The Perfect Blend: A Firm’s Path to Ensuring Work-Life Balance

3. We are going to close our office on January 1, 2013. Since everyone does what they want in our firm, they work at home most of the time now. We believe that we don’t need an office anymore. Again, we believe that. And when you believe something, you will typically act on what you believe. A lot of planning has gone into this move, and we have a lot of work to do to notify our customer base about this change. But more and more, our customer base is all over the country so they have never been to our office anyway. They don’t even need us to tell them that we are closing our office.

4. We will not allow paper to leave or come into our office on January 1, 2013. Because of the way we want to work, and because we will not have an office anymore, paper cannot be a part of our future. It must be eliminated. We believe that. We believe that so much that we are willing to say “you are not the right customer for us” instead of deliver paper to someone who might want paper. When you make radical changes, you have to really believe in what you are doing. Our attempts to eliminate paper from our firm thus far have been such a blessing, we believe that we can go all the way. No Paper will be part of our future.

All of these changes do NOT come without problems or hiccups or things we did not anticipate. To be sure, we have to be ready to pivot and change as we innovate in this space. But we believe in what we are doing. We believe in the perfect blend, and we are willing to stake our firm’s future on it. And that belief has united our small team more than anything else we have done. Because of our beliefs we have to be militant about the kind of customers we take into the firm. Only a certain kind of customer will enjoy the way we work. But when you take customers from all over the country, we are finding there are plenty to go around that believe the same things we believe.

What is the perfect blend like in your firm? Does it exist? To be sure, for the right team member, the perfect blend will exist... but it may not be at your firm. They may start their own firm one day and create their own perfect blend out of their personal life and the work that they love so much. The Perfect Blend allows our team members to love what they do, love how they do it and love the customers they serve. What could be better than that?