Mark Kohler spent five years extracting every dollar from his law practice to cover personal expenses, starving the business and forcing month-to-month survival. Switching to retainer clients gave him breathing room to reinvest profits instead of just paying bills, letting the practice finally grow.
Chapters
Here's the mistake I made in my young practice as a lawyer, advisor, tax, all of that. I was in startup for five years. Now when I'm trying to help our tax pros in the Main street tax professional program, I'm trying to help them not make the same mistakes I made, get out of startup in the first year, get into optimizing right away. But I stayed there for five years, and what I was doing is I was suffocating my business. A lot of entrepreneurs say, oh, I quit my job or this, and they expect their business to support them. And when you're doing that, you're living month to month on your business and you're just pulling out profit as fast as you can. You're spending, you got to pay bills, you got family members you're trying to take care of, maybe a young family, but you're not letting your business grow or thrive, and you're suffocating, you're starving it. And I did that for five years, and there was some point in there. Again, it's gray when you kind of move from one phase to the next. I got a client that gave me more stable income, and I didn't want to do it at the time, but then I knew I needed to because it gave me some breathing room. And once I had that more stable income with a retainer with a couple clients, it allowed me to take the profit from this other area and not just have to suck it out to pay the mortgage payment or whatever. And I was able to build the business. And I was in startup way too long.
