Leslie Stewart’s law firm business boomed when the foreclosure crisis hit its peak in Florida. But she knew the day would come when–like all crises, this one, too, would wind down, and at that point, she’d need a better business model.
Sustainable businesses, she says, must learn to be nimble. So she prepared. Today, the Appearance Network provides local counsel appearance coverage for law firms throughout the U.S., but with more efficiency and profitability than ever.
We talk about what key changes she made to make it happen… including her number one secret weapon.
Tune in to find out…
- How she differentiates her practice in a crowded marketplace
- Why perfection can cost just as much as mistakes
- Strategies for staying in a constant state of improvement
- Ways to recognize your weaknesses – and balance them with your strengths
- And more
Listen now…
Mentioned in This Episode: www.appearancenetwork.com
Episode Transcript:
Davina Frederick: Hello, and welcome to the Solo to CEO podcast, where we provide a mix of powerful, thought provoking, and practical information to assist you in your transformation from solo to CEO of a high impact, high revenue generating business. I’m your host, Davina Frederick, and I’m here today with Leslie Stewart, attorney and CEO of Appearance Network. Appearance Network provides litigation and local counsel appearance services for law firm clients throughout the United States. And I’m really excited especially for today’s guest, because Leslie Stewart was my very first and only law firm business partner. So, I’m super, super excited that she’s here today. So welcome, Leslie. I’m so happy you’re here today on the Solo to CEO podcast.
Leslie Stewart: Thank you, Davina. I have been looking forward to this since we had it scheduled. So I am looking forward to visiting with you and chatting with you about Appearance Network, and letting everybody know what we’re up to now.
Davina Frederick: Oh, yeah. So we’re going to have a hard time, you and I, because we’re going to get … Every time we get together, first of all, we will talk for hours and we only have a finite amount of time, and there’s no telling where this conversation is going to take us, but I really love the direction that you have gone in with your practice since you and I were together. So why don’t we start with, let’s, talking about kind of where you and I started, way back in 2009.
Leslie Stewart: Yeah, so really, I have to give you tons of credit, maybe I was your first client, your first coaching client. You let me know 11 years ago, that I had what it took to be an entrepreneur. And forever, I will be grateful to you for encouraging me to join you and we had a dynamic, fun practice. And you know, 10 years ago, I actually was looking as I was getting ready for this. It has been 10 years-
Davina Frederick: I know.
Leslie Stewart: I know, I know. And we’re beautiful, and we look exactly the same. You know, nothing’s changed.
Davina Frederick: I know.
Leslie Stewart: We’re just wiser.
Davina Frederick: Exactly.
Leslie Stewart: But 10 years ago, we were closing up our, what I call my first chapter, you know, the first business that I had ever owned, and starting to grow what today are two nationwide businesses. And to me, that is just really remarkable. And I mean, what an honor to be able to sit here and chitchat about that, with it being a 10-year anniversary.
Davina Frederick: I know, I know.
Leslie Stewart: Of making those huge, dynamic changes.
Davina Frederick: I can’t believe it’s been, I can’t believe it’s been 10 years. I mean, time has really just flown by and we’ve both been busy, busy, busy since then. And so, I want to talk about, so when you and I were in practice together, we had kind of the foundation of our, our little partnership started, it was kind of built on doing a lot of foreclosure work, which is how I had started out my solo practice, was doing … My solo practice started out kind of at the beginning of the foreclosure crisis in the country, particularly here in Florida. The housing foreclosure, housing crisis, and we were representing lenders, and that’s where we got a lot of our business. Of course, we did a lot of other, we were kind of door law. You know, we were trying to figure out what kind of law we wanted to practice.
You and I met in law school and became friends in law school. And so we did a lot of other kinds of law, you know, family law and some estate planning law, but the foundation of our work.
Leslie Stewart: Oh, the bankruptcy. Got to talk about the bankruptcy. We worked on that. Ugh.
