Ep 85: Starting a Business Begins With Identifying Your Mission & Core Values

I'm Clark, speaks the catastrophic injury lawyer. Welcome to the verdict. This is the elevation Leadership Summit.

Okay, so say I want to start my business, you know, my own business out of law school. What's the first thing that someone should do? I

think the first thing that you want to do is, sort of chart a course. And what I mean by that is you have to figure out where you're going. If we were to get in a boat and we were to start heading towards something, it's very important to be very conscious of where you want to go, of what you want to do. And it's the same thing with starting a business. So to me, what that means is you've got to identify your mission, your vision and your values. Your mission is what you want to accomplish. Your vision is how you want to accomplish it, and your values are these are the behaviors I want to engage in while I'm doing this thing in this way. Does that make sense? Right? So for me, our vision is to help people injured people recover physically and financially and emotionally. Our mission is, is the way that we do that, through collaboration and at relentless advocacy and all this. And then our values are, how we treat people, how we treat other other lawyers, how we treat the people that we work for our clients, how we our commitment to learning, our commitment to you know, and these are very specific written set of documents, our commitment to overcoming challenges, and our process for overcoming challenges. They're in their posted like again, they're they're on that wall, they're on my desk, they're on this board. They're everywhere, right? And because they have to be living, breathing documents that we refer to, because they can, they they are valuable in that they can help us make decisions going forward, we come up with, Hey, what should we do about this personnel decision? What should we do about this other challenge? There's a, you know, some lawyer has called us and has behaved unprofessionally. How do we respond to that? And so that happens on a regular basis. Like, there's a lawyer who I felt like was cheated us in a case and, you know, and so I mean, like, I wear a button down shirt and, you know, and, you know, sport coat sometimes now, but I grew up in a different world, and so part of me that wants to take my shirt off and fight him in the Walmart parking lot, you know. And I'm like, I want to lose my mind. You know, when somebody mistreats one of my guys on my team or my clients, I want to physically fight them. Like, that's something that, I mean, I don't know that. That makes me, you know, I don't know, I mean, but, but that I want to destroy them, but then I got to go back, and I got to go to my core values, and I go, right, that's not how I babe, I want to win. I want to accomplish my clients successful, but I'm not going to compromise my ethics. I'm not going to compromise my professionalism, and I'm not going to and I'm going to treat people in a certain way, you know? And so that's how that thinking, that that document, that living, breathing document, can help you make decisions about how you do something, right? Also, it can help us look back and evaluate how we've done something in the situation that I'm talking about, where somebody was did not treat our client and our team fairly, and I felt that was did a dirty, unscrupulous thing, to our team and to our client. I did, in fact, lose my mind. I, like, went bananas and and all this. But then, and then I was able to look back later and go, Hey, I don't care what they did. I can't control what they did. I cannot that's not I'm not responsible for what they did. I am responsible for what my reaction and I reacted badly, and I should not have done that thing. So then I can go, Okay, I'm not going to do that again. I mean, arguably, I could apologize I did not. I'll work on that maybe someday, but in any event, the but it helps, but at least I can look back on and go, Hey, I should have done that differently, and in the future, I'm going to do that different. That differently going forward. And so that's why that is important. It can be a compass telling us where we should go and how we should make decisions, and it is a tool for helping us look back and evaluate whether we did a good job, you know. And so that mission, vision values is what helps us make decisions and chart our course. The other thing it does is it's disseminated to your team, right? So it's disseminated to everybody in your organization, from from your people that are your reception people to your sales people to your production people to your finance people to your administrative people, to your operations, people and whatever. And the good thing about that is, if they know that, and you're known in your community for being like, Okay, we help, if I can disseminate in my community that we help injure people, cover, recover, physically, financially, emotionally, right? Notice, that doesn't mean that doesn't say clients. And just, we're not limited to our clients. We're going to help injured people recover, physically, financially and emotionally. That means, if somebody calls us and we can't help them, we're still going to steer them in the right direction. If somebody calls us and and they're in a different jurisdiction, we're going to still try to connect them with the right people. If somebody this this series, you know, what does this have to do with helping our clients? Maybe it does. Maybe somebody, one of our clients, is injured, and they can no longer do the job that they were did before. But they have to find another job that they have to do. They have to find some other way to be useful, to be productive, to make money. And so maybe they'll plug into this and go, Okay, should I start a business or go work somewhere? And that's what our hope is here. But it's like whoever, whether they're our clients or not, if they're going through this, these challenges, we want to be able to help them, and that's a part of our mission. So if people know that what our mission is in the community, we're going to attract team members, people who want to be part of that, people who want to help other people. You know, we have this I have this thing all the time. People, people always go, hey, you know my kid? I think my kid would make a good lawyer. Why is that? Well, they love to argue, and I'm like, I don't want to be unfriendly, but that just means, you know, they you might take them to church, you know, I mean, like the place where you become a good lawyer. The thing in you that makes you a good lawyer is if you care about people and want to help them, right? So for me, you know, growing up seeing things that I thought were unjust and unfair, and I'm like, Who do you go when something's unjust. Where do you go when something's unjust and unfair? For me and my community was a lot of times it was either pastors or lawyers, you know, and then pastors would pray for you, and lawyers would help you figure out a play way out of it, you know? I mean, there's one or two guys in particular that were like, really, and I knew him through our church, you know, that were like, Wow, that guy seems like they really are committed to helping people, and they're capable of helping people, so that's cool. That's what I want to do. And so that's that's part of it, but, but if you have this mission, vision, values, and you let it known be known in the community, and you let it be known in your in your workplace, you're going to attract the kind of people who are committed to the same things, and then you're going to have alignment, where they are committed to the same things, and they know what you're trying to accomplish. And they are that way. When somebody calls the, you know, the front desk, even if they're not in our jurisdiction, you know what I mean, if they're not in North or South Carolina, they're still going to be we're still going to help them, help them get to a better place, you know what I mean. So that's an important reason why that that's a reason why that's one of the very first things that people should, should do when they're starting a business, is to is to establish those that mission vision values. And every time, let me say one other thing, every time, like on a regular basis, people come to me and they say, Hey, I'm going to start a business, or I'm thinking about starting a business. What should I do when I go, you start, start start with your mission vision values. And I go, Yeah, but really, where should I get my office space and and then they want to talk about marketing, what kind of because we have a very elaborate marketing process, and we're very recognizable, you know, marketing images and all this, right? And I'm like, okay, I get it, but you got to have your mission vision back. Okay, yeah, I got that, okay, but after that, you know, and I'm like, You're not, you're not hearing what I'm telling you. Like, we had a very, very, very successful practice with lots of cases and lots of people and good team and all this kind of stuff. And about five years ago, we made a decision to just philosophically rip it all down to the studs and go, who are we and what are we trying to do?

And that's when we identified our mission, vision, values with clarity, not just some abstract thing in the back of my mind, where, you know, we used to say every client is our most, most important client, which is true. It's very true. We try to maintain that philosophy, but it's until we got our mission, vision, values and and thought about it and sweat it over for days and this word or this word or this thing, this and went through it as a as a group, and it started with me, and it started with a person I'm very close to that helps me think through these things and continue with my coach and all this. And then we kind of really worked and hammered it out. You know, we did not have what we have now, and what we have now is a clear mission. We have a clear vision of what we want to try to accomplish. We have standards for how we're going to do it. We have standards for who we are and why, what, how we conduct ourselves, and we have team alignment, where everybody is pretty much rowing in the same direction. Is it perfect? No, to we always gotta improve. We're always works in progress. But, but when people, people, every time I have this conversation, people just, Okay, I got it. I gotta I've heard the mission vision about anything? No, it's the first thing you have to do. And it's something you got to go back to all the time, and that's why it's on the wall, it's on my desk, it's on my phone, it's everywhere. It's every time. So our leaders, and we have leaders in the organization, they have regular times when they have to, when they when they have one on ones, with everybody, with for whom they are responsible. And each of these people, when they have that, they should have their mission vision values in their hands, when they're having that, you know, I mean, and talk about it when we have firm, wide meetings, we are, we have, I have the mission vision values. And we're talking about ways that we have done this correctly, ways that we have done this incorrectly. If we get a negative review, we are looking at that negative review and saying, Hey, have we done the things we were supposed to do? Did we not sometimes they're just nut balls who were just who just like, I mean, you've been in a restaurant where people have have food, and they and they're they eat the whole, the whole thing, and they're like, this was terrible. And you're just like, come on, you know what I mean, like, but we always scour those things and go, Hey, what could we have done better? Why did we Why did we have, you know? And sometimes there are competitors, and sometimes there are people that we never even heard of, you know, but, but we always look at them to say, hey, what can we learn from this? And we measure it against our mission, vision values to determine if we've if we if there's room for improvement. And I think that's, that's that's why those things are important. Thanks for joining us. Don't forget to subscribe and follow us to stay up to date with our weekly episodes. We'll

see you next time bye.

