Sometimes you have to spend money to make money...

Every decision you make in the first few months of opening a new business, especially a law practice which you’d like to grow into a law firm, seems like it is always a catch-22.  You don’t have enough money to pay yourself-- let alone buy everything you’d like to have to make your business amazing-- yet you don’t want to make hasty decisions based solely on cash flow.  So, like I said, you seem to be stuck between a rock and a hard place.  This predicament has arisen many times throughout our short history as a company, but the decision about our office takes the cake.

Our first thoughts on an actual office were that we would be able to operate effectively without an office, to keep costs down, for a total of six months.  HAHA!!  We were so wrong.  It was next to impossible to get anything done without an office and without office supplies.  The trips to Fed Ex were expensive and time consuming, so something had to budge, and it was going to have to be our budget. 

We managed to get along without an office for six weeks, mostly because we could not decide on where or what type of office we wanted.  Another money saving strategy we played with was the idea of just getting an office anywhere so that we would have somewhere to go to work every day for as cheap as possible.  You’d be surprised how cheap office space can be, but like the saying goes, you get what you pay for.  I looked at all sorts of cheap office space and eventually Taylor and I decided those spaces weren’t the first impression we wanted to give people when they came to our place of business.  We wanted to give off a professional appearance and you can’t get that in any empty office building.

So after hitting another hiccup in our office journey, we decided to re-work our budget and figure out how we could swing an executive suite.  An executive suite comes with a receptionist and includes all utilities and amenities you would find in a large office such as a kitchenette, indoor bathroom facilities, and some usage of boardrooms and day offices.  This type of set up was appealing to us because it would provide a professional appearance and we could still fit it into our budget.  The only downside of the decision to go with an executive suite was that to fit it into our budget we had to go with a “cave” office instead of a window office.  Neither Taylor nor I want to indefinitely be stuck in “cave” offices, but it was a good trade-off.  A “cave office” for an executive suite, but we made sure to enter into a month-to-month lease, so that when we are ready to grow we can at anytime. 

So in the middle of March after weeks spent looking for a place to call home, Bristol, Haynes & Associates landed at the Executive Suite at Haven.  It is an added monthly expense, but in order to make money you’ve got to spend money.  The advice I can give when it comes to making decisions that can and will affect your future, always choose the high road, even if it is more expensive and find other ways to make your budget work.  Planning for the future is the only way you’ll get there in the fashion you’re dreaming about.