08/26/2021
Catalyst group has been together for about 22 years. I was thinking about our journey, and I think it might be an interesting story.
In the beginning, as they say, I was a corporate auditor and the manager of quality assurance. I spent most of my days focused on ISO standards and business processes. With my partner, Cheryl Leone, an administrator for a law firm, we decided to help a law firm go through the expansion process. My original thinking was, a business is a business. There is no difference. Together we tried to instill business processes in the law firm. We had some success, and the law firm grew pretty steadily. However, I began to discover that all businesses are not the same. A law firm is somewhat different than every other business. I started looking at the differences as it pertains to a business process.
The approach we were taking was putting our emphasis on the financial side. Everything was looked at with Return On Investment in mind. That was valid as far as it went, but I found something else in the process. We added in the concepts of a strategic plan and developed a tailored approach for the law firm. Over the next couple of years, we developed a unique set of processes and started teaching other small law firms what we had learned. That became a very successful model. These tailored processes became the new focus of the catalyst group, and that approach worked for many years until we eventually noticed another pattern evolving. I noticed that the law firm owners didn't necessarily seem happy after developing what we thought was the ideal law firm.
Once we discovered law firms were somewhat unique, we switched our focus to the strategic plan and began to fold in values, vision, and mission. In doing that and looking at the values and visions of the law firm owners, we discovered that many of the firms that we audited or worked with were not focus on the goals of the owner. They were still focusing on revenue. So, we began to modify our thinking once again, using all the lessons learned in our strategic plan process. We put a focus on values and the vision for the Firm. We also mapped the values and vision the owner of the firm gave us. When those data sets did not match, we worked to create a composite set of values and vision. In most cases generating revenue was not the driving force.
This became the most successful model that we had used, and that is the model that we have stayed with until now. At this point, we are semi-retired. But it's an interesting pattern when you look at it, and you could get a jump on the future if you take all those lessons in the last 21 years and change your focus.