I'm Clark, speaks the catastrophic injury lawyer. Welcome to the verdict. This is the elevation Leadership Summit.

Okay, so say I want to start my business, you know, my own business out of law school. What's the first thing that someone should do? I

think the first thing that you want to do is, sort of chart a course. And what I mean by that is you have to figure out where you're going. If we were to get in a boat and we were to start heading towards something, it's very important to be very conscious of where you want to go, of what you want to do. And it's the same thing with starting a business. So to me, what that means is you've got to identify your mission, your vision and your values. Your mission is what you want to accomplish. Your vision is how you want to accomplish it, and your values are these are the behaviors I want to engage in while I'm doing this thing in this way. Does that make sense? Right? So for me, our vision is to help people injured people recover physically and financially and emotionally. Our mission is, is the way that we do that, through collaboration and at relentless advocacy and all this. And then our values are, how we treat people, how we treat other other lawyers, how we treat the people that we work for our clients, how we our commitment to learning, our commitment to you know, and these are very specific written set of documents, our commitment to overcoming challenges, and our process for overcoming challenges. They're in their posted like again, they're they're on that wall, they're on my desk, they're on this board. They're everywhere, right? And because they have to be living, breathing documents that we refer to, because they can, they they are valuable in that they can help us make decisions going forward, we come up with, Hey, what should we do about this personnel decision? What should we do about this other challenge? There's a, you know, some lawyer has called us and has behaved unprofessionally. How do we respond to that? And so that happens on a regular basis. Like, there's a lawyer who I felt like was cheated us in a case and, you know, and so I mean, like, I wear a button down shirt and, you know, and, you know, sport coat sometimes now, but I grew up in a different world, and so part of me that wants to take my shirt off and fight him in the Walmart parking lot, you know. And I'm like, I want to lose my mind. You know, when somebody mistreats one of my guys on my team or my clients, I want to physically fight them. Like, that's something that, I mean, I don't know that. That makes me, you know, I don't know, I mean, but, but that I want to destroy them, but then I got to go back, and I got to go to my core values, and I go, right, that's not how I babe, I want to win. I want to accomplish my clients successful, but I'm not going to compromise my ethics. I'm not going to compromise my professionalism, and I'm not going to and I'm going to treat people in a certain way, you know? And so that's how that thinking, that that document, that living, breathing document, can help you make decisions about how you do something, right? Also, it can help us look back and evaluate how we've done something in the situation that I'm talking about, where somebody was did not treat our client and our team fairly, and I felt that was did a dirty, unscrupulous thing, to our team and to our client. I did, in fact, lose my mind. I, like, went bananas and and all this. But then, and then I was able to look back later and go, Hey, I don't care what they did. I can't control what they did. I cannot that's not I'm not responsible for what they did. I am responsible for what my reaction and I reacted badly, and I should not have done that thing. So then I can go, Okay, I'm not going to do that again. I mean, arguably, I could apologize I did not. I'll work on that maybe someday, but in any event, the but it helps, but at least I can look back on and go, Hey, I should have done that differently, and in the future, I'm going to do that different. That differently going forward. And so that's why that is important. It can be a compass telling us where we should go and how we should make decisions, and it is a tool for helping us look back and evaluate whether we did a good job, you know. And so that mission, vision values is what helps us make decisions and chart our course. The other thing it does is it's disseminated to your team, right? So it's disseminated to everybody in your organization, from from your people that are your reception people to your sales people to your production people to your finance people to your administrative people, to your operations, people and whatever. And the good thing about that is, if they know that, and you're known in your community for being like, Okay, we help, if I can disseminate in my community that we help injure people, cover, recover, physically, financially, emotionally, right? Notice, that doesn't mean that doesn't say clients. And just, we're not limited to our clients. We're going to help injured people recover, physically, financially and emotionally. That means, if somebody calls us and we can't help them, we're still going to steer them in the right direction. If somebody calls us and and they're in a different jurisdiction, we're going to still try to connect them with the right people. If somebody this this series, you know, what does this have to do with helping our clients? Maybe it does. Maybe somebody, one of our clients, is injured, and they can no longer do the job that they were did before. But they have to find another job that they have to do. They have to find some other way to be useful, to be productive, to make money. And so maybe they'll plug into this and go, Okay, should I start a business or go work somewhere? And that's what our hope is here. But it's like whoever, whether they're our clients or not, if they're going through this, these challenges, we want to be able to help them, and that's a part of our mission. So if people know that what our mission is in the community, we're going to attract team members, people who want to be part of that, people who want to help other people. You know, we have this I have this thing all the time. People, people always go, hey, you know my kid? I think my kid would make a good lawyer. Why is that? Well, they love to argue, and I'm like, I don't want to be unfriendly, but that just means, you know, they you might take them to church, you know, I mean, like the place where you become a good lawyer. The thing in you that makes you a good lawyer is if you care about people and want to help them, right? So for me, you know, growing up seeing things that I thought were unjust and unfair, and I'm like, Who do you go when something's unjust. Where do you go when something's unjust and unfair? For me and my community was a lot of times it was either pastors or lawyers, you know, and then pastors would pray for you, and lawyers would help you figure out a play way out of it, you know? I mean, there's one or two guys in particular that were like, really, and I knew him through our church, you know, that were like, Wow, that guy seems like they really are committed to helping people, and they're capable of helping people, so that's cool. That's what I want to do. And so that's that's part of it, but, but if you have this mission, vision, values, and you let it known be known in the community, and you let it be known in your in your workplace, you're going to attract the kind of people who are committed to the same things, and then you're going to have alignment, where they are committed to the same things, and they know what you're trying to accomplish. And they are that way. When somebody calls the, you know, the front desk, even if they're not in our jurisdiction, you know what I mean, if they're not in North or South Carolina, they're still going to be we're still going to help them, help them get to a better place, you know what I mean. So that's an important reason why that that's a reason why that's one of the very first things that people should, should do when they're starting a business, is to is to establish those that mission vision values. And every time, let me say one other thing, every time, like on a regular basis, people come to me and they say, Hey, I'm going to start a business, or I'm thinking about starting a business. What should I do when I go, you start, start start with your mission vision values. And I go, Yeah, but really, where should I get my office space and and then they want to talk about marketing, what kind of because we have a very elaborate marketing process, and we're very recognizable, you know, marketing images and all this, right? And I'm like, okay, I get it, but you got to have your mission vision back. Okay, yeah, I got that, okay, but after that, you know, and I'm like, You're not, you're not hearing what I'm telling you. Like, we had a very, very, very successful practice with lots of cases and lots of people and good team and all this kind of stuff. And about five years ago, we made a decision to just philosophically rip it all down to the studs and go, who are we and what are we trying to do?

