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According to this law firm owner, remaining “in love” with your legal firm remains crucial to achieving success — especially during a period of prolonged uncertainty.
Caralee Fontenele is the director of Collective Family Law in Queensland and manages her own coaching platform, Scalable Law. Speaking recently on The Lawyers Weekly Show, she revealed how she sustains her passion for running a law firm.
Whilst emphasising the sense of purpose that underpins her business ownership, Ms Fontenele opened up about the bitterness that can often build during difficult periods.
“It starts out by having the realisation that, ‘I’m burning out. I’m actually really starting to hate and resent this business’. The challenges are then not being able to pick and choose every single file that comes through the door because you now need cash flow. The reality of keeping the doors open. You are overworked and underpaid. You are working way too many hours, and you don’t know where to best spend your time.
“Whatever it might be, there’s hard things that you go through and patches, and you do lose love for your business and you gain something else which is called resentment. And that’s the worst thing that you can have in your business,” she acknowledged.
“Unlike employees, they can leave tomorrow. We can’t; we’re stuck. Once you’ve made the decision to be in your business as a business owner, there is really no way out, except either selling or closing. So we have to get through these times.”
Ms Fontenele spoke about strategies to avoid feelings of resentment and maintain being “in love” with the legal firm you run:
“Once you start really working on your business, rather than in it, and your business starts supporting your life, rather than your life supporting the business — that’s when ... it’s much easier to stay in love with your business,” she said.
Ms Fontenele reflected on her time as a lawyer and encouraged others to prioritise their underlying purpose for being in the industry.
“The business is about impacting and resolving [your clients’] legal pain points. That’s what we do, right? So remembering and getting back to that core of why you’re passionate about the area of law that you practise,” she said.
Being a mother of a 21-year-old legal student, now working in her business, has also enabled new prospects to evolve.
“My thinking has been, ‘maybe this business is going to be a legacy business for my family’, which gives me more purpose and excitement about the business. Or maybe it’s a legacy business for someone else’s family, another lawyer that comes through here and wants to own a law firm.
“So, there’s opportunities there. I think that’s a really exciting prospect,” she mused.
The transcript of this podcast episode was slightly edited for publishing purposes. To listen to the full conversation with Caralee Fontenele, click below: