Client Spotlight: Norman C. Polak Law
Norman “Chris” Polak, P.A., is a criminal defense attorney in Ocala, Fla., whose former careers as a police officer, ATF agent, and investigator for the Florida State Attorney’s office led him, eventually, to practice law. None of Polak’s jobs, past or present, could accurately be described as predictable. “This is a huge challenge,” Polak says. “Many times, the [legal] odds are more insurmountable than if you’re just prosecuting. Nothing’s ever the same from day to day, and that’s what I like about it.
How long have you practiced criminal law?
I’ve been practicing almost eleven years.
What attracted you to criminal law in the first place?
I started out, when I got out of college, as a police officer, and later, I worked for the state attorney’s office as an investigator. During that time, I’d gone back to school and gotten my Master’s. I was always interested in law school. When that possibility [to study law] came around, I didn’t want to let it pass.
Whom to do you represent?
In the criminal arena, I work with folks who’ve been charged with drug trafficking, sex crimes, murder, and white-collar crime. That is part of the realm there. Then I have some civil clients that I do collections work for—mostly small companies, locally, who I do collection work for.
How predictable is your daily schedule?
Here I can plug AnswerConnect. One feature I like is the 24/7 answering service. It’s not uncommon for us to get calls after-hours from family or someone who’s gotten in trouble and gotten arrested. Before AnswerConnect, for example, I’ve gotten calls at 4:30 in the morning. It’s not uncommon for folks calling at 6:00 or 7:00 pm, asking for assistance. From a standpoint of being able to respond, it’s nice to look down and see it’s someone I need to respond to immediately, or someone who can wait.
From a day-to-day perspective, you can’t predict that you can get a call. Often you’ll have your day planned out—you’re in court or in deposition—and someone calls and says “We need to hire you.” That changes your day around. Three out of five days of your week, something may happen where you have to change things up. Say your client’s in from another facility. Your day could turn into a 6:30 or 10:00 at night thing really quickly.
What do you love about your job?
It’s a challenge. Being able to work with someone’s case, dealing with the law, the evidence, and seeing how it affects them—does the evidence match the law that he’s been charged with? Different parts of the system are more challenging than others. After being involved as a prosecutor and a police officer and managing in the court system, this is a huge challenge. Many times, the odds are more insurmountable than if you’re just prosecuting. Nothing’s ever the same from day to day, and that’s what I like about it. You don’t get into a mundane, day-in and day-out thing.
How does technology affected your practice?
It’s amazing how much easier it is for me, with an iPhone and an iPad, with dockets being imaged in, I can go anywhere and do my job. I can access court systems, print files—it’s just easier, more diverse. You used to have to be in a room with the files. Now if I want to look at some property in regards a forfeiture action, say, I can be on my laptop, pull it up and look at it in Starbucks. Before, I had to get to the courthouse.
Years ago, I was a court investigator when crack cocaine was getting really big. All that money has to go somewhere, you know? So we would search property records. We always had to go down to the courthouse to do that. Now I can be remote and look this up. Now, with Google Earth, I can see where someone is.
Or we can go to the scene, take our laptops and iPhones and get answers to our questions at the scene. Years ago, we used to have to write down things and travel someplace to then look it up. Our jobs have become easier and more portable.
What’s the downside?
You can never get away from it. It used to be, you had a pager. Now we’re connected constantly. You can never really separate yourself. It may not be necessarily that my clients are sending me texts all the time. Maybe it’s a friend. But the question becomes, do you have another phone, a business phone and a cell phone? From a level of never being able to put it down and separate yourself, that can become problematic. Especially when it’s movie night with your family. It can be harmful if it pissed your family off.
One thing that’s hard is trying to know “What software do I need and what I don’t need?” Especially from an overhead business perspective, there’s so many things you can buy that you don’t really need.
