Alan Crone

Have a relationship with an accountant, with a banker. You should be going to lunch with those folks once a quarter at least. To keep them apprised of your situation and ask them for advice and so forth. Keeping good tabs on those professional relationships and advice. And then finally, I would say, be fair. Be fair, be real, be human. When you start a business, you're not starting a family.

Have a relationship with an accountant, with a banker. You should be going to lunch with those folks once a quarter at least. To keep them apprised of your situation and ask them for advice and so forth. Keeping good tabs on those professional relationships and advice. And then finally, I would say, be fair. Be fair, be real, be human. When you start a business, you're not starting a family.

We're not family. But you're a good team. You're a collaborative team. Have values. Have a mission. Have a reason other than just making money. that you come to work every morning. I find that when I put my focus on that vision, and my professional mission is to transform the American workplace, one client, one case at a time. That's not something that's going to happen overnight.

We're not family. But you're a good team. You're a collaborative team. Have values. Have a mission. Have a reason other than just making money. that you come to work every morning. I find that when I put my focus on that vision, and my professional mission is to transform the American workplace, one client, one case at a time. That's not something that's going to happen overnight.

That's why we have that disclaimer at the back of it. But when I keep my focus on that mission, great things happen. When I'm concentrating on me, how much money I'm going to make, how much growth my firm has and that sort of thing. That's when it all kind of falls apart because true success is elevating other people.

That's why we have that disclaimer at the back of it. But when I keep my focus on that mission, great things happen. When I'm concentrating on me, how much money I'm going to make, how much growth my firm has and that sort of thing. That's when it all kind of falls apart because true success is elevating other people.

And so if you do those things every day, then every day you're going to be a little bit better. And you're going to look up after a year, after five years, after 10 years and say, man, we really have come a long way, although I don't remember getting here. Those are the things I would do.

And so if you do those things every day, then every day you're going to be a little bit better. And you're going to look up after a year, after five years, after 10 years and say, man, we really have come a long way, although I don't remember getting here. Those are the things I would do.

Every case I've ever been involved in, even if there's intentional discrimination, intentional harassment, there's always this element of bad communication up and down the chain. How does this position fit into the mission of my company? What qualifications do I really need this person to have? How do they need to manifest those qualifications on a day-to-day basis to be successful?

Ask that question in an interview, and if you get a good answer, that's where you need to work.

Greg.

Oh, yeah. Aretha Franklin's birthplace.

Thank you. Next time you come, let me know. I'm a little plugged into this town. I'll be glad to make sure you have a good time.

Be glad to. Well, I wish I could say that I had this burning desire to practice employment law even before I went to law school. That's not true. I went to law school, got out, My first job, I was exposed to employment law, went to work at another firm, and then that's really all I did and really enjoyed it.

Your employment relationship is probably one of the top two most important relationships you have in your life. You've got your significant other, your spouse, and then the way you make your living. And in America, what you do is a big part of who you are. Very early on,

I realized that how incredibly important it is to folks' lives that they have a fair workplace and they have a clear path to be able to provide for their families and provide for their own personal self-actualization. So it wasn't hard to kind of fall in love with employment law from that standpoint. At that time, early in my career, I was a politician with a law license.

I'm now a recovering politician. In the mid-90s, I went to work for the governor in Tennessee and was the chief counsel for the Department of Employment Security. And among other things, we did workforce training and unemployment compensation. I did some work for the governor's office in employment law. And so when I left government service,

Employment law was kind of hard-baked into my professional DNA, and over the years, I've become more and more of an employment law specialist. The book, The Law at Work, People ask me, well, how long did it take you to write the book? If I'm truthful, 30 years.

And I wanted to write the book to give non-lawyers a playbook on how to deal with some of these employment law issues out there because there's a lot of misinformation. People think they know what the law is, but they really don't. A lot of people just don't think about it until it's on top of them.

Whether you're a decision maker at a company or a employee or executive trying to figure out what your rights are, Hopefully, it's a good first place to go to begin to formulate a plan on what you should do next.