From Practitioner to CEO: Building a Business That Works Without You

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for High Velocity Radio.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here another episode of High Velocity Radio and this is gonna be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor, Business RadioX. If you’re a business coach or consultant who’s tired of being a best kept secret, set up a call with Stone Payton at bookstonephone.com to unlock your perpetual prospect pipeline. Today on the show, we have the CEO and founder of Evergreen Business Coaching, Jennifer Gore. Welcome.

Jennifer Gore: Hi. Thanks for having me.

Lee Kantor: Well, I am so excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us about evergreen business coaching. How are you serving folks?

Jennifer Gore: So I am a lawyer and I started my career owning building, scaling a law firm here in the Atlanta metro. It was called Atlanta Personal Injury. We were on the Inc. 5000 as one of the fastest growing companies three years in a row. And I went through a lot of the trials and tribulations many entrepreneurs go through in building their business. I hired many coaches and professionals and mentors to help me. And then I ultimately sold my law firm and I had started my own consulting business. And so now I get to do this kind of full time. And so that’s kind of the short story.

Lee Kantor: Well, when you were, um, at the law firm, what was kind of the impetus to hire a coach like what happened around you that said, you know what, maybe a coach will help.

Jennifer Gore: I had a friend who had a coach and she and me would meet for lunch and we would talk about our business. We were kind of at the similar stage, and her business started growing really fast. And so I was like, huh, that’s interesting. Why is that happening? And she would tell me, oh, I hired this coach. And they’re helping me learn about sales and marketing and leadership and hiring. And so I just figured, what the heck? Like, I’m gonna go try to find out more. And I think when you know somebody who has a coach and you see the results, it’s hard to deny.

Lee Kantor: So what was it like kind of in those early sessions when you were just kind of getting used to being coached? Were you were you coachable? Were you a good kind of coaching client?

Jennifer Gore: Oh, that’s a loaded question. I play all in. I love learning, I’m a lifelong learner, but some of these topics are very confronting and they’re hard. And they’re especially like the mindset work that we do with people about learning to think like an entrepreneur. And, you know, entrepreneurship is an exercise in personal development. So, you know, all your trauma, all your, all your fears, everything’s gonna come up in your business. So is that easy? No. Um, am I coachable? I think that I became more coachable along the way. You’ve got to get out of your ego. You’ve gotta, like, be wrong. You’ve gotta, you gotta, like, do a lot of internal work to be coachable.

Lee Kantor: Now, how do you kind of see that? Um, how do you decide as an individual when you’re doing that? Like, do I need a coach? Do I need a therapist? Do I need a sales consultant? Like how do you kind of know what you need at at that time?

Jennifer Gore: Um, I didn’t know. I just tried things, you know, you’re just trying things and, you know, you’ll hire coaches over or therapists or people in your life and like, there’s a season and sometimes you outgrow those people and you got everything you needed to get out of that relationship. And there’s somebody else over my career, I’ve had many coaches and there’s an art and science to like developing those relationships.

Lee Kantor: So in your practice, how do you kind of, um, know it’s the right fit for, um, somebody who’s hiring you as a coach?

Jennifer Gore: Well, I like to say that I like to work with ambitious people, entrepreneurial people, people that want to grow. All the reasons that I ever grew, my company wasn’t just for vanity reasons. It was because there were real problems. Like just to give you an example, you know, every one of us that’s owned a business has come in one day and your key employee quits, you know? And I thought to myself, I’m never gonna let this happen again. I’m not going to just have one employee in this role. And so I thought if I build my business bigger, then I can have some of this risk diversified, you know? And so my driving reason to scale the business was to make the business, you know, overall run smoother, you know, and if you’re somebody who is experiencing day to day, your business is causing you a lot of unhappiness, stress, you know, there’s got to be a better way. And part of that better way is to find people who’ve already done what you haven’t done yet, and to learn from them.

Lee Kantor: Now, um, are your coaching clients mostly, uh, attorneys? Are they like kind of in the same boat that you were in, um, small to midsize firms? Or are they part of large enterprise firms and they’re just lawyers that work there?