The other side to that, I have a friend who scans everything. Daily. And if you communicate by email, and you do all your research online, if your hard drive goes down and the power goes off, there’s nothing like that calendar you took your pencil out and wrote in. Being paranoid, I still write things down in the calendar. It’s wonderful when Google Calendar works. When it goes down, though, you’re like a child, pulling your hair out.
Where do you see your practice in five years?
There’s no way of predicting what’ll happen with the economy. If you read a lot of predictions coming out of law schools and think tanks, they’ve tried to give us an idea. I’ve looked at these to predict where my practice will be in five years. I know we’ll remain portable.
We’re in a position where when someone misses a call, that client will go somewhere else. You’ll lose that lead, unless you’ve been referred to them. If you’re a parent and your son or daughter or family member is in trouble, you may not call back if I don’t answer. In the next five years, with the economy as it is, we have to be very quick to respond to people’s needs. You have to study your market not to out price yourself. In five years, we have got to be as quick or quicker to respond.
We’ve always had a general practice, where a lot of people have specialized. When the economy went south, it was positive for us. We had other clients coming in—we were doing collection work—and that helped us stay profitable. Compared to if I was in only one field: if that went dry, it went dry. In the criminal field, when mom and dad don’t have credit, their 401(k)s are drained, they don’t have cash, who’s going to hire me to represent their son, daughter or son-in-law?
We’re going to stay lean and not narrow our field. If things change, we’ll expand.
Client Spotlight: Dr. Kimberly Wright
Dr. Kimberly Wright, MD, practices OB/GYN in the Chicago area, and her vision for five-star gynecological care is set to open this August. The Wright Center for Women’s Health won’t just have warm blankets and a chandelier in the waiting room. Patients will get their own personal lactation consultant, pregnancy massage each trimester, deliver-room photographer, fashion consultant, and 24/7 access to Dr. Wright, among other perks—concierge medicine, essentially, for OB/GYN. This, along with providing highly innovative, minimally invasive medical procedures: “I want to be able to take total care of the patient,” Dr. Wright says.
When is The Wright Center for Women’s Health scheduled to open? I’m getting everything set up. The building still is getting built out, but there’s a million and one things to do. I’m opening August 6. Right now, I’m setting up appointments.
How did you come to this stage in your medical career? I chose OB/GYN because it’s a pretty happy field. Women love having babies, and it’s wonderful thing, bringing life into the world. I came to Naperville, Ill., in 2002 when I started out in private practice. It was fine, but I needed room to grow. I wanted to bring health care to another level. Usually, OB/GYN doctors usually see anywhere from 4-8 patients an hour. I generally see about two patients per hour. I don’t like feeling rushed. I don’t want my patients feeling rushed. I want to do a very thorough exam and give them time.
With my new practice, I envision everything being more upscale and five-star, from the moment they call to the moment they come in the door. I’ll have a chandelier and a wine glass—with sparkling grape juice, not wine, for those who are pregnant—and a really nice waiting room with a fireplace and a minimal wait time. The rooms will be warm—those rooms are always so cold—with a warm blanket instead of paper sheets and a warming fixture over the bed and a TV in every room. Just really serious, five-star, upscale care. I still do general OB/GYN, but the thing that I really focus on is more innovative, more up-to-date, latest-technology type of procedures. I do minimally invasive procedures, helping women get back to their lives quicker and faster, taking care of those many gynecological nuisances that women have to deal with: Heavy bleeding, annoying periods, birth control. These are mostly for women who are done with having children. I can take care of these things in 90 seconds, and they’re done without surgery.
Also I’ll be doing cosmetic vaginal surgery. This is a really innovative, new field, and they’re aren’t many people in the U.S. who do it, let alone females who practice in this particular specially. I believe I’m the only female in Illinois who will be performing this surgery. This entails several things: labiaplasty, vaginal rejuvenation, g-spot amplification, and several other things that enhance women’s self-perception and sexual gratification.