And that's when we identified our mission, vision, values with clarity, not just some abstract thing in the back of my mind, where, you know, we used to say every client is our most, most important client, which is true. It's very true. We try to maintain that philosophy, but it's until we got our mission, vision, values and and thought about it and sweat it over for days and this word or this word or this thing, this and went through it as a as a group, and it started with me, and it started with a person I'm very close to that helps me think through these things and continue with my coach and all this. And then we kind of really worked and hammered it out. You know, we did not have what we have now, and what we have now is a clear mission. We have a clear vision of what we want to try to accomplish. We have standards for how we're going to do it. We have standards for who we are and why, what, how we conduct ourselves, and we have team alignment, where everybody is pretty much rowing in the same direction. Is it perfect? No, to we always gotta improve. We're always works in progress. But, but when people, people, every time I have this conversation, people just, Okay, I got it. I gotta I've heard the mission vision about anything? No, it's the first thing you have to do. And it's something you got to go back to all the time, and that's why it's on the wall, it's on my desk, it's on my phone, it's everywhere. It's every time. So our leaders, and we have leaders in the organization, they have regular times when they have to, when they when they have one on ones, with everybody, with for whom they are responsible. And each of these people, when they have that, they should have their mission vision values in their hands, when they're having that, you know, I mean, and talk about it when we have firm, wide meetings, we are, we have, I have the mission vision values. And we're talking about ways that we have done this correctly, ways that we have done this incorrectly. If we get a negative review, we are looking at that negative review and saying, Hey, have we done the things we were supposed to do? Did we not sometimes they're just nut balls who were just who just like, I mean, you've been in a restaurant where people have have food, and they and they're they eat the whole, the whole thing, and they're like, this was terrible. And you're just like, come on, you know what I mean, like, but we always scour those things and go, Hey, what could we have done better? Why did we Why did we have, you know? And sometimes there are competitors, and sometimes there are people that we never even heard of, you know, but, but we always look at them to say, hey, what can we learn from this? And we measure it against our mission, vision values to determine if we've if we if there's room for improvement. And I think that's, that's that's why those things are important. Thanks for joining us. Don't forget to subscribe and follow us to stay up to date with our weekly episodes. We'll

see you next time bye.