Ms Fontenele is the director of Collective Family Law and two years ago founded Scalable Law, a platform that assists other practitioners “scale their law firms without burnout”.

Recently on The Boutique Lawyer Show, she spoke about how she has taken a step back from client work to prioritise the behind-the-scenes responsibilities of her business. Being a lawyer herself, Ms Fontenele acknowledged that this is an essential step that other professionals might have to learn to take. 

“As you start growing a team, it becomes more difficult to then also grow the team, manage, be a great leader, get the work in the door … you really need to start empowering your team by giving them the work,” she explained. “It takes time to run a business, and that’s where I think people end up burnout,” she explained.

For entrepreneurs who have mastered their workload, she advises never to have a set destination for where you want your business to head.

“There is no arrival point. When you start turning over a million dollars a year, that’s not an arrival point. When you have a team of 20 staff, that’s not an arrival point … our goals keep us going to the next level,” Ms Fontenele went on. 

“But as long as we know that it’s not that you are arriving, there’s still going to be challenges, and you’re still going to have to keep recommitting all the time to this business and to be showing up in the best version of yourself.” 

She commented on how many firm owners have entered the industry right after studying and have operated in the same space for several decades, with the trajectories of their business models going stale as a result. 

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“In the business world, people do things differently from the way we do things in law. I don’t understand why lawyers think that we have to be traditional and do things in a certain way. One of the things to spice your business up is to really start looking at your business like a business rather than a traditional law firm.

“There’s so many amazing, cool things to implement into your business and spark it up. If you haven’t yet experimented with social media and getting clients to come through your social media, you can implement tools in that area of your business. You can implement new marketing strategies. It’s exciting to get the phone ringing,” Ms Fontenele explained.

“There’s so many different little things. By the time you’ve gone through all of them and worked them all out, it’s time to restart again and upgrade your skills and up-level. There’s never a moment really to get bored in your business.”

She noted that collaboration amongst other entrepreneurs is a rare, but much-needed, aspect of up-scaling your business and facilitating peer-mentoring.

“Not everyone has the old-school-law way of thinking. There’s a whole community of people out there and a whole movement of doing things a new way in law,” Ms Fontenele noted. 

“Having that growth mindset where you’re going to learn something that you can implement into your business, I think, makes a big difference. For me, I’ve done lots of coaching over the years, and really that’s the thing that’s kept me growing.

“It’s about leveraging your time capacity and working smarter and not harder to achieve the outcomes that you want, which is to have freedom in your business, to have profit in your business, and to impact clients in the way that only you can, as a lawyer.”

In the same episode, Ms Fontenele spoke about the importance of loving one’s business.

The transcript of this podcast episode was slightly edited for publishing purposes. To listen to the full conversation with Caralee Fontenele, click below: