Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Focus vs Sprawling with Holly Buckley of McGuireWoods LLP 1-31-25
Fri, 31 Jan 2025
In this episode, Holly Buckley, Chair of Healthcare at McGuireWoods, joins Scott Becker to discuss the art of balancing focus with strategic expansion.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
This is Scott Becker with the Becker Private Equity and Business Podcast. Today, we're going to speak to Holly Buckley. Holly's the chair of the McGuire's Healthcare Department. We've got the McGuire Woods Healthcare Private Equity event coming up May 14th and 15th in Chicago this year at the Ritz-Carlton. It's in its 21st or 22nd year.
Amazing, amazing work by the Healthcare Private Equity team to grow that into a marquee event in the country. Today we're going to talk to Holly about a subject I find very fascinating, which is the subject of focus versus sprawling. Focus in the essential versus doing and going after more priorities and how people like Holly, who runs this major, major department at a, you know,
huge law firm, manages this concept of focus versus testing new ideas, focus versus sprawling, and trying to stick to the essential. Holly, what are your thoughts on how you manage around this concept of focus versus sprawling and trying to hit that right balance?
Chapter 2: How does Holly manage focus in her role?
Thanks, Scott. And as always, thanks for the discussion. I mean, I think I would love to say I have a perfect system and that I'm great at this. And I think as many can probably identify with the life is cyclical. And so at some points you do much better and at other points you're probably sprawling and not as focused as you should be.
But I think within different categories, there's different items and they need to be managed in different ways, right? So I'm both a practicing lawyer, that's kind of what I should be spending the majority of my time on. And I'm also the leader of the healthcare group. And so within both of those areas, There's the areas that I need to focus on very deliberately and continuously.
And for the lawyer side, it's clients. For the department side, it's people. So very similar. The most important thing in both of my disciplines are the people. And on the lawyer side, if you don't have clients, you don't have a business. And on the department side, if you don't have great people, you don't have a business.
Chapter 3: What are the key strategies for maintaining focus?
And so making sure that the people are top front almost at all times is just critical. But then there's the strategy side of things. And as both a practicing lawyer as well as a department leader, it's really important to take the time out to build strategy for the department side. It's growth. It's how do we want to grow? Where do we need to grow? And how are we going to execute on that?
And in order to build that plan, you really need that focused downtime. And I frankly find flights very helpful for this. I find as sad as it may be, vacation's a good time for this, to be able to take some quieter time when there's less going on to actually focus on it.
On the lawyer side, building your strategy around business development, personal development, where you want to develop skills, same thing. You've got to take that quiet time to think it through. and put a plan in place and then revisit it periodically. Within both of the disciplines, there's also kind of the ongoing things you need to execute on.
So there's the constant focus, but then there's the need to focus on execution on things like business development, recruiting, billing, focusing on finances, and that's things that need continued attention, but less deliberate and continuous attention. and kind of the clients and the team items.
Chapter 4: How does one balance professional responsibilities and personal priorities?
And then there's all of the other admin that just kind of, I wouldn't say it gets in the way, it's totally critical, but it takes a huge amount of time. And for that, I think the key is figuring out systems to both keep everything on track, but also keep the things off my plate that shouldn't be on my plate.
And I think the final thought, and this is one that I'm stealing from one of the senior associates I work with who's very, very smart, is the idea of... You have a lot of balls you need to keep in the air, but there's only one glass ball, and the glass ball is your family, and that's the ball you can't break.
And so you keep all the balls in the air and everything on track, but you make sure that when that glass ball starts to fall that you're there to catch it, and that's your number one priority and focus whenever it needs to be. So happy to chat through any of those, but those are the high-level thoughts.
Chapter 5: What role does culture play in strategy?
No, I think there's so much there, and I'll sort of walk through four of those things that I just absolutely loved. The first concept is execution plus strategic thinking, execution plus thinking. And not always easy. You and I have had plenty of colleagues that are so good at both, at wrapping their hands around both of those.
And then we've also had colleagues that are so good at sort of executing little tasks but not actually thinking of the context they're in. So execution plus thinking. The second thing, you know, there's this whole layer of thought around culture each strategy for breakfast. And most of us that have been in real business understand that that sounds so good, but it's really culture plus strategy.
It's not one or the other. It's people and strategy. It's like people and technology, culture and strategy, and it is both. The third thing that I absolutely loved is this concept of what is the absolute most important thing in your life.
And if it's family, it's family, whatever it is, but whatever that glass ball is, it could be in business, the most important client, the most important colleague, the most important employee, whatever it is, but you better have your eyes on what's most important to you. And I think a wonderful concept of like, look, we've got all these different work priorities and,
But if we mess up our relationship with our spouse, our family, our children, whoever it is that's most important to us, that's a real problem.
The fourth thing, which is an amazing thing that's happened is, you know, particularly on longer flights, we've gotten back to this point where people used to think about, you know, in the healthcare world, they talk about this thing called pajama time, where a doctor has to do notes at night. Airplane time for lawyers or business people is,
particularly if you could sit nicely and turn off some of your social media and stuff, has become really well-timed. For our sake today, we actually decided to send this get some work done, think through some things, do some reading I want to catch up on.
That's really how this evolved to the airplane team becoming something that people actually like versus hate for their chance to actually sit and do some work and think versus just executing on stuff. So I love those four or five points. I know there's a lot more there, Holly. Holly, anything else you'd like to add to this concept on essentialism?
I mean, you've made big strategic shifts over the year as you move the practice from a provider-centric practice to, over the years, a provider and private equity-centric practice. That was a big strategic effort by you and some others.
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