Davina Frederick: Let’s not talk about the bankruptcies. But then, when we split, we decided that, I decided I had some things going on personally, and I decided that I wanted to go a different direction and do some different things with my life. It wasn’t what I wanted to do anymore, even though we were successful, and even though the firm had grown. After a couple years, it just wasn’t what I wanted to do, and you were really seeing a great opportunity with doing local counsel work, which is what we were doing a lot of. So tell me, after I sold out my part of the practice to you, and you continued, you changed the name of your practice, and it became Stewart Law Group, so tell me where did you go from there?
Leslie Stewart: So it was, you know, I knew I liked being in the courtroom. And I have to be honest, we all have mentors that encourage us in different ways, and I’m sure that we’ve talked about this many times before, but I had a mentor that told me he didn’t know that litigation was going to be something that was for me. And I actually think that he helped me more than he ever realized, because once we started doing the coverage work, and we were having success with it, I enjoy being in the courtroom, I enjoyed seeing the difference that me being there was making. It was more than just saving a file attorney from traveling from you know, South Florida to do a five-minute hearing, but we were getting contested matters. And I enjoyed starting, I could see that I was getting proficient in doing, it was pretty much the same thing every day, but the breadth and depth of my knowledge was growing in this one particular area of the law. So exactly what you were saying.
We started as door law, doing all kinds of things, but finally, I focused in. After the practice changed, we changed names to Stewart Law Group in September of ’09, you know, number one I didn’t have enough resources to do everything, and quite frankly, I hated some of it. Can we talk about bankruptcy? I hated it. And so, right? And so I knew that that wasn’t what I wanted to do, and we were really fortunate, the demand was there that you talked about. Yeah, we started, we were on kind of the front end of the foreclosure financial crisis, and you know, I don’t know if I had a conversation with somebody, or if it was just, you know, process of elimination, though not a very difficult process of elimination. I didn’t have to spend any marketing dollars. I didn’t have to have extended you know, client relationships.
It was just something that really clicked for me and I didn’t mind getting up early in the morning. I didn’t mind dealing with the traffic. I didn’t mind all of the parts about coverage that are not so glamorous, and we were, you know, we had one staff member. And it was something that within a few weeks of getting started and just making the commitment that that’s what I was going to do, all of the sudden, I was recruiting, you know, the attorney that sat next to me in law school, and then she knew someone and another attorney. And we had, we grew from doing two counties to three counties, five, seven, and then I had to add staff. And I remember adding, you know, that staff member that she was with me for years, and one day she came into my office, and I’ll never forget.
And she’s just in the doorway and she said, “Why are we only doing seven counties? And I said, “Well, I don’t know.” She said, “Because I think we could do the whole state.” And I have to give her credit, she saw it before I did. And we started doing the entire state, and it became a little bit of a logistical nightmare, we had every surface in our old office space was covered with a white board, keeping track of everything that we were doing. We’ve had spreadsheets and checklists, and calendars, keeping track of everyone and you know, eventually, that all appeals to me. I’m an organizer and a process person by nature, and so the practice grew because I think I found something that just played upon my natural talent, and you know, I’ll organize a closet on a rainy day. So organizing you know, a mess of, you know, a schedule with multiple people, geographic limitations and who can do what, who’s, you know, I loved all of that.
And was able to turn that into something and then take advantage of an increasing demand at a particular time in our, quite frankly in our nation’s financial history.
Davina Frederick: Right.
Leslie Stewart: So it was an important time, and you know, I’m going to give credit where credit is due, I was in the right place at the right time and fortunately for me, married to the right person who could write me a software program to take all of those spreadsheets and develop something that would give me a real leveraged business advantage.
Davina Frederick: So tell me a little bit more about that. Your software. Because that’s something that is really unique, for your business model and what you do.
