Look at your company’s and your own goals. From my own experience with my law firm, we look to our own needs and our own goals. Every business has to have in place specific short-term and long-term goals. Are those goals to try to grow or at some point stop growing? I think that’s a very individual specific question, and the leadership of the business needs to, again, have short-term and long-term goals that are specific to the business.
I think the question is, ‘Where do we see ourselves as a company in five years? Where do we see ourselves as a company in 15 years?’ And then, for the individual business owners, I think individually you have to say, ‘Where do I see myself in five years and 15 years? Is my goal to keep working around the clock or do I want to be able to, at some point, back off? Do I have other up-and-coming leaders within the company who I want to step in and start taking over so I can step back a little bit and perhaps spend more time with family and more times with hobbies and so forth?’
It’s both an individual and a company goal that needs to be examined.
Hire flexible employees and mentor them in order to diversify. Surrounding yourself with good people, hiring good people, hiring people who have good vision, that is key.
I think the past is the best predictor of the future. Obviously in the interview process a lot of these issues can be discussed. But, you want to look at how the individuals have performed in the past with their previous employment.
A law firm is more of a calling in a way — we like to hire lawyers young, and then we like to mentor them and train them. All of our partners have really come up, grown up through the ranks of the firm.
So I think if you have in place a good fundamental firm philosophy and you’re taking the time to train and mentor your young people, you train them in those ways, and hopefully you can make good leaders for the future.
How to reach: Bremer Whyte Brown & O’Meara LLP, (949) 221-1000 or www.bremerandwhyte.com