Jennifer Gore: Um, I coach all types of law firms in different practice areas, uh, some personal injury, some outside of that practice area. A lot of the, um, firms I coach, you know, they’re, they have some foundation, but they want to scale. Um, I also recently was approached to start coaching non-law firms. So I coach people that own professional services businesses, whether that’s accountants, uh, therapists, other professionals. Um, business is business at the end of the day. And I think in that professional service category, it’s a lot of the similar principles.

Lee Kantor: And when you’re coaching them, are they coming to you because they want the same thing that you experienced of scaling and then exiting.

Jennifer Gore: Some, some, you know, I didn’t start off knowing I was going to exit, but, um, you know, I think everyone should apply business principles to their business. And if you have a business, it should be something that somebody wants to buy. You build something that has resale value. Um, so yeah, it’s, uh, a variety of different reasons. People come mostly people are frustrated. They hit a plateau in their business. They’re doing the same things. They can’t seem to get above a certain revenue level. You know, it’s very lonely being an entrepreneur. And there’s a lot of conversations you can have with your coach or somebody who’s already done this, that you can’t have with somebody who works at your business.

Lee Kantor: Right? Like somebody with kind of fresh eyes on this and that they’re not going to be as judgy as somebody in your on your team.

Jennifer Gore: Even, even more so, I would say, um, you know, there’s inappropriate conversations to have with staff as the owner, you know, if you’re really stressed about cash flow, you know, that may or may not be something you want to discuss with the receptionist, you know, um.

Lee Kantor: Right. It becomes a safe place to have those kind of conversations.

Jennifer Gore: Correct.

Lee Kantor: So now any advice for that business owner that, like you said, that they’re, um, I guess they come to you because something’s amiss. Um, is that typically, um, is it like a business related. Something’s amiss. Or is it their life’s out of balance? Like where? What is usually the problem they’re having right before they call you?

Jennifer Gore: Um, a lot of it could be they don’t know how to grow marketing. They don’t know how they’ve built their business on referrals, and they don’t see a path of how they’re going to double their business on referrals. Um, they’re working 80 hours a week and their families mad at them. They are doing seemingly a lot of work, but not making any progress. They don’t understand the financials of their business. They don’t know what they don’t know. They don’t know what they should be tracking, what they shouldn’t be tracking. They don’t, um, have a business plan. They don’t have a budget. They don’t have, you know, they’ve basically been a lawyer and they don’t have the education or like the MBA in the school of life on business.

Lee Kantor: But does some of the work kind of bleed into consulting where you’re kind of like giving them playbooks on how to do some of these things. Or are you staying in the coach lane of just asking questions?

Jennifer Gore: Um, I mean, a lot of my coaching is also giving advice. And so I will challenge them on like, hey, you know, I think you have an intake problem. Um, I can look at people’s businesses very quickly and tell almost instantly what level of control they have over their business. And I can ask them key questions that I can basically diagnose where, where some of their problems are. Because like you said, some of them don’t realize that the problems that they have, right? They it’s not even in their awareness that this could be a problem.

Lee Kantor: Right? Or they might, they, they might think, you know, X is a problem, but it’s really Y and Z.

Jennifer Gore: Yeah. A lot of times it’s, you know, multiple issues. What I will say is that my goal with every person is that they, as an entrepreneur, have a certain level of control over their business. They have a sense of marketing, intake, sales, production, and financials. And if you have those, if you have control over those areas, you’re in a different category. Honestly, most people in the country do not have good control. I don’t care if you own a restaurant, I don’t care. You know, if you own a law firm, if I was to stop somebody on the street and say, can you tell me right now, month to date, how many new clients have you signed up? What’s your recurring revenue? What’s your revenue for the month? You know, what’s your production metrics in your business like? It’s shocking how many people cannot answer that.

Lee Kantor: Now, when you say answer that, is it, um, just to have those numbers or to have a lever that can move those numbers?

Jennifer Gore: I mean, every day that I sat down in my law firm and even in my current business. I sit down and I have a dashboard that I built that tells me exactly the health of the business, and you can access that at any moment, at any time. And that is how, as a CEO, you need to be looking at your business so that, you know, that’s basically like our fire alarm system, right? If is the house on fire? And when I see the metrics going down, that’s alerting me that the smoke alarm is going off. We have a fire. And so what you’re talking about is once we see there’s a fire, we need to spring into action and put out that fire, right? So if our sales is plummeting, if our marketing is plummeting, we, you know, that’s great Intel. But now we have to take action.

Lee Kantor: Right? So you have to have a lever that can move the needle in any of those, I think four categories that you just described.

Jennifer Gore: Yes.

Lee Kantor: And that’s.

Jennifer Gore: I will say it, just getting people to have the smoke.

Lee Kantor: Alarm, just knowing the numbers is, I mean, that’s a big step because most people you’re saying don’t even have that.

Jennifer Gore: They don’t have that. They get data. They get a month end report that tells them, oh, shoot, we didn’t hit any of our metrics.

Lee Kantor: And then, yeah, yeah, but you have to do something at some point. You have to take action.

Jennifer Gore: Yes.

Lee Kantor: And so like, what’s a conversation you’re having? Like, so you, I would imagine at some point you’re gonna put in that dashboard or help your, your client see the numbers clearer. And then then they start tracking it. And then one of the categories is going down. Are you then kind of jumping in and saying, okay, what do we have to do to triage this?

Jennifer Gore: Yeah. So a lot of what I teach people is how to think like an entrepreneur. So just even having a conversation and saying, you should be tracking these things. For some people, that’s life shattering. Then they go, oh yeah, like logically that does make sense. And then there’s a process of how do we get that data in front of you? And that could take months to try to engineer depending on your systems. And then once we have that data, who in the company is responsible for it other than you? You know, why is that data lagging? Why are we not deploying solutions in real time? And then all of what goes into that? So I’m not so married to what the system is or how it’s actually done, but I want people to think entrepreneurially about what level of control they have over their business.

Lee Kantor: And are you finding that most people that are in professional services just want to be the doer of the professional service?

Jennifer Gore: I mean, I think in order to start a great professional services business, whether that be a law firm or an accounting firm, you have to be good at that. Right? You know, I was a great lawyer and I was good at all those aspects of doing the products, like the work, the production. But at some point you have to build a business to give yourself the real benefits of business ownership, which is that you make money on other people’s time, right? You make money when you’re on vacation, when you’re sleeping. And so in order to make the transition from a practitioner to a business owner, there’s a lot of shifts that have to happen.

Lee Kantor: And one of them is mentally, you have to want to change roles.

Jennifer Gore: Yeah. And you know, there are some lawyers that they are incredible lawyers. And let’s say they, they are like the Johnnie Cochran in their firm. And you know, what we do with them is we say, okay, you have 100 cases right now that you work on. What if we just picked the top five that are the most valuable, that are your highest and best use? And you only worked on those five and we had associates below you that worked on all the other middle like kind of not as important cases, right? There’s tears. And you had incredible people that were handling those cases, but you got to really run the business and be involved and have, you know, the ownership of the company, but you also got to get that itch scratched and do just maybe five cases. You know, that are really high profile, that are like the best of the best in the company and we can build that. You know, if people really feel compelled to do that legal work, we can build anything. I mean, Entrepreneurially we can creatively build whatever the person’s vision is, but most people don’t even take the time to think about what their vision is.

Lee Kantor: Well, it’s interesting because in your case, your ego wasn’t such that it was important to you. Like none of your companies are called Jennifer Gore incorporated. No. Like you.

Jennifer Gore: Because I don’t want to be.

Lee Kantor: You don’t. Right. I mean, you had well, that’s there’s plenty of law firms that have people’s names in it. So that way you were definitely an outlier from that standpoint. Um, and that was by design, I would imagine based on what was important to you.

Jennifer Gore: Yeah. I mean, my upbringing, I grew up in an entrepreneurial family. My parents had their own businesses and I always was taught, you never make yourself the product.

Lee Kantor: Right. But you’re your IP is now the product. Correct.