Leslie Stewart: Well, and this is what I tell anybody, you know, your Solo to CEO audience, everybody has unique advantages and talents. And mine just happened to be brushing his teeth right next to me in our house. And I, he came up to the office, and he would see things, my husband has been a programmer now for I’d have to say decades. Today’s actually his birthday, so I’ve been using words like decades and epoch all day.
Letting him know that I haven’t forgotten it’s his birthday. But he developed, he came in, saw what we were dealing with, and he says, “You need a database.” And what I thought we needed was more manpower. But over time, he was able to take individual parts of what we were doing and develop components that eventually became our Harmony Case Management System. And the reason we call it Harmony, it has a super cheesy name, but I came up with it in two minutes, and it’s called Harmony because it’s your firm and our firm working together in Harmony.
Davina Frederick: Right, right. And you, so it’s not only did you create a custom sort of software to system, to help make this, to help maximize your productivity and make it easier for you to work with your clients, but you also then really start, and not only your clients, but also your network of attorneys in the field, right, because you’re now managing a network of attorneys working for you throughout-
Leslie Stewart: Truly. It’s three, there are essentially three stakeholders that use Harmony. And we always forget about the staff, right? Because we always talk about the client and the attorney needs, but we have to remember the component that they’re, that we have the staff members in our office, there was a lot of paper, you know, 10 years ago. There was a lot of paper involved and a lot of you know, just administration. And so we had, you know, at one point, there were 36 full timers. You know, working with us, managing the files to ensure that the legal work was done correctly. But we had the attorneys, who were relying on the staff to do their part, and the client, which really is a firm that represents one of the largest financial institutions, any of them that you can name, you know, mortgage lenders, that were relying on us working as a team.
And what Harmony did was it allowed us to be consistent, be in communication, and one of my favorite things that it does is it allows everyone to be on the same page. You know, we’re all looking at the same event, we’re looking at the same, you know, we have hearings. We still have hearings pending out today right now. And so the clients know that the attorney is still in court, we as the administration and management know the attorney is still in court, and the attorney hopefully is in court using the information that we’ve provided in order to get either the result, or push the case forward in the way that the client directed us to.
Davina Frederick: Now, so there was no other tool already available out there that could do this for you.
Leslie Stewart: Well, and to be honest, there may have been, but this is a really niche business. You know? And the reason I know that it’s a niche business is that it takes me about 30 minutes to explain what all we do. But I wanted some, I thought I only needed something that did a couple of features, and so it took me a while to understand that you know, what we really needed was something that was tailored to exactly what we’re doing. So I wouldn’t say that any of the commercially available case management systems, they’re not really designed to work with those three stakeholders. They’re really more firm to customer, and this really has to have more of a team environment, and has to be able to work in math. It has to be simple, direct, and quick, because efficiency is the name of the game in what we’re doing.
Davina Frederick: And it’s very tailored to not only these three stakeholders, but also the nature of the stakeholders, and the industry and the environment, right? So there may be team work apps out there, but they’re not attorneys, attorney providers, attorney clients.
Leslie Stewart: Right-
Davina Frederick: And then those poor admin people, who are caught there having to please those attorney clients, and attorney providers-
Leslie Stewart: Isn’t that the truth.
Davina Frederick: Right? So, you really need high performance system.
Leslie Stewart: High performance, and like I said, efficiency is really the name of the game. You know, coverage work is something that, it happens fast, and you need to be able to distill down to what you need to do. So what the attorneys are actually looking at, number one, we have to be careful about privacy, and we actually have a need-to-know policy. The information that is displayed is what the attorney needs to know to perform what they need to in court, and then be able to transmit that back, we try to eliminate paper, you know, what do you do with a court package after you go to court with it? You know?
Davina Frederick: Yeah, so there-
Leslie Stewart: I’m sure everybody, you know-
Davina Frederick: I’m sure there’s a confidentiality issue, because you’re trying to, you know, you have those kinds of issues. Those issues are unique to attorneys and clients. You know? The ethical issues-
Leslie Stewart: Absolutely.
