845 Anne Hamer:

Go see a lawyer right away and get a prenuptial agreement because post-nups, are a  lot harder to get someone to sign for obvious reasons. But if you have started your own business, I don’t care how in love you are, it is very hard to keep it separate for a number of years. It is very, very difficult especially if you do need to make capital contributions out of your income because your income is marital. The business itself, you started it, it’s rolling and going but what you make will be marital assets. So, when you contribute that back into the business, then you just have to be very careful that you’re not funding the business and thereby transmuting it into marital property.

OK, I know if you’re a female founder you already have enough on your plate and here’s something else to add to your list. If you’re about to get married and you have a business, get a pre-nup. If you’re married – happily or otherwise, entrepreneurial attorney Anne Hamer has some important advice for you, and you’re going to want to hear this if you want to protect your business and your growing wealth.

MELINDA

Hi, I’m Melinda Wittstock and welcome to Wings of Inspired Business, where we share the inspiring entrepreneurial journeys, epiphanies, and practical advice from successful female founders … so you have everything you need at your fingertips to build the business and life of your dreams. I’m a 5-time serial entrepreneur and the CEO and founder of Podopolo, the AI-powered interactive app revolutionizing podcast discovery and discussion and making podcasting profitable for creators. I’d like to invite you to take a minute, download Podopolo from either app store, listen to the rest of this episode there, create and share your favorite moment with our viral clip sharing tool across social media, by text, or any messaging app, and join the conversation with your questions, perspectives, experiences, and advice … Because together we’re stronger, and we all soar higher when we fly together.

Today we meet an inspiring entrepreneur and Nashville divorce lawyer who works with a lot of women business owners with a practice focused on high asset and conflict cases.

Anne Hamer has seen it all when it comes to the ugly mix of business and divorce, and after experiencing the end of her own marriage she made it her mission to help others going through the process.

Anne will be here in a moment with all her advice for female founders, and first,

I know you love podcasts as much as I do, so what if you had an app that magically connected you to the exact right listens around what interests and inspires you and your friends – without having to lift a finger?  Podopolo’s AI powered recommendations and social clip sharing are just a few things that make it different from all the other podcast apps out there. Download Podopolo now – it’s free in both app stores – and if you have a podcast, get it featured on our home discover screen for free and access time-saving ways to grow your reach and revenue. That’s Podopolo.

We all know how challenging it is to build a business. And one that gets overlooked by many married women entrepreneurs … is what happens to their business in the event of divorce.

If you’re building your empire out of the family home and your partner is contributing to the mortgage, the utilities, the groceries, and maybe you’re not paying yourself your full due or at all, a divorce court is likely going to regard your business as a marital asset. That means, you may find yourself with a 50/50 partner you’re not talking to, and unless you have the liquidity, you may have no means to buy them out. A lot of women lose their businesses this way, so it pays to think ahead, even when love is in full bloom.

Anne Hamer is a top-rated family lawyer who focuses her practice on high-conflict and high-asset cases, and she shares today why it is vital to get great legal advice before you need it. We talk pre-nups, post-nups, valuation and much more.

Let’s put on our wings with the inspiring Anne Hamer and be sure to download the podcast app Podopolo so we can keep the conversation going after the episode.

Melinda Wittstock (00:08):

Anne, welcome to Wings.

Anne Hamer (00:10):

Thanks for having me, Melinda.

Melinda Wittstock (00:11):

Well, you’ve built a whole practice around divorce so I’m going to cut straight to the chase. If a female founder with a business is in that situation, what are the things that she needs to be thinking about that she might not be thinking about right now?

Anne Hamer (00:30):

Let’s take it like this. If a woman comes to me who owns her own business and she’s thinking about getting divorced, she hasn’t filed yet, she’s considering it, what I’m going to talk to her about is how the court will look at the business she’s built and is it hers or is it her husband’s or her spouse, whoever, is some part of that value that she has built all by herself belonging to her spouse. It’s really frustrating for my clients who are entrepreneurs because, in their mind, they have built their business, it is 100% theirs. And whether or not their spouse sat at home eating bonbons or took care of the kids or had a job in a company somewhere, entrepreneurs tend to be the type of people who believe, and rightly so, that they have put their blood, sweat and tears into something and now they don’t want to have to divide it up.