Jennifer Gore: And this is a really important concept. Even think about the brand. Ralph Lauren. Everyone knows that brand, right? Sure. At some point Ralph Lauren was designing the clothes. I’m sure he was sewing the clothes. Who knows what he was doing. But, um, at this point, Ralph Lauren is its own brand now, right? That has taken on its own, um, you know, life and your goal is to take your vision, your art, your businesses, your, your way of seeing the world, how you how you see law, how you see whatever it is that you do. And then make that a brand in a way. And so now Ralph Lauren can be, you know, I’ve heard there’s like a creative director that’s not Ralph Lauren that executes that brand, but it’s not necessarily has to be done all by the founder.

Lee Kantor: Right? I mean, hopefully you can escape that as quickly as possible, but most people’s ego is tied to this is what I do. So they hang on maybe longer than they should.

Jennifer Gore: Yeah. And, um, you know, that is a choice, right? But I’m okay. I’m not here to do brain surgery or force people to do things they don’t want to do. My job is to offer you, you know, containers to think about what it is you’re creating, why you have a business, what is your purpose? What is your vision? What do you want to build? If you could go in a time machine in three years, what do you want it to be rather than live like kind of as like a victim of circumstance of like, yeah, this is what it is because it just right.

Lee Kantor: And that’s what I did yesterday. So that’s what I’ll do tomorrow. Like it. I mean, I think it’s important the work that you’re doing. And they just give people the, first of all, the awareness of what their business really is, not what they think it is. And then also give them a path to, you know, kind of choose their own adventure as if they want to exit, if they want to expand, if they want to sell or whatever, give them more choices.

Jennifer Gore: Correct. Life is about choice, right?

Lee Kantor: And you’re giving them the freedom. Whereas, you know, if they don’t pay attention to some of these metrics, their business is going to struggle or not be as valuable down the road.

Jennifer Gore: Yes. Um, yeah, I, I wholeheartedly agree like, like business is not for the faint of heart. You have to continually kind of like evolve. And, you know, you need to be thinking about how the market’s changing in your industry. Like what worked yesterday doesn’t always work today.

Lee Kantor: Yeah. And that’s why I think it’s important. I think coaching is so important for folks, uh, entrepreneurs especially to just get other people’s perspective. And like you said, it’s not like you have to have this coach forever, but it’s a good idea to periodically check in with somebody who’s been there, done that to see if you’re missing anything and that maybe there are other paths that you can go on.

Jennifer Gore: Yeah. And, um, you know, I really have so many coaches in my own life that I think like my life literally would have been different had I not met that person. So we’re talking about like monumental changes that, you know, one person meeting one person can really change the course of your whole life.

Lee Kantor: Right. And the. And what they said might not have. It could be something small but meaningful. It doesn’t have to be this, you know, big epiphany thing. It could be just like, oh, if I make that adjustment, then lots of, you know, those other dominoes are going to fall because of that.

Jennifer Gore: Yes.

Lee Kantor: Now, any advice for that entrepreneur out there that’s kind of stuck and is frustrated? What, some low hanging fruit for somebody in professional services to focus in on to maybe get unstuck.

Jennifer Gore: You know, the biggest challenge I see for so many businesses is that they’re really not good at intake and onboarding new clients. Um, you know, you talk to like a business owner of a professional service and you say, how do you track all the people who called you this month who were interested in your services? And you get a lot of blank stares. Um, And you would think that that’s really like the center point of business, like tracking people that are interested in hiring you and paying you. And, you know, it’s like, well, I get texts and I get emails and I get calls and it just kind of like in a scrap of paper or it’s, you know, in my mind and it’s like, that is where we have to start because there’s no reason to go do marketing or networking or all of this. If you’re going to have people calling you and then you really don’t follow much up with them, or you don’t have a systematic approach to getting people onboarded into your firm.

Lee Kantor: So you have to build kind of the system first before you do some of these tactics.