Davina Frederick: The confidentiality issues, so it’s not, you can’t use some off-the-market you know, calendaring system, team work system, or something like that, that you would find, you really have to have some things specialty. Right?
Leslie Stewart: Sure. And especially in an era now where we’re dealing with regulatory complaints, we’re dealing in the financial you know, sector, and there are regulatory complaints that didn’t exist 10 years ago, that have come online. And so there’s all sorts of security concerns. But, and also, just as a matter, as a practical matter, you know, an attorney who is doing 10 files doesn’t need information on 20 files. They need just what they need to know in order to get the job done, complete their assignment, and move on to the next thing, whatever’s next in their day.
Davina Frederick: Now, I want to talk about, so people get an idea of your real solo to CEO journey, I really want them to get an understanding of how you grew this business, what it looks like then, and what it looks like now. So first of all, it was you starting out and then you’ve explained how you’ve started sort of growing it, talking to this person and that person, and you grew it, you grew it, and eventually, you had a pretty full team and you had the office space, and you know, you had attorneys coming and going from your office, you had managing attorneys in your office, helping you kind of coordinate you. You had staff, pretty big staff of people helping to work these files and that kind of thing. But that’s not what your business looks like today, and you are servicing more clients in more locations throughout the country today. At one point, you were really focused on Florida, and now you’re nationwide. But with fewer people, so tell me about that.
Leslie Stewart: That’s exactly right. Yeah, so we did, we, the, you know, office space that you and I had, and I think of it this way, is that we grew from 1200 to 3000 square feet, to 5000, 7000, and we added more and more people, well, you know, for your Solo to CEO audience, that sounds great until you start, the pressure adds up and the problems add up. More people, more problems, more complexity, you know, I was sharing, as I was preparing for this, I was sharing with my husband, I said, “Do you realize we had what the payroll requirement was, every other Monday?” And so it was something that I was excited when we were doing it. But it was something that eventually, as we all know, the economy began to improve, and so our business began a gradual slide down. And so I had an opportunity about two years ago to decide what was I going to do?
And it was an opportunity for innovation, and I was able to do things like allow employees to work from home, eliminate, we have completely eliminated the mail room, mail room was fully staffed all day, every day, so 80 labor hours per week, two machines, one pallet of paper, two staff members. When the firm was fully functioning. I’ve been able to completely eliminate those costs. Now, 10 years ago, I don’t know that that would have been something we could have done, because we were so reliant on paper in several of the courtrooms, but just the natural progression of things towards a digital environment, made it unnecessary. You know, I’ve, to have huge copiers and then pay the air conditioning bill to keep that room from being so hot.
Davina Frederick: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Leslie Stewart: And being more efficient. The piece of software that we talk about, you know, Harmony is in a constant state of improvement. So, you know, we’re, if I open the door, you’d be able to hear Chris clickety-clack on his keyboard, working on it right now as we make innovations that allow us to be nimble as a business but yet, serve more clients all over the country.
So one of the reasons that we stayed with Florida is because I thought that I had to have a depth of knowledge, that this was all that we could handle, and what’s been truly amazing, is now with such a nimble model, with less staff, with staff who I think are you know, happier because they can work from home, we are working on something more interesting, you know, we’re learning all about other states and how you know, foreclosures are practiced in other states. It’s fascinating to me. We have a better model, we’re doing more with less, and like I said, my footprint, having a 7000-square foot office, I’ve done it. I will never do that again, you know, it’s just not something, I see that I can do it differently, and I’m more satisfied as a business owner, and the word that I keep using is nimble. I realize how critical that is for my business.
Davina Frederick: So, one of the things that you know, of course, we see it no matter what business we get into, we’ve seen it in the business that I’m in, in the business you’re in, in the legal business, whatever it is, wherever there is success, you’ll start seeing more and more competition. So, in your, it’s certainly been the case in your industry as well, in your area as well, we saw it happening when you and I were doing it, that there became a lot of competition for local counsel coverage and everything. And has that been an issue for you? I mean, where-
Leslie Stewart: Oh.