(01:27):

So, the first thing I would suggest to that person is let’s get valuation done. Some of my entrepreneurs will come to me, private business owners, have already recently considered selling or they’ve had a valuation done that we could use. Some of those valuations tend to be higher than what we would want a court to consider and we might want to have something valued that made it more fair. So-

Melinda Wittstock (01:54):

There’s lots of different ways to value a business. We can get to that in a moment but, yes, [inaudible 00:01:59]

Anne Hamer (01:58):

Absolutely, yes.

Melinda Wittstock (02:01):

Because there’s [inaudible 00:02:01] value in terms of where it’s going to go and then there’s, okay, if you’re looking at just at revenue or something like that, it’s very different.

Anne Hamer (02:10):

Yes, yes. And real estate businesses are different. If you’re valuing that, then you’re valuing a manufacturer. There are all sorts of things that can be taken into consideration and the CPA’s rule, especially in Tennessee where I practice but I would assume it’s pretty standard across the country, is that they can use any valuation method that’s reasonable to the accounting community, that’s just a reasonable accounting standard. So, that gives you some leeway. If you are looking for an attorney and you’re in a divorce situation, you own your own business, you need a lawyer who’s used to handling big assets, obviously. You can’t just walk in to somebody and think that’s going to be easily done. You’re also going to need a lawyer who has their own CPAs they use who testify as experts.

(03:02):

Again, you don’t want to use just any CPA. The CPA you may have that you’re working with, probably, most likely, has never testified in court. The kind of CPAs we use to value businesses are called forensic CPAs and, just like you said, they are different ways to do it and you want someone who’s an expert at it but you also want someone who holds up on appeal, who’s talked to judges, who’s used to writing the kind of analysis that the court wants to see. The last time I had one come in, I think she brought six notebooks, three-inch ring binder notebooks of the valuation. So, that’s the kind of thing that a court is impressed by and it is expensive, I’m not going to lie. You’re looking at somewhere between 20 and 50,000 for a basic valuation at that level.

Melinda Wittstock (03:54):

So, assuming you have the valuation and you’ve done all that legwork, how does the court tend to look at it? Say, if you’ve built your business and it’s been 100% you, does it look though as it’s a marital asset that’s just divided 50/50? How does that go?

Anne Hamer (04:13):

Let’s talk about the timeframe on that because that’s super important. If you started doing it, let’s say, you’re building up a medical provider, okay? I’ve got a client right now, she provides medical services and she started that during the marriage. So, her husband worked, she started her business. That is going to be viewed as 100% marital property to be divided fairly equally. Not all marital property is divided on a 50/50 scale but you can use that as a rule of thumb. If she had started it prior to the marriage and had kept reinvesting only from her business and never used marital money to support herself, to grow the business, anything like that, there’s an argument that could be made that most of that would be hers but that’s so tricky.

(05:13):

There’s so much that has to be done to trace that back where the money has come from, what kind of funding did she ever make, capital contributions out of the marital estate, those kind of things that are just very, very particular.

Melinda Wittstock (05:26):

Yeah, or a founder that doesn’t pay herself while she’s building the business and-

Anne Hamer (05:29):

Correct, correct.

Melinda Wittstock (05:31):

… [inaudible 00:05:31] living in that. You know what I mean?

Anne Hamer (05:33):

Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock (05:33):

It gets pretty murky.

Anne Hamer (05:35):

Well, and another thing that I would advise is you need to look at your own liquidity. Because if you’re the major breadwinner or if your business, let’s say, it values at a million, but you don’t have half a million dollars to give your spouse in the divorce, you’re going to be looking at some alimony there or a long-term buyout to try to get that value toward to the spouse that you just don’t have. The court won’t make you sell your business if you can provide your percentage of it to the spouse, whatever the court would award or whatever you two agree on. But liquidity is something that I feel like a lot of entrepreneurs … I struggle with it. You might’ve had a year where you’ve just made a lot of investment in the business and the money’s not there.

Melinda Wittstock (06:23):

Yeah, you literally don’t have the money to do that buyout. So, how do the courts look at providing equity? But then, again, if you’re divorced, do you really want your ex to be owning half the business.

Anne Hamer (06:35):

You just really do not, you just really do not. And sometimes that does end up being the case. You can offer them stock but without a management position. There are some good ways around having to buy them out but it requires both parties to be on board with that. And I want you to think about it this way, if you’re getting divorced, you may or may not feel like you can really trust the person you’re divorcing.