Lastly, there’s something called VIP OB. When a woman is pregnant, they have 15 doctor visits, and that’s with anywhere from 4-8 different doctors. When they go into delivery, they may not meet the same doctor who they’ve seen throughout their pregnancy. Health care is going, more and more, toward seeing different doctors in the office. In my particular VIP OB practice, the patient gets my cell number; they can call anytime. It’s like having their own personal concierge obstetric physician. They can get in touch with me 24/7. When the time comes to deliver, I’ll be in the hospital with them the entire time they’re delivering.
I don’t know if you’ve heard of concierge medicine. You don’t see a lot of OB/GYN(s) doing it, but it makes sense. You know you’re going to see your obstetrician 15 times, minimum. It totally makes sense to have this service available for a fee on top of the insurance. And of course it’ll be other stuff. There will be a 3D ultrasound. They’ll have a whole team: a duola; a lactation consultant; a photographer to record the whole pregnancy and pictures of the baby from 3, 6, 9 months to a year; their own personal nurse; fashion consultant; pregnancy massage each trimester. It’ll be a whole team of people caring for the patient with my concierge VIP OB practice.
What are the most challenging aspects of your job? Working in the office.What we do day in and day out is not that difficult, because we do it all the time. This is what I’ve been doing the past 15 years. As far as what I find most challenging is working within the confines of an already organized system. I want to do new things, different things, such as the vaginal rejuvenation surgery, or focus on things that would help women in everyday situations and help them get away from those little nuisances like their period coming every time they go camping or go on vacation or having an accident or being free to have intercourse without thinking “Am I going to become pregnant?” or being free from hormones or excess medications in their bodies.
In order to focus and do the VIP OB and do the extra care, it’s impossible to do it within a practice that is already formed. Because every OB/GYN practice in Illinois is a formula: You see 4-8 patients an hour. This is how it works. I need to have control over the entire environment to do things the way I want to do them on an upscale level. In the current confines of a regular OB/GYN practice, it’s impossible to practice the way I want to practice.
And then starting up your own business is a whole other thing. It is terribly busy.
How is your family helping? My husband is a banker, and he has stayed home with our twins for the past two years. That helps tremendously, to the point where I don’t have to worry about them. He’s probably one of the best fathers in the history of fathers. That really helps. He doesn’t know it yet, but he’s going to be helping me with the business and financial part of things. But him being home with them is a huge aid, beyond measure.
What led you to practice OB/GYN in the first place? It’s a really good feeling, helping people. Bringing children into the world is a wonderful thing. I like the surgery. The biggest thing is that patients, for the most part, are generally well and happy. It’s a happy specialty, OB/GYN.
And also being female—women like to see women. My practice is going to be an all-female practice.
How do you envision your practice being different in five years? Right now, my practice will be one of the very few practices in the area that has electronic medical records. I plan to go totally paperless.
Most doctors are frightened of electronic medical records. I’m not going to lie; I’m a little scared myself. I’m used to having that one-on-one interaction with the patient, talking face-to-face and not typing on the computer. I hope I’ll be still able to do that. I think there’ll be many ways, as I look into the electronic record systems, that can help streamline processes, and not only with billing concerns and accounting and practice-management, but also actually seeing the patient. There are so many alerts, for example: If a patient is due for a Pap smear or a mammogram, computer systems can alert you of this. In general, as long as us doctors learn to use it correctly, I think it’ll aid us tremendously in taking care of our patients. Also, I have 24/7 access to their record. If a patent calls and I’m not in the office, I can still look at their chart and record and see who they are, their records, what’s going on, what medications they’re taking—in general, it’ll provide a much better quality of care that’ll go along with my New Age practice.
Update: We’re Going Paperless!
AnswerConnect has always advocated going paperless. You’re hard-pressed to find a printer in our office. (Well, there is one. It’s tucked away and used so rarely the sound startles nearby associates.) We prefer the easy access and improved collaboration of Google Docs and other cloud-based software. Then there’s the sense of satisfaction that comes with the huge decrease in our annual waste production.
