Last week I sat in a room with estate planning attorneys from all over the country. One of our core values at the firm is Always Better — better than yesterday, not yet as good as tomorrow — and conferences are where I hold myself to it. The funny thing about these events: you learn as much from the attorney sitting next to you at lunch as from the person on stage.
But one presenter, Molly McGrath, earned her spot on stage. She has spent her career inside law firms — building the teams that make them run, not theorizing about it. And while her audience was lawyers, almost everything she said applies to anyone who runs a business. Here’s what I wrote down.
The time to change a tire is not when you’re going 70 mph. Molly calls it the power of the pause. Every business owner knows the feeling of being too busy to fix the thing that’s making you busy. You have to pull over. The pause isn’t lost time — it’s the only place improvement happens.
When is the right time to hire? The second you’re feeling it. Most of us wait until the pain is undeniable, then spend months making up ground. And we talk ourselves out of it by staring at the fee — the salary, the overhead. Molly flips the question: it’s not about the fee. It’s about the cost if you don’t. What is being too busy costing you in missed calls, slow follow-up, and work that walks out the door?
Ask of everything on your desk: is this the highest use of my time? Whatever you’re uniquely good at — the thing customers actually pay you for — is where you belong. Nearly everything else belongs in the hands of a team member who will do it better than you would — because it gets their full focus instead of your leftover attention. I’m an attorney. My highest use is legal strategy and sitting across the table from families. It is not formatting documents.
Your phone is a money-making machine. When was the last time you called your own business? A helpful, friendly human answering the phone is so rare now that it’s a competitive advantage all by itself. It might be the cheapest one available.
Customers remember process, not brilliance. Molly shared that the single most common word in law firm Google reviews is “process.” Not “smart.” Not “genius.” People remember whether they knew what was happening, whether things moved when promised, whether anyone followed up. And process is driven by people — which is why the most important hire in any business may be the one who answers the phone.
The line I keep coming back to is Molly’s bluntest: “Reasons and excuses are the cemetery of dreams.”
I flew home with a full notebook and fewer excuses.
And if you call our office this week, a real person will answer the phone. That’s not an accident — that’s the notebook at work.