Davina Frederick: How do you differentiate yourself, and what is that, what kinds of things have you done? How do you feel about that?
Leslie Stewart: Well, you know, the first thing I had to realize, I had an attorney that has been doing coverage work since the 1990s, he told me, he says, “You don’t have competition.” He says, “I have competition since you guys showed up. So we’re just the first wave of coming into what was a cottage industry, so essentially you know, for those who don’t know exactly what coverage is, essentially this is something that if you worked in a large, traditional firm, you know, if you had a conflict, you’d just have someone else, you’d just walk down the hall to the lowly associate and say, “Hi, I’ve got a 9:00 tomorrow morning, here’s the case file, if you’ll handle that for me, I’d appreciate it.” You know, we had that model, versus people having your suite mate cover a hearing while you’re on vacation. And so that has existed, you know, as long as there’s been lawyers practicing law.
Davina Frederick: Right.
Leslie Stewart: But during … You know, so I have an attorney, and he actually works with us, and he said, “This has existed forever,” he said, “I’ve had a practice doing this for a long time,” so we were just coming into something when there was a high level of demand. Well, that high level of demand, exactly what you said, has brought lots of competition into the marketplace. There’s been people that run, you know, they stay in their geographic area and they compete locally with individuals, but there are some nationwide competitors that I have. And to me, it’s really simple, I am a practicing attorney, I treat the work do like it is law, I don’t treat this like match.com where you know, you just are matching attorneys with hearings and you know, it’s one bad date and you’ll never hear from them again.
And so you know, for me, there are a lot of folks that are coming into the marketplace that think that this is easy, and that goes for the services getting something started, they think, “Oh, we’ll just write an app, you know, nobody has to talk to each other, we just go cover a hearing and it’s great, and everybody gets paid and nobody’s upset.” Well, that’s just not reality. And for us, I treat lawyers like lawyers, I treat the clients that we work for like lawyers, because they are. And we try to keep things you know, precision is required, and so we come at it from that point of view. Innovation is necessary, we all have to be efficient. But as I look out into the marketplace, I think there are different ideas of doing coverage that are floating around.
I think mine’s the best. I think that one of the best compliments that we received was to have one of our existing customers in Florida say, “Please, would you come to this state?” We were encouraged to hurry up the expansion by letting some of our customers know, you know, we want what we have in Florida in this state or that state, and you know, moving … I know we’ve got a winning model when our customers are satisfied, and there’s a lot of dissatisfaction just in our industry, because people are not … You know, there’s a perception that what we do is just quick and easy.
Well no lawyer wants to think that somebody is not taking their case seriously, or is going to court and just doing the bare minimum to get paid, you know? So you’ve got to have a broader spectrum, there’s got to be a team environment, and there’s got to be an ongoing working relationship, and that’s really what to me, brings the total package you know, idea to doing coverage.
Davina Frederick: And your attorneys are prepared. I mean, your attorneys are prepared to make an argument. Your attorneys are prepared to do what is necessary to have the outcome that is desirable for the client. They’re not just showing up to be a warm body.
Leslie Stewart: Right, and I hate that. But that perception is real.
Davina Frederick: Right.
Leslie Stewart: The perception that you know, when you hire a coverage attorney, it’s just a warm body. First of all, it is a slight to the many, many, many attorneys that are going out there and rocking it out every day. You know, we, I see people going the extra mile, and some of it, it’s just having the right personality to do that. But one of the reasons that the attorneys that work in my network are so prepared, is number one, that’s who they are as professionals.