Melinda Wittstock (07:01):

Yeah. Chances are you’re probably not getting along, yeah?

Anne Hamer (07:04):

Right. And so, do you really want to be in business with them? And then, if you are the person getting bought out, do you really want to be a silent partner with your ex where you don’t have any say so? You’d have to be married a long time and have a lot of trust in that person for you to agree to that. So, it is a very elegant solution if both parties can go for it but it’s not a typical solution. It just turns out to be a good way to do it but maybe not emotionally a good way for anybody.

Anne Hamer (07:35):

So, you do have to look for liquidity.

Melinda Wittstock (07:37):

And so, then this gets into a lot of pre-planning. Say you’re getting along really well, you think you’re always going to be married, you’re happy and you create a business. Chances are you’re just not thinking about any of this stuff but should you be? I guess you should be.

Anne Hamer (07:56):

You should be, you should be. Let’s start with you’re not married, that’s the easy solution. At least I say out loud to all your listeners, that’s the easy solution. Just go see a lawyer right away and get a prenuptial agreement because post-nups, and I’ll go into that in a minute, are a lot harder to get someone to sign for obvious reasons. But if you have started your own business, I don’t care how in love you are, it is very hard to keep it separate for a number of years. It is very, very difficult especially if you do need to make capital contributions out of your income because your income is marital. The business itself, you started it, it’s rolling and going but what you make will be marital assets. So, when you contribute that back into the business, then you just have to be very careful that you’re not funding the business and thereby transmuting it into marital property.

Melinda Wittstock (08:50):

So, then you need really good accountant’s advice how to keep those funds from co-mingling.

Anne Hamer (08:56):

You need to think of all those things. You need to think of all those things at the outset. Yes, you should meet with an accountant, you should meet with a family law attorney, you don’t have to use the nasty word divorce. I tell people prenups are really just estate planning. Think of it that way, it makes it so much easier and you can agree that everything else can be you and your spouse together that you’re building together but the business needs to stay separate and I would start there.

(09:22):

If you’re already married, and I have had this happen where I had a client come in, she had a big jewelry business, she was doing great internet jewelry sales through lots of big outlets like Target, making a lot of money doing that and she did convince her husband to sign a postnup, I couldn’t believe it, and we kept the business separate for her but it is so rare that you can convince someone to sign a postnup because what’s their incentive.

Melinda Wittstock (09:49):

And so, did she have to figure out what an incentive could be?

Anne Hamer (09:54):

I think his incentive was that he loved her and she was going to leave him but that’s usually not enough for most people. Especially if you’re thinking financially, why are you going to sign it if you’re the spouse thinking, “Well, you want me to sign this, give me something for it,” otherwise you’re just entitled to whatever it is that the court would give you because married to that person. But I do think it’s important to think about it at the beginning before you marry. If you are already married, I wouldn’t even mention divorce to a spouse, if I owned my own company, before I sat down with a lawyer and an accountant and discussed what’s this going to look like.

Melinda Wittstock (10:37):

And this becomes very important if you have the type of business where you’re bringing in outside investors because-

Anne Hamer (10:42):

Oh, very.

Melinda Wittstock (10:43):

… in due diligence, for instance, this is going to come up. Because this is a mess, it could absolutely crush the asset value of a company. Say, a technology company that’s highly scalable has taken venture capital money and that starts to get very, very complicated.

Anne Hamer (11:03):

It can, it absolutely can and that’s why you’re going to need somebody in there. If we have to do it, I would tell everybody just do it before you get married, do it on the ground floor. Now, I think that, if you are starting a business and, let’s say, you’re already married and you’ve gotten your mind, I’m about to start this up or I’ve started it but it’s not worth a lot yet but I know it’s going there, like you said, investors are on the way. And you know somewhere in the back of your mind that this marriage is not going to last forever or you suspect that it might not be due to you but maybe your spouse has been acting a little strange and you think something could be up, go ahead and meet with a lawyer and go ahead and meet with an accountant and explain what your concerns are. How can you protect your company against your spouse coming for it? It needs to be something that’s considered and, of course, there’s all sorts of ways to do it, it just doesn’t hurt to think about it on the front end.

Melinda Wittstock (12:03):

This is interesting because divorce can cut in a lot of different ways. Here’s a funny scenario, what if you have an investor in your business who’s married but gets divorced? Is that investment then divvied up to the [inaudible 00:12:18]?

