’re ready.
Just start getting into the habit of saving for retirement. You don’t need to start with a huge amount of money, even just 1% of profits is good as an initial amount.
Remember, retirement is not an event but the result of your habits over time.

Chelsea: “It is never too soon to start planning for retirement, even if you don't have $150,000 sitting around to give to an investment planner. Knowing [and] having clarity around when you can jump in, what you can do now, what to work towards, and meeting with this person on a regular basis is crucial.”

Chelsea: “Profit is not an event. Profit is a habit. Retirement is not an event, it is the result of a habit that you have created in the prior 20 years or whatever the case may be. Success is not an event. It is a habit. These are all fundamental things in every area of our business, that really matter.”

The Role of the Business Banker

Don’t underestimate a good working relationship with a business banker at your bank.
Chelsea shares that when the pandemic started, financial relief was given through the Paycheck Protection Program and needed to be claimed in a participating bank.
She observed how people who already had existing working relationships with a business banker had smoother transactions for financial relief.

Build a Relationship with the Five Financial Players

Remember that business is personal. Your personal relationship and communication habits will impact your business.
It’s crucial to know how to communicate effectively with your team, including the financial players.
It’s so easy to set up a business today. However, if you want to grow your business, you need capital and good investments.
If you have a relationship with a banker, you’ll have more clarity on how to get capital to fuel your business.

Chelsea: “Business is personal. Your personal relationship and communication habits are your business relationship and communication habits. These are humans, these are people. People make mistakes. The better the relationship, the better the communication, and the better the results. Knowing how to communicate with everybody in your business, including these financial players is crucial.”

Be Intentional with Strategy and Relationships

Nowadays, there are fully online banks. Law firms just need a bank that offers trust accounts.
Have more than one bank, since their lending requirements will be different. Treat business bankers well and create a relationship.
Creating a relationship like this is becoming rare due to the pandemic. It can make you stand out.
While you don’t need to borrow money immediately, it’s good to have a safety net for when you want to grow your business.
Business growth is not about dumping money on various plans. It’s about analyzing your current situation and knowing what needs to be done so there can be ROI.

Chelsea: “I want to highlight that is strategy. So we're not just going into a plan, or like a marketing plan, or dumping money into a new software without fully analyzing what needs to happen for this to be an ROI. What are the variables that I need to be aware of? How can I make sure that I really leverage this decision and this investment so that I can put the money back in my line of credit, or pay off my credit card, or whatever the case may be, so these aren't just knee-jerk decisions. These are very well thought out — consulting your team, financial and others to make sure that what you're doing for your next step of growth makes sense and you can measure its success.”

How the Financial Players Interact

Your key financial players may not be communicating in the same room; it’s about communicating with them when needed.
For example, your bookkeeper may need to communicate with your CFO to ensure they’re on the same page.
Then, the retirement planner can help guide the CFO when creating the financial strategy.
As the business owner, you need to make sure these key players are interacting and you yourself understand what they’re doing.

Chelsea: “You have to hold yourself accountable. You can't just dump your data into your bookkeeper's lap and expect not to answer questions. You can't get the financials and not look at them and then be upset when they're not helpful to you, because you're in a state of reaction. [When] you need those financials that you haven't looked at for the past nine months and then you get upset, you have to hold yourself accountable to the information, you have to hold yourself accountable to the relationship [by] asking questions. I get this response a lot where this is probably a dumb question, but no, it's not. And guess what, at the end of the day, you're the one that needs to know because you're the one that's going to suffer if you don't ask and get the answer to that question, understand it for yourself.”

Chelsea’s Offer and Advice

Chelsea helps her clients build a budget that projects revenue goals over 12 months.
You can’t measure what you can’t see. After setting a revenue goal, you need to know what numbers you need to collect. This then becomes your operational objective.
Be intentional about your habits.

Chelsea: “A budget is not good if you sit down and you build it out once a year. And then next year, you look at it to see what you did. You got to use it consistently, at least monthly, and hold yourself accountable.”

About Chelsea

Chelsea Williams is the Founder and Financial Guru of Core Solutions Group, Inc., a legal industry financial consulting firm. With over a decade of accounting experience, Chelsea helps her clients achieve financial freedom, and security, and get their time back. She provides full-service accounting, monthly budget reviews, forecasting, strategic planning, and retirement strategy.

Chelsea has been featured in the Top 100 in Finance Magazine, highlighted in Marquis Who’s Who 2021, and interviewed in several podcasts including Grow Your Law Firm, Velocity Work, Hiring and Empowering Solutions, Wealthy Woman Lawyer, The Lean Law Firm, and more!

Interested in Chelsea’s work? Check out Your Core Solution.

You can also connect with her on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and email ([email protected]).

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