Why doing it all was holding me back

I ran a photo business from 2010 to 2019 without paying anybody for help. No website designers or photo editors. Not a bookkeeper or a VA. I told myself that I wasn’t earning enough money to make those kinds of investments, and that one day when my business grew I would get more help.

So, I would do things I hated and struggle through things I didn’t understand. Like filing my own tax partnership tax return. Watching YouTube videos so I could learn how to use a WordPress template.

And you know what happened? I felt totally depleted. I was proud of everything I had learned how to do, but I was constantly procrastinating tasks that I didn’t enjoy. I closed our business during the pandemic, but the pandemic just made me realize what I had known deep down for a while: I didn’t enjoy running that business anymore. In late 2019 and early 2020 I had hired a few people to help (a web designer, a marketing consultant, and I had just started outsourcing occasional editing), but the burnout had really set in.

As I was closing my photo business, I was in the process of building this law firm. And while I’ve still bootstrapped my first two years in business -- reinvesting a portion of earnings in the business and generally not investing other money into the operation of the firm -- I stopped waiting until I was big to get help.

Pretty shortly after my best friend from law school, Ashley, became my business partner, we hired a bookkeeper, marketing strategist, and a virtual assistant. Then, we hired a blog writer and a video editor. More recently, a director of operations and a confidence coach. And now we are in the process of onboarding our first part-time employee.

We aren’t waiting to hire people until we have money in the bank that we don’t need to pay ourselves. We’re cutting our own paychecks so we can get help. Neither one of us is skipping meals or rent payments, but we’re certainly getting paid less than we should be for the number of hours we’re putting in right now.* But this is how we’ve grown to a 6-figure business this year.

Why would we hire others before we are earning a reasonable wage ourselves? Because every time Ashley and I struggle to complete something that’s hard to figure out or that we hate, we are using up energy that we then can’t make available for making strategic decisions, developing new products, or educating and serving our clients with our whole heart.

It’s been a really hard year in each of our personal lives, but the clouds are clearing a bit on that front and this summer I have truly seen what it feels like to have the energy I would have spent on all of the tasks I’d hired out. And we are doing big things. It’s only possible to do big things because we didn’t spend all of our time and energy on the little things.

*What does this look like in numbers? This is going to be our first 6 figure year, we’ll come in somewhere between $120-$150k in revenue, and we spend about 40% of our revenue on expenses, even with all of that help.? If you’re doing the math, splitting 60% of $150k before taxes between two lawyers is . . . not what you hope for when you enroll in law school. But Ash and I both believe that we’re putting in some time now to build a business that’s going to grow, last, and help us each build fulfilling professional and personal lives.