One of the toughest realities in business is coming to terms with the fact that not everybody plays by the “right” rules.
Running a business is tough enough, with pitfalls and challenges coming at you every other day. But it’s one thing to compete with other firms while putting out internal fires. It’s quite another thing to have to do that when the competition starts cutting corners to win.
You want to do things the right way, running your law firm with full compliance with, well, the law; being ethical; and doing business with integrity. But suddenly, you look around and realize that the leaders doing things the wrong way are the ones who are succeeding.
You may even wonder: “Is there any use in trying unless I’m willing to cheat?”
The answer, I believe, is a resounding “YES.”
We’ve all heard of the concept of karma, but this is the definition of it I believe in, and have witnessed, the most: someone repeating the same actions and beliefs over and over again until they eventually get what they deserve.
It’s not a mystical force handing out punishment or reward from out of nowhere. It’s a simple, logical progression of events. What you do eventually catches up to you.
If you build your practice on solid ground, with sturdy walls made of knowledge, ethical practices, strong community presence, dedicated internal teams, and efficient operations, the house will weather all sorts of storms.
If you cut corners and build a house of cards, it’s only a matter of time before something knocks it all down.
If you’ve ever watched a mob movie or something like The Wolf of Wall Street, the story always follows the same arc: At first, everything works out, the money flows in, and the lifestyle gets bigger. It looks like they’ve cracked the code. But eventually it all collapses.
And the reason it collapses is simple: probabilities stack.
If someone commits a crime once and thinks through it well enough, the probability of getting caught is quite low. But if they keep committing crimes over and over, no matter how clever they are, it’s statistically impossible for them to keep getting out unscathed.
The best part of all this? It’s not your job to control what anyone else is doing.
You can’t and shouldn’t control the bad actors in your industry. All you can control is how good you are.
How good is your marketing? How about your team; is it solid? Are you involved in your community? Is there a better way for you to manage your caseload?
Too many people get distracted by what their competitors are doing wrong instead of focusing on what they themselves could be doing better. When you do that, you hand over your energy, attention, and strategy to someone else.
Instead, put that energy toward making yourself and your firm stronger. Focus on internal structures, your foundation, and your walls. Get so good that even if someone were to cheat, they couldn’t beat you.
We had a similar issue arise recently:
Someone reached out to us looking for a position. When I saw that they worked at another organization in our industry, I reached out to the CEO to check in with them.
They asked me not to hire the person, so I didn’t.
The very next day, that same company hired one of our former team members.
You could certainly get angry about that, calling it unfair or hypocritical. (And you’d be right.) But it just made me laugh.
You can’t control the fact that people are going to make their own decisions. What you can control is whether you can look yourself in the mirror at the end of the day, and more importantly, whether the way you run your business is built to win in the long term.
Shortcuts might work for a while, but sustainable success comes from doing the hard things consistently, ethically, and well.
So if it feels like the bad guys are cheating, let them. You just make sure that you’re building something so strong that even cheating isn’t enough to beat you.