Anne Hamer (12:19):

Well, it’s interesting because a lot of people will try to put in, I’m not going to call it a poison pill, that’s a corporate law term, but they will put in a provision where the investment cannot be assigned or divided so then that investor is in the same boat. What I’m talking about with the entrepreneur, they’ve got to get a value to that investment. If it’s a privately traded company, if it’s a family-owned company, it can be very difficult to value if it’s not on the market. So, that investor then, absolutely, has to consider that as a marital asset, was it paid for with marital funds and it’s just really doing a tracing of where did that money come from. If you can keep everything inside a company, that’s fantastic but most people cannot.

Melinda Wittstock (13:10):

Female founders have so many different challenges that men don’t. It’s harder to get access to capital, for example, there’s all sorts of mindset challenges and such so this just adds a whole other level. But the other thing that I’ve seen in marriages too is, when the woman starts to really succeed with a business, it can cause turmoil in a marriage if the man’s not strong enough or …

Anne Hamer (13:42):

Yeah.

Melinda Wittstock (13:42):

[inaudible 00:13:43]

Anne Hamer (13:42):

No, I think that’s absolutely right, that’s absolutely right. And I think it was interesting too what we had touched on before we got on the recording part that a lot of women after divorce are able to go out, start businesses, start a new career, start a new path. For me, personally, it was very helpful to have a settlement because now it was my money and, if I decide I want to use my money to go rent office space and I want to use my money to hire some employees and I want to use my money to build my firm, I can. When I was married, there’s no way my ex-husband would’ve said, “Sure, baby, I would love for you to go start a brand new law firm in Nashville and own your own parking lot and make all this happen with my money,” no, he would not have ever agreed to that.

(14:31):

So, I do think it frees a lot of women when that capital that is part of their marital estate, they get half of it then they can go out and do something creative with it that they weren’t going to be allowed to do in their marriage.

Melinda Wittstock (14:44):

Yeah, that’s interesting because I see a lot of women starting businesses in their 40s and 50s and 60s even and many of them are divorced.

Anne Hamer (14:54):

Well, and let’s talk about the age situation there too because so many things happen to women building careers. So, for me it’s I worked, I went to law school, I got married, I had babies, I was a stay-at-home mom, I went back to work and all those strange little segments add up and, while all that’s adding up, you’re building capital in either your personal money or you’re building your marital estate and it takes time. And so, when you get into your 40s and your 50s, that’s when you finally got enough experience and out there working at various different things, you’ve got a lot of confidence and you probably have enough capital built up to give you some starting point more than what you would’ve had at 22.

(15:43):

Not everybody can go out and start up an internet company at 22 with a bunch of investors just because they went to Stanford University. So, most of us need to get some credibility and it takes time to do that and it takes a lot of hard work and experience to get to the point where you can do it.

Melinda Wittstock (16:02):

Yeah, that tends to be women’s path. I think young men with technology, they tend to be in the sweet spot for investors in the 20s there and a lot of it is because the investors actually exploit their lack of knowledge-

Anne Hamer (16:18):

Yeah, yeah.

Melinda Wittstock (16:19):

… [inaudible 00:16:19] side. That’s why a lot of companies exit and the founders they really don’t have much of the proceeds, right?

Anne Hamer (16:26):

Yes, yes.

Melinda Wittstock (16:27):

They don’t really understand the term sheet, they just signed and such. Whereas, women tend to come into it much later with a lot more experience and I wonder whether that’s that. There’s lots of complexity of why female founders struggle to get funded and only get 2% of the venture capital money, I think there’s all kinds of unconscious bias and such but I think one of the reasons is we tend to come into it later in life when we have a lot more experience about all those things.

Anne Hamer (16:56):

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Melinda Wittstock (16:58):

And quite be so easily controlled in that established Silicon Valley system.

Anne Hamer (17:08):

Yeah, you’re not going to just sign over 99% of your invention or your creation or whatever you’re working on to your angel investor, you’re just not going to do it unless you have no other options. But I do think you’re right, men, young men, A, can be taken advantage of on that side and, with women, I do think you’re coming in thinking I will get an accountant to look at this and I’ll get a lawyer to look at these contracts and I want to know how does this affect me. I also think at 40, 50, I’m 56, I don’t have a lot of runway left, I don’t have time to crash three different career paths. So, at 20, you might say, “Well, we’ll try this. If it doesn’t work or they steal it from me or whatever, I’ll go invent something else.” You got a lot of hutzpah back then when you’re young and life is easy.