Jennifer Gore: Well, I just, I just think that there’s a hole in a lot of buckets. So I always say like, I imagine like intake, like fishing, like nets, right? And you have like all nets with holes in it, right? So it’s like we could go fishing all day. But if you can’t capture the people contacting you, you know, you should have a very clear system. And I don’t care if it’s an Excel spreadsheet that you are very religious about, and every single person that contacts you, you put them in that sheet and you follow up with them. But you know, you, you can’t get these answers from many people. I don’t really, I don’t really know. You know, I, I only know the people that hired me. I don’t have a list of all the people I talk to. It’s really, really basic.

Lee Kantor: Right? And it’s not if you don’t understand that the person that didn’t hire you today might hire you tomorrow. If you don’t understand that, then you’re, you’re going to spend a lot of money on marketing.

Jennifer Gore: And then yeah, and it’s all for waste. You know, there’s just money kind of pouring out everywhere. So, uh, I really start at intake because that’s the lifeblood of a business.

Lee Kantor: Now, is there a story you can share in your you’re coaching, uh, life. That illustrates what it’s like to work with you maybe don’t name their name, but maybe share the challenge they came to you with and how you were able to help them get to a new level.

Jennifer Gore: Um, I have worked with a lot of, uh, professionals who they have a business, maybe they’re seven people. They’re, they’re an attorney or they’re an accountant or they’re a therapist or they’re somebody and they have some administrative staff, but they have no other professional working there. So they can never go on vacation, you know, because if they go on vacation, they’re the only lawyer in the office. And so, you know, it’s really like a cast of assistants. It’s a bunch of people that are kind of like helping that lawyer, but they are not able to really replicate any meaningful work. So I’ve helped a lot of people on board and hire their first professional, which is a skill set that if you’ve never done it before, it’s really, you know, there’s a lot of big mistakes that could be made. Um, and so I’ll help people get their first attorney, their first CPA, their first bookkeeper, you know, onboarded, and then you know how to coach and lead and manage them. That’s an entire other skill set. And, you know, finally they call me and they say, oh my gosh, Jen, I just went on vacation and I was able to take a week off. And this person that I have working in the office, they were able to handle everything and I was actually able to be off.

Lee Kantor: Yeah. And those things are I mean, that’s monumental because now they can have a normal life. Like it doesn’t have to just be all about their work.

Jennifer Gore: Yeah, yeah. And, you know, you go to start a business, I think for freedom and autonomy. And then if you don’t scale up the business to some point, you end up actually having less freedom and autonomy. Because at least as an employee, you could take PTO.

Lee Kantor: Right? Well, that’s the thing. I find a lot of people who go, okay, I want to be an entrepreneur. I want to be my own boss. And what you don’t realize is you’re trading one boss for every client or boss. So like, you didn’t get rid of a boss.

Jennifer Gore: Yeah. Which I, I always rather go in that category because again, it’s diversified risk.

Lee Kantor: Right? And you can do what you just described is hire somebody else to deal with those people.

Jennifer Gore: Yeah. So, you know, it’s, uh, fun, fun things to solve.

Lee Kantor: Right? Well, you’re helping people build a machine that can help them grow and serve more people and make more money rather than that all just be their problem.

Jennifer Gore: Yes.

Lee Kantor: And, you know, there’s a lot of people that I think they get stuck in that hamster wheel where they’re just doing the work, and then they don’t even know what’s happening, but they think everything’s good because, you know, the lights are still on, you know, when they come in.

Jennifer Gore: We do not want to manage the business just by cash in the bank account.

Lee Kantor: Yeah, that’s a good, good tip out there. So if somebody wants to learn more, get on your calendar, have more substantive conversation with you or somebody on the team. What’s the website? What’s the best way to connect?

Jennifer Gore: Yeah, thanks for having me. The website is evergreenbizcoaching.com. My email jennifer@evergreenbizcoaching and um, I’m on Instagram. Jen Gore lawyer, Evergreen is our, um, Instagram as well. And I’m on LinkedIn. I post a lot on LinkedIn. Jennifer Gore.

Lee Kantor: Good stuff. Well, congratulations on all the success. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Jennifer Gore: I appreciate you. Have a great day.

Lee Kantor: All right. This Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on High Velocity Radio.