You’re good at getting known. You do it via networking, advertising, media relations, or whatever.

You’re also likable. People think you’re cool. They want to hang out with you. They like helping you. They want to be your friend on Snapchat and in real life.

You’re trustworthy. People know they can leave their wallet on the table and you won’t run off with it. They’ll loan you their vacation home. They’ll even leave you alone with their kids.

Known, liked, and trusted: you’re golden. People are buying things from you. Life is good.

Except that it’s a disaster.

You’re selling services in a big way, and you’ve got clients galore. You’ve created a team to handle the needs of the clients, and you’re continuing to sell stuff because you’re the master of the selling.

Except that you’re now being pulled away from the selling because of the disaster.

Your “team” is unraveling. They’re spinning out of control. The clients are getting upset, and you’re shifting away from being the chief salesperson into the role of chief calmer-downer. Clients are freaking out, and you’re spending your days talking them off the ledge.

It’s not pretty.

Business is booming. Except, suddenly, the people who trusted you are losing trust. The people who liked you are having second thoughts. And some of the people who know you are wishing they didn’t.

Why Is This Happening?

It’s happening, and it’s incredibly predictable, because you’re good at sales and you aren’t good at management.

In fact, there’s a high probability that you imagined your team would, more or less, manage itself.

You thought they’d gather together, bat around legal issues, come up with a plan, and take care of things.

You suffer from serious delusions. You are in the “don’t know what you don’t know zone.”

How do bright, talented people with great people skills end up with a business that spins quickly out of control? Because they simply don’t know what they don’t know.

And the thing they never learned and underappreciate is management. Management is hard. Management is really, really hard. People spend their lives getting good at it. People are difficult. Getting them to do things is even more difficult.

You won’t solve the management problem easily. In fact, the management problem is a really good reason to stay small, charge premium fees, and avoiding adding people. The ease of outsourcing and assembling project-based teams makes staying small particularly appealing today.

The solution to the management problem can’t wait. If you grow without managing your team, you end up with unhappy clients. Unhappy clients damage your reputation. It can happen with shocking speed on Yelp, Google, and Avvo. Unhappy clients can damage your reputation in minutes.

What do you do?

Three Steps to Survival

1. Vision

Get serious about developing your vision for the future. Please take the Rosen’s Rules free course. We cover vision on day two. Way too many lawyers build a team they didn’t plan for to patch holes they didn’t see developing. Start with a plan and build in an orderly way. This is no time to hire an intern because he’s cute and cheap. This is your business, and it should matter enough to plan.

2. Learn

You’re not going to learn management from a book that promises to teach it to you in 60 seconds. This is a profession. People get degrees in this stuff because it’s hard. Learning is just the beginning. Experience matters. This is complicated. If you’re looking for a place to start, then visit Manager Tools. You’ll find specific, actionable advice that will help you solve the urgent problems immediately.

3. Hire

You’ll always have to manage your manager, so you’d better learn the basics. But you can hire talent, skill, and ability to manage the rest of the team. There are folks who’ve learned enough to be good at this stuff, and you need them on board. How do you hire a manager when you’re struggling to pay a team? Go back to vision. Maybe you’re not ready for a team? Remember the damage they can do your reputation? Think before you hire.

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Strategic, Careful Management Is the Key to Growth

This isn’t going to be easy. Nothing that matters comes easily.

But you’ve got to move carefully.

I’m watching a 10-year-old practice, with great revenue and people, melt down due to inept management. Ten years of solid reputation is being quickly dismantled in a year. Your team can destroy you—fast.

Employees enable you to leverage yourself. That’s wonderful or devastating, depending on how it works out. Everything happens faster as you grow the team.

Grow with a vision of where you’re going. Learn what you need to learn before you need to know it. Hire the people who can overcome your shortcomings before those shortcomings damage your reputation.

Being known, liked, and trusted is just a starting point.