Melinda Wittstock (17:59):

For sure.

Anne Hamer (17:59):

You think, “Oh, I can do this forever, I’m brilliant.” And as you get older, you realize, well, wait, how long is it going to take me to really, like you said, scale it, build it up and then either sell it or bring in more investors and keep scaling it or whatever it is your plan is to do with what you’re building. You don’t have the same amount of time at 50 that you did at 25 so that gives you pause, you don’t want to necessarily let someone come in and have that secret dead hand control on you.

Melinda Wittstock (18:29):

So, this is a lot of stuff to do and, in entrepreneurship, there’s a lot of stuff to do as it is and women can easily fall into overwhelm of, oh, man, this is just something else on this endless to-do list.

Anne Hamer (18:53):

Oh, my gosh, yes. And I’ll tell you, I just got back from the funnest vacation. I was with a bunch of really cool women down in the Dominican and one of my good friends who owns her own law firm was with me and she texted me after it was all over and she said, “Thank you so much for making me go do something fun. All we do is work and I’d forgotten about what it’s like to do something fun, we have to be able to have fun too.” And I thought, “Yeah, absolutely.” If all you do is work, what’s the money for? That’s just my opinion.

Melinda Wittstock (19:23):

This is really important. So, how do we prioritize these things from starting a business because there’s a lot of legal groundwork that I think a lot of entrepreneurs miss? Outside your area of expertise but just lining up there, making sure it has their trademark, these sorts of things that get overlooked or just, gosh, just even contract law or understanding [inaudible 00:19:53] law.

Anne Hamer (19:53):

Absolutely.

Melinda Wittstock (19:54):

If you don’t pay an employee in California, that can actually now be a felony, right?

Anne Hamer (20:00):

Oh, for sure. All the taxes you’ve got to do-

Melinda Wittstock (20:03):

Yeah.

Anne Hamer (20:03):

… it’s nerve-wracking.

Melinda Wittstock (20:07):

So, most people don’t know, Anne, and that ignorance is bliss in a way for a lot of entrepreneurs. Because the entrepreneur personality is you have this vision, you go and you build it and you learn all this stuff, you build the plane as you’re flying it.

Anne Hamer (20:20):

Mm-hmm.

Melinda Wittstock (20:23):

But would you say this is absolutely necessary no matter where you are in a relationship? You’re not married yet, you are married, you’re thinking about getting divorced, you are divorced. In all the different legal things for laying the foundation of your business, where would you rank this? I’m going to imagine quite highly because it is what you do but all the same. If someone’s such a busy, I don’t know, they’re just trying to figure out how to get their first clients, they’re-

Anne Hamer (20:52):

Sure.

Melinda Wittstock (20:52):

… [inaudible 00:20:53]

Anne Hamer (20:54):

Well, I’ll tell you what I did. I’ll tell you what works for me or is so far working for me. When I first decided to start my own practice and not be an associate for some other law firm, not working for other partners, not giving them my money, that situation. And because law practice is a little different than I know what starting a business where you’re selling something and you can make more and more and more of it, all I can sell is my time and the time of the people who work for me, that’s how lawyers get paid.

(21:25):

So, when I decided to do it on my own, I went and talked to different people who had already run their own law firms. I wanted to know all the details from how much do I need to bill out my paralegal, how many hours do I have to have the paralegal billing, what their rate needs to be to make it worth my while to pay a salary. The same with all the taxes that are coming due, quarterly and the payroll taxes, that’s a humongous thing. And if you’re not getting that done right, that is when you can get in big, big trouble, they can come in and take your business because you don’t pay your payroll taxes right.

(22:05):

So, talking to someone who’s done it where they can tell you some of the pitfalls and don’t get into this kind of a lease, don’t lease this kind of equipment, all those things, it makes a huge difference. Why build it from scratch if somebody else has already hit some of the speed bumps, let them tell you where they are, right?

Melinda Wittstock (22:24):

And so, talk to me a little bit about your journey because obviously this is personal to you. You are divorced and you built your own law practice.