So it was only a matter of time until we phased out paper bills. New clients are automatically enrolled into our paperless billing program, and we’re currently working on switching over all of our existing clients. Here are a couple reasons why you may love the new paperless billing as much as we do:
It’s much easier to organize bills on a computer desktop than on a wooden one. Paperless bills mean no more clutter. Take a look at your desk. It’s possible you’re a naturally organized person and your bills are stacked and filed neatly away. Or it takes fifteen minutes of digging through drawers to find a bill when you need it. Either way, no more bills accidentally ending up in the recycling bin or getting lost between the desk and the wall. Your bills are archived, organized and accessible from any location.
Paper makes up the largest percentage of municipal solid waste. In 2010, paper and paperboard made up 29% of municipal trash in the United States. Office buildings are responsible for a hefty portion with the average office worker using approximately 10,000 sheets of paper annually. We’ve done our best to reduce our contribution by virtually eliminating office paper, but generating monthly paper bills for thousands of clients adds up. Paperless billing felt like the next step.
AnswerConnect strives to be a green office. We’ve switched to non-disposable dishes in our break room and energy-efficient bulbs in our light fixtures. We’re thrilled to make another change that is environmentally beneficial, cost-efficient and convenient for our clients. Let us know what you think by leaving a comment or sending us an email to chitchat@answerconnect.com.
Client Spotlight: Michael Beck International
Like most people, Michael Beck worked for his share of bad managers. Unlike most people, rather than swallowing the abuse or settling for a mediocre job, Beck left to forge his own executive development company, based on improving organizational leadership and creating corporate culture. With the majority of American workers emotionally disconnected from their jobs, Beck helps his clients and their organizations consciously create the types of culture that encourages connection, job satisfaction, creativity, and workplace happiness. “I believe people really want to do a good job,” Beck says. “…You need to appreciate what a strong culture can do to your bottom line.”
What do you do?
Most of what I do is executive coaching. Some of what I do is training, but the training is secondary to coaching.
I love working with executives and helping them succeed. I love my clients because they’re all about improving who they are. We’ll work on leadership competencies—everything from improving communication to helping them develop other people to creating more of a vision for their organization and learning how to express it effectively. I also work with conflict resolution. If they’ve got a more junior member of their leadership team who they’re having trouble with, we’ll strategize about how to help that person improve.
The other thing I do with my clients is to help them with strategy—either corporate strategy or career strategy or something to do with their business; a market direction or sale or acquisition.
How did you enter this practice?
In the job-part of my career, I worked for some folks who I felt were not very good leaders. I thought they did a poor job leading, and I felt they mistreated people. I really wanted to make a difference by helping leaders become more effective and treat people better. I believe people really want to do a good job and often, if they don’t do a good job, it’s not because they’re incompetent, but rather one of two things: They’re either in the wrong role for their strengths, in which case a leader needs to help them move, or they end up doing a poor job because they become de-motivated by poor leadership.
What you’re saying seems like the inverse of the old Peter Principle.
The Peter Principle has some validity. I’ve worked with people where they were promoted beyond their capabilities, and then unfortunately, they didn’t get the right developmental support. So they struggle and fail.
But I’m not really talking about that when I say “People are in the wrong roles for their strengths.” I’m talking about natural competencies. For instance, some people are more creative than analytical. An easy example of a poor fit would be a creative person becoming an accountant.
Describe how you teach how to “capture hearts and minds.”
Capturing hearts and minds of folks is about resonating with people, learning how to have a vision, and how to project that vision, share it, and communicate it effectively. There’s a natural order that emerges out of that. The people who align with that vision will be invigorated and those who aren’t will gravitate away from the company. As it becomes more and more apparent externally, you attract new people to your management and staff who are aligned with that vision and are engaged with it. That’s how you capture hearts and minds.
