How spending $300 on a contract can save you $10,000

Spending money can be fun – when….it’s on fun things.

But spending money on stuff like legalities is..well..not fun. Not sexy. And downright painful sometimes.

But let me tell you a story, my friend. One that is a common situation I am seeing weekly as y’all roll up to my law firm email with issues.

Instead of choosing:

• peace of mind
• confidence
• doing the right thing
• spending a little cash

Many of you are choosing to simply wait until you have an issue in your business.

Let’s take Eva the Entrepreneur. She came to me at the beginning of the year – FIRED UP to get her business ready to roll.  However, Eva didn’t want to spend a few hundred dollars on creating a lawyer-drafted contract for her business.

Eva decided to “wing it” and used freebies on the inter webs, combined with her own hammering in Microsoft Word, to develop her own contract.

Eight months later, Eva is back in my inbox because a client of hers has an issue with Eva. Now, mind you, Eva hadn’t really done anything wrong with the client. Provided service, abided by the contract, and all should’ve been good. Client was not happy. Client decided to file a lawsuit.

Here’s where the issues really start to ramp up. While you may think that Eva is in the “clear” because she didn’t do anything wrong and had a “contract”  – that is not the case. Eva still has to financially pay out to a lawyer and expend financial and emotional  resources to prove to the court she did nothing wrong.

Eva starts to see how his “saving” of the few hundred dollars are about to cost him a lot of money. When self-drafting his contract, Eva left out some very key legal miscellany, including attorney fees.  Now, even though Eva wins, she is not owed any attorney fees by the client.

Eva has now paid out almost $10,000 to her lawyer and still is paying the lawyer to draft the contract that she should’ve had done in the first place.

Friends, so you see. It’s not a matter of IF an issue happens. It’s when.