Anne Hamer (22:39):

Yeah, it’s very personal to me for that reason because, well, my story was interesting. I’ve worked for entrepreneurs before, I went to law school and they had built up a big company that eventually went public while I was still there and I thought I’d like being a corporate lawyer because I enjoyed helping people who were building companies. I liked working on small stock deals, things like that, I liked working on the big ones. But when I got into the actual practice of that, ugh, it’s till 2:00, 3:00, 4:00 in the morning working on people’s IPOs and I just thought I’m never going to have a life.

(23:15):

So, I went into litigation and I loved it but then I got married and, like many women do, took the chance to take 10 years out and those 10 years really set me back, I’m not going to lie. If you take time off, it is going to hurt. And then when I did go back to practicing, I was practicing part-time, thank God, because I had no idea my husband was thinking about leaving me. And when he said he wanted a divorce, I thought, “Well, at least I’ve got the groundwork here. I’ve got a law degree from a top five law school, I’ve got practice, I’ve got experience.” But at that point, I really had to hit the ground running hard and learn everything there was to learn about building up a big client base, building up the advertising engine that has to run that because now the legal field is so …

(24:04):

We all see the Morgan ads everywhere and so that’s something lawyers never did in the old days but, I promise you, we’ve all got to really understand advertising, marketing, PR. I didn’t have a background in any of that. I just went to work, looked at a lawsuit, met with my clients and went to court. So, once you start trying to ramp up like that and then get the clients in and then you say, “Oh, okay, I’m going to go on my own. I’m going to have my own employees, I’ve got to earn enough and they’ve got to earn enough for me so I can pay them,” those were the scariest things. Hiring my first employee was the scariest thing I ever did, I thought I was going to die but it worked. It’s just like what you say, when you’ve got to jump in at some point, you can’t just stand on the side and dip your toe, you do have to go try it.

(24:50):

But it was definitely a scary journey for me. I was very fortunate, coming out of my divorce, to have money and I could use that to invest and build and I would recommend to anybody, don’t be scared. If this is something you’ve always wanted to do, go do it now. If you can afford it, go do it now. If you can’t afford it and you want to do it, you’re going to be able to make it work so go do it, don’t wait. Don’t wait because life’s too short.

Melinda Wittstock (25:18):

100%. And so, you mentioned some of the challenges in building the business, there’s certain things that every business has to do. You got to be good at sales, you got to be good at marketing, you got to figure out, obviously, all the legal stuff, the accounting stuff, you got to figure out how … It’s one thing to do it yourself but it’s a whole other thing to master delegation and-

Anne Hamer (25:42):

For sure.

Melinda Wittstock (25:43):

… and management and all of these things. And so, what were some of your biggest challenges and how did you navigate that? I think there’s a lot of entrepreneurs that get to the point where it’s like, “Okay, I’m going to double down on my strengths and hire my weaknesses.”

Anne Hamer (25:57):

Exactly. Girl, that’s exactly it. That’s exactly what I did. I just outsourced the things I can’t do. I can’t develop a website, there is no way. I can sit in front of a photographer while he takes the pictures for it, I can come up with content, I don’t know if anybody’s going to come up with their own content now that we’ve got AI out there but, at the time, I could develop my own content but I can’t design a website and I can’t update it. And I guess I could learn, I’m not stupid but when, when am I going to learn that. Because when am I going to also drive my children to their sporting events and when am I going to go look at that new office space that I’ve got to decide upon, when am I going to interview the new secretary who’s coming online, when am I meeting with the computer guy. So, you do have to learn that you’re going to have to outsource and then you just got to, again, I’d say always ask for recommendations.

Melinda Wittstock (26:49):

Right, 100%. So, what were some of your biggest challenges in where you had to get out of your own comfort zone?

Anne Hamer (26:58):

Huh. Probably marketing, probably marketing. I would say that was a big one because it’s scary, it costs a lot of money, you’re making big investments. I’ve seen my own clients come in where they’ve hired somebody to design a website or run their Instagram, all their social media and they’re getting no ROI on that, nothing, it just looks ridiculous. And I’m trying to explain to them, “I’m sorry you put that much money out of your marital estate into this but guess what? It’s worth nothing to you. Your business is not doing well and you’ve got this beautiful website and all this great social media but no one’s buying your product.”

