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Using the new financial year to reset
As the new financial year commences, an award-winning sole practitioner highlights the golden opportunity it provides SME law firms to pause, reflect, and strategically recalibrate.
Grace Robbie
In a recent episode of The Boutique Lawyer Show, Claire Styles, the founder and principal of C Legal and the winner of the Sole Practitioner category at the 2023 Women in Law Awards, advised SME law firm owners to use this new financial year to reflect on the past year’s accomplishments and setbacks and establish clear, intentional goals for the year ahead.
“The new financial year is just a perfect opportunity for us to have a moment and reflect on the year that has been and also what we want the new year to look like,” she said.
For law firms, Styles stressed how this period serves as a moment to reflect on professional growth, past achievements, and challenges encountered. Such reflection allows firms to establish meaningful growth and strategically plan how they want to navigate the year ahead.
“Really, this is our new year for business. So it’s really taking that mindset of not necessarily resolutions that we make on 1 January, but goal setting and looking back on the year to see what worked, what didn’t work, and how we want to live our lives in the next year and future as well,” she said.
Amid the relentless demands and the need to wear multiple hats, Styles underscored how SME law firms can easily become engulfed in the constant rush of running a firm, which can eventually take a personal and professional toll.
“We kind of get caught up in this rat race, which is totally understandable because work comes in, you get busy, and you just go with the flow of running the firm, and that can take a toll on us as lawyers,” she said.
Styles indicated that overcoming this cycle of thinking hinges on being intentional and strategic about how one invests one’s limited time.
“It comes back to being extremely intentional about where we put our time. Unless you are intentional, you will get caught up in your matters, and you will get caught up in politics, in the firm, or what decisions you need to be making for the business,” she said.
She revealed that she implements this intentional approach by conducting quarterly reviews throughout the year. This method allows her to make ongoing adjustments and ensure that her firm remains consistently aligned with her long-term strategic objectives and goals.
“I love to do this actually every quarter. So every quarter I sit back and actually say to myself, OK, well, the year is cut up into four pieces, and what do those four pieces want? What do I want to achieve in those four blocks?” she said.
“I can stop and reflect, and I can actually see it clearly because I’ve written it down. I’ve seen if I’ve achieved my goals, what I’ve not achieved, and what I want to achieve.”
She further added: “Somebody once told me, you don’t eat an elephant all in one bite. Like, we have to eat an elephant little bits by little bits. And I think that’s how we have to approach business, is that we’ve got to see the big picture, but we’ve also got to break down that big picture into achievable goals.”