And that’s why we, that’s why it’s a win-win for us to work together. You don’t make it very far working with us, number one, you know, it shows up in the work product, it shows up before the work product, you know, after 10 years of interviewing people and getting to know attorneys in this particular industry, it’s not right for everyone, you know? There’s a personality type that works really well with us, and it’s very obvious when an attorney either shouldn’t be doing coverage, and frankly when a client, shouldn’t, certain cases don’t belong in the local counsel arena. If you can’t give us instructions, and be okay with the, you know, give instructions and allow the attorney to go do their job, then it’s not a great fit for local counsel. You know, so that’s a discussion I actually had this morning with an attorney. Like, “I’m really nervous about this hearing,” “Then you need to go do it.”
Davina Frederick: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And there’s a difference, I’m sure you’ve seen the change between I know back, you know, back when we started doing local counsel work, we were doing it for big banks, big lenders, right?
Leslie Stewart: Right.
Davina Frederick: But your clients, over time have changed and expanded. I’m sure you still do a lot for lenders, but for banks, but you do, you have a lot of other types of clients now, and that makes a difference to the type of client that you have.
Leslie Stewart: Sure.
Davina Frederick: Because when you start having you know, right? Is that the case?
Leslie Stewart: Absolutely. And every client’s needs are different, and so what’s important is understanding the communication, and explaining as the customer, if you’re going to use coverage, being clear about what you expect to happen, giving the relevant information, and then allowing us to get the correct attorney to cover the matter for you.
Davina Frederick: Right. Right. So, tell me, you mentioned something about the total package, tell me how you’re going to do that?
Leslie Stewart: So, you know, we were just, when we started our chit chat today, we were talking, and you know, I mentioned that I think of our practice as like my first chapter, the close of my first chapter. Well, I feel like I’m starting out on my third chapter, and I feel like I’m going to be a total package solution, in my particular industry, providing local counsel services all over the country. You know, I love that I have 10 years of experience to build on. And you know, the fact that you know, a lot of my practice is still in representing lenders, and so the fact that I practiced through the financial crisis, which I truly believe is going to be just, it was a historic time in the financial and just historical landscape for our country, and the fact that I grew through that, learned interesting he court room, you know, I’ve stood at the podium and did, you know, I believe we counted off and I’ve done 7000 court appearances.
Davina Frederick: Wow.
Leslie Stewart: I know, I can’t believe it either. But there’s a lot of experience that I gain day after day. The fact that I was around during the start of regulatory compliance and have an understanding of what that is, and have a working knowledge of just being in the courtroom, and what it’s like to actually be the coverage attorney, what they’re looking for. And all that to say is that I’m just going to put the years behind me to work. You know, that that wasn’t a chapter that I was closing, it’s a chapter that I’m using to build my next chapter on.
Davina Frederick: Right.
Leslie Stewart: I plan to keep focused on what we do as legal work, you know, this is … Logistics is a major part of my business, but ultimately, it’s logistics in delivering quality legal work, and then understanding efficiency. Efficiency will make everyone happier. You know, there’s less waste, which I love. You know, I’m cheap by design, right? And-
Davina Frederick: Let’s put it this way, you like a good bargain.
Leslie Stewart: I do like a good bargain, and efficiency is, you know, any sort of waste is exactly that, it’s loss. And so using Harmony as our cornerstone to increase efficiency, having happy attorneys, as long as it works for them, they enjoy doing the coverage work, I do my part. And we deliver quality back to the file attorney that is our client, and their corporate client, you know, the lending institution or the insurance company, whoever it may be, that they’re getting the product that they’re looking for. That’s my plan for a total package solution.
Davina Frederick: Right, right. So, we only have a few minutes left, so I want to ask you a very specific question. I want to know, what, for those who are on the journey, of the solo to CEO journey, where they’re building the kind of law practice that they desire, and that may look, that may look like yours, not like yours, any way that they desire, whatever that means to them. Whatever type of law practice they desire, what kinds of, what advice would you have for them based on the experiences that you’ve had? Because you’ve had quite a unique journey, and we never could have predicted this, all those years ago in law school, through those internships we had, through those first jobs that we’ve had, and the first years in practice.