(27:36):

That’s the scary thing to me is just having to say I know this will work or I believe this will work or I’ll try it. Let’s try it for a year, let’s try it for six months, you don’t have to commit forever. I heard a woman entrepreneur the other day at a business luncheon talking about trying something out like that and she said, “Sometimes you just go, ‘Okay, well, I spent $100,000 on that last year and it didn’t really work.'” And I thought that makes me want to puke but it’s true, it’s true.

Melinda Wittstock (28:04):

Oh, it can happen. I think of all of my five significant businesses. There’ve been other little side hustles and things like that but you can make very expensive mistakes quite easily and –

Melinda Wittstock (28:23):

The self-recrimination that comes from that can be crippling. And yet, at the other hand, sorry, on the other hand, you’re making decisions with the best information and your knowledge at the time. And this is a really interesting mindset challenge because things are always changing and there’s so much beyond your control. So, while it’s painful, as long as you can learn from it.

Anne Hamer (28:49):

Yeah, yeah.

Melinda Wittstock (28:51):

But again, try to keep your mistakes because you’re going to make them. Try and keep your mistakes inexpensive.

Anne Hamer (28:58):

Well, and here’s a good example of my personal weakness. I have a great CPA, I have a great CPA, she handles everything I need to do. Whoever I’m paying, my payroll, she handles all that, she handles all the accounts, she’s brilliant at it. I have a financial advisor. I have a really good website designer. So, those three things are things that are not my strengths. I can market myself at a public event, no problem, but what I can’t do are those things and, to me, it’s worth every penny I pay those people to do those things. My publicist is fantastic and I know it’s worth paying her because I don’t have time to sit down and figure out what are all the areas where I need to be pushing myself marketing, advertising wise, that’s what she does. I think I could be good at that but I can’t do that and also be a really good divorce lawyer, I got to pick.

(29:54):

So, I think you do have to know your strengths and figure out where is someone that can do it a billion times better than I ever could, who I really trust and also feel like you’re getting the bang for your buck. You want it to be a value you feel good about.

Melinda Wittstock (30:09):

Yeah.

Anne Hamer (30:10):

But like you said, we all make mistakes on that.

Melinda Wittstock (30:12):

That’s so true. So, where are you taking your practice? Where do you see yourself being five years from now, 10 years from now? What’s success for you?

Anne Hamer (30:21):

It’s interesting from, well, any kind of small law firm standpoint, how big do you really want to get and how big can you get before you ruin your brand. So, right now, that’s my struggle, I guess, is looking at the reason my clients hire me is to hire me, they want access to me and I only have so much time in the day. So, how many attorneys can work for me, how many clients can I take, how big can I grow. There are divorce firms, Cordell & Cordell is one that’s national, but I’ve never met or seen or spoken to Mr. Cordell and I doubt any of the clients have. That’s not necessarily something that, I think, would make me happy. I like being able to have at least just the face-to-face meetings with them when they need me, whether it’s a big client or a small client. I care about my clients that’s why I love my job.

(31:19):

So, that has been my struggle is figuring out how to scale a firm like mine because I would have to grow it with other attorneys who my clients felt as comfortable with as they do me and I think that’s where I am right now. But let’s say there’s 10 of us or 20 of us, getting the quality control when the person is the thing you’re selling is difficult and that’s where I see firms that grow get growing pains. When everybody’s wanting to hire the celebrity partner and they’re getting the five associates, they don’t feel like they’re getting that access and then I see them … That’s where I’ve been able to get a lot of my growth from people who said, “Well, I wanted that lawyer or I wanted that lawyer but I got her associate all the time and that didn’t really work out for me. I need someone who I can talk to on the weekend or I need someone who can pick up in an emergency.”

(32:18):

So, that’s the harder challenge, I think, for law firms is you really are hiring a person, not a product. The person is the product.

Melinda Wittstock (32:27):

Right. So, Anne, if anyone is listening to this podcast and they need legal advice because they are about to either get a divorce or get married or such and they have a business, how can they get in touch with you?

Anne Hamer (32:46):

I would love for them to go to my website, it’s annehamerlaw.com. Anne, A-N-N-E-H-A-M-E-R-L-A-W.com. And that’s got all my contact information and it tells you a lot about why I do what I do and what I do and how my firms work and that would be a great way for them to get in touch with me. If they’re not in my state, I can help them find somebody where they are.

Melinda Wittstock (33:13):

Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for putting on your wings and flying with us today.

Anne Hamer (33:18):

I loved it, Melinda. Thanks for having me.