It’s easy to blur the lines between you and your business.

It’s important that you avoid doing that.

You are not your business. Your business is a separate entity from you.

Sure, you may file one tax return depending on the form of your entity, but it’s important for you to draw a distinction between you as a person and the law firm you own. It’s important that you think about what’s good for you and what’s good for your business. Those two agendas might not always coincide.

With respect to you as an individual, you probably have goals and objectives. You may seek to build net worth, pursue interests, and maintain a particular lifestyle.

Your business, however, is an entity that should be considered separately. You’ll likely have particular objectives for the business. Maybe you seek to increase its value and sell it in its entirety or one piece at a time to new partners. Maybe your goal is to create a desirable mechanism for raising capital in the coming era of non-lawyer ownership of law firms. Maybe you’re building a business intended to survive for 100 years and provide for future generations. Maybe it’s a lifestyle business that will make your personal goals possible.

Whatever the goal is for the business, it needs to be thought about as something separate from you. When you create plans for yourself, they should be distinct from the business plans. When you create plans for the business, they should account for the long-term objectives of the business and address the goals of that entity.

You are one distinct entity; the business is another. Sure, the business may provide for you as an owner and/or employee of the business, but you should always draw a distinction between the two entities in your mind. Don’t let the two entities merge. That’s bad for you and bad for your business.