Alan Crone

Particularly for small business people, it's okay in the short term, but it is not sustainable long term.

Well, the first thing is, no matter how big your organization is, you need an employee handbook and you need written job descriptions for every position for all the reasons we've been talking about. It's one of those things that you say that to operations people in a business and they, oh, job descriptions. And it's one of those check off kinds of things. No, no, no.

This is a great business tool because you really need to make sure that what you say people are doing or what they actually are doing. And that is so important, whether it's compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, Title VII, all those things, the first thing that a plaintiff lawyer is going to ask for and discover is, give me the job description.

If the job description is wrong, a good trial lawyer can just make you look silly because your job description is wrong. I could do a whole show on job descriptions. So that's the number one, job descriptions, employee handbooks, which is another way of saying, communicate your expectations and communicate your standards.

The second thing is once you've communicated your standards, once you've communicated your expectations, they're non-negotiable. If they're negotiable, then they're not a standard or they're not an expectation. And you should make sure everybody knows.

If five widgets a month is a non-negotiable and the person can't do five widgets a month, ask them to seek their salvation elsewhere, as they used to say at my high school. It's non-negotiable. That's going to do two things. One, your guys that are doing eight widgets a month are going to appreciate you because they see that you value their effort.

The people that are doing four realize, I got this really, they're serious about that. And you're going to get better production out of it. The next thing everyone should have is you should protect your intellectual property. My product or my service is not the value of my company. The value of my company is how I do those things. There are agreements that you can have that really tie

that stuff down, non-competes, non-solicitation. Those agreements can be enforceable. Most of them are not as enforceable as people think because, again, they're kind of off the rack. Somebody says, well, those salesmen, we need to get a non-compete with them. And so they go to The internets, they pull down an agreement and everybody signs it.

And then when you have to go and enforce it, there's problems because it's not customized to your situation. And the person who ordered it isn't going to get what they thought they were getting. And they're going to have some lawyer like me say, well, you know, give you that kind of experience, which you don't want. So understanding what your intellectual property is and what it isn't is crucial.

Part of it may be the cocktail of vendors that you have assembled. The identity of those vendors is proprietary. And that doesn't necessarily mean that it's secret that, you know, somebody couldn't figure out who you use for SEO or who you use for supplying that vanilla that makes your cupcakes taste so good. But somebody doesn't have to do a commercial about it or publicize it.

So you want to make sure that if that vendor relationship is important, that you protect it either through exclusive contracts with the vendor or non-disclosure agreements or whatever it is. Of course, part of that means you've got to understand what it is, and then, you know, communicate that to everybody else.

So the third thing I would say from a legal standpoint is have a relationship with a lawyer. Have a relationship with an accountant, with a banker. You know, 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 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

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. 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.

You know, I think everybody, every reasonable person would agree that you shouldn't make business decisions based on accidental factors like race and gender and sexual preference and all of those things. And I really think that if I was a decision maker, I would be thinking every day, okay, how can I eliminate the implication that that might even be a factor?

And I think one of those things is in order to create, first of all, I say diversity in a business is death. And by that, I mean true diversity. And true diversity is when you have a diverse opinion on what the mission of the organization is. Now, color, gender, all those things are accidental in the true scholastic definition of accidents, right?

I mean, as long as you have people that are mission-focused, then it doesn't matter. All those other things don't matter. But if you're a white guy like me, I got to go outside of my sphere of influence to make sure that those accidents are purely accidental. In other words, I've got to go out and go where other people are more diverse areas and make sure that I'm recruiting at HCBUs.

I'm recruiting in the Latino community. I'm going to the women's lawyers organizations and meeting people and making relationships so that when I'm recruiting, I'm recruiting across the vast spectrum. Because again, the number of people who meet my mission is a limited number amongst the universe of everyone on the planet.

I've got to really expand my scope of recruitment just beyond my little circle of friends. And that's the way that you really do increase diversity in terms of those accidental characteristics that people have is to really expand your view.