I mean, you know, you and I have been friends a long time, and had many, many discussions. We never would have predicted this would be where either of us would be at this point. What kinds of, what kinds of lessons now, sitting here at this point in your career, looking back, what things would you say to young us and younger you, than me-
Leslie Stewart: Right.
Davina Frederick: Or others, you know, coming along behind you?
Leslie Stewart: Well, I would say first of all, you know, starting your own business is a journey, and to understand that sometimes it will be like you’re sliding down hill, going too fast and you’re not in control, and sometimes it will be like you are marching uphill and it’s a fight for every good foothold that you get. One of the things that I really know, I use as a litmus test, is, “Am I excited to get in here?” You know, I laugh and I say, you know, my chair squeaks that I sit in at my desk, and the reason it squeaks is because I’ve almost rolled the wheels off of the chair. Because I’m in here so much and I’m enjoying what I’m doing. So, making sure that you’re enjoying what you’re doing. Some other things, you’ve got to have a firm foundation, and this is something, during part of my journey I lost sight of.
You know, taking care of your own health. You know, sleep, having a good relationship with the people around you, having balance. You know, there was a time when I was spending too much time devoted to my business and neglecting other areas of my life, including health. And realizing that things are for a season, that change is something that is going to happen, finding out that you have, you know, your natural talents and abilities are the things that I think any person that’s starting a business should leverage. Because those are your natural talents, those are your gifts.
Davina Frederick: Right.
Leslie Stewart: Understanding your weaknesses, and finding a way to you know, balance against those weaknesses, and you know, understanding that perfection has a cost. You know, expecting perfection from others has a cost. They’re going to let you down. But was that a reasonable thing to do? And then expecting perfection from yourself, you know, and this goes to all of us type A personalities. There’s a cost to it. Doing a job to the best of your ability, versus perfect, you know, there’s a cost to it, and I say this a lot. Mistakes cost money, but so does perfection.
Davina Frederick: Right.
Leslie Stewart: And you know, for those closer to the CEO end of the journey, a seven figure practice sometimes comes with a six figure tax bill. Right? And so understanding the business side of what you’re so passionate about, you know, so as you have success, and I have no doubt that everyone will, understanding that there are irrefutable laws of business, you know, the tax man shall get paid. The payroll taxes are due. The lease check must be made out. Understanding that there are those types of obligations that have nothing to do with your craft but you’ve got to address them and be prepared and just as versed if your business is going to succeed, grow, thrive, and move through the seasons of change that take you from chapter to chapter.
Davina Frederick: Yeah, excellent, excellent advice and I think anybody listening to this will learn a lot if they heed to those words. And I’ve heard a lot about the tax bills, so I know.
Leslie Stewart: I almost had it tattooed on me, you know? It will be, it’s something I will never forget.
Davina Frederick: Ah, yes. That was one of those hard lessons. Hard lessons. And there are always those lessons that come with business, there are those highs and those lows, but you know, hey, we still love it. Once you go down that entrepreneurial path, that’s just who we are then at that point, right? Well, I really, really, really appreciate you being here today, and I’ve enjoyed it, and you and I could probably talk for another hour like this, tell us where we can find out, because I know there are people who are going to want to find the Appearance Network on the interwebs. So tell us where they can find you. Web address, phone number, social, wherever they can find you.
Leslie Stewart: Sure. So find us on the web, www.AppearanceNetwork.com, here in Florida we still have Stewart Law. But connect with me on LinkedIn, I love to, LinkedIn is, I’m actually one of the few people that, I’m a LinkedIn user, I love it. And so feel free to connect with me, and we post regularly. And I look forward to connecting with your audience, if anybody wants to reach out via LinkedIn. And Davina, have me back. This was fun!
Davina Frederick: All right, yeah. Definitely. I am sure I will. All right, thank you everyone, and thank you, Leslie. I’m sure we’ll do it again soon.