Over the years, I’ve been asked “How do you motivate people?” How people might interpret that question is “How do you get people to do what you want them to do?” And the answer to that question is, “You can’t”. They need to be self-motivated. If you always have to poke and prod in order to get them to work, they’re the wrong people. When you get the right people on your team, they’re self-motivated. Something about you as a leader, something about the vision of the company, the culture of the company–those things resonate with those folks and they become self-motivated. They’re happy to be part of what you do.
How do you create corporate culture?
I’ve been having an ongoing conversation on LinkedIn about culture. Every organization has a culture. Sometimes it’s by default and sometimes it’s by design. If you don’t craft a culture, one emerges regardless, and usually it’s dysfunctional.
Why would a company’s culture, in the absence of conscious direction, default to dysfunction?
A designed culture is crafted around values that everyone agrees are important. Those might be things like treating one another with respect or a having a commitment to excellence. They’re strong, positive values. If you don’t have those values in place and live by them, then people’s dysfunctions are tolerated. Without a designed culture you end up with a culture in which dysfunction becomes acceptable. In my experience, the majority of companies operate like that.
The third side to this coin—it’s weird coin—is that if you design a culture and then you don’t live by those values, it actually acts as a de-motivator. It throws the whole integrity of leadership into question. Part of that equation of culture—of having an impactful culture—is to be diligent about living by it. That means calling people out when they do something that’s not in line with the culture or making decisions that depart from that culture. Those are de-motivators.
Conversely, when you have a good culture and live by it, there’s an integrity about it. It always leverages the results of the organization. They are many examples of companies that have good culture. One that comes to mind is Zappos.
They started early on and continue to be completely focused on good customer service. They embody this culture by living it and the results are spectacular. Can you imagine a company selling shoes online and generating over $1 billion a year? It’s crazy. You need to appreciate what a strong culture can do to your bottom line.
How do you get a company, whose raison d’être is profit, to turn their attention to culture?
I was able to do that with a client recently. They had done a number of employee surveys over a couple years and gotten a consistent message of disconnection with leadership and a feeling of a lack of fairness. It became apparent that there was poor communication and no set of values that everyone was being held to.
The point I made to their CEO was that corporate culture by itself doesn’t work. It’s a waste to have a mission statement because your company doesn’t live by it. If you’re going to do it, you have to commit to living it. If you have a culture and you don’t live by it, it’s a de-motivator. So if you’re going to go through the effort of creating a culture, you’ve got to commit to holding behaviors accountable to that culture, to making decisions in-line with culture.
My recommendation was to form a cross-functional team to define cultural values. So they started doing it and they’re starting to get great results.
What’s the biggest challenge to helping C-level executives become better leaders?
The thing that’s most frustrating is that they’re very busy. They don’t always have time to implement the things that we’ve agreed to. That can be frustrating. And things come at them very quickly. One week a certain topic is on the forefront of their minds. Then a week later, there’s an emergency and they’re focused on a new topic.
Does that affect how you coach strategic thinking?
Have you seen this [Time Management] graphic? It’s four quadrants. The Y-axis is “importance” and the X-axis is “urgency:”
I’ll ask people “In your ideal work day, what quadrant do you want to spent the most time in?” A lot of people will say “I’d spend it in the ‘Important’ and ‘Urgent’ quadrant.” That’s the wrong answer. Things that are both “important” and “urgent” are what we call “fires”. Spend time there, and you’re putting out fires all the time. In the ideal world, you want to spend time on “important” tasks before they become “urgent.” Now we’re talking about strategic thinking.
What makes your job great?
It’s the best when you love what you do. I love my clients. I love the conversations that we have. I love the marketing of the business.
I’m in the kind of business that offers me variety. Sometimes I’m with clients, sometimes I’m working at a coffee shop on an article, sometimes I’m reading to expand my knowledge. I love that variety.
You must’ve been a terrific student.
[laughs] Yes. I was!
Client Spotlight: Apto
Eric Bouchard and his business partner, Tanner McGraw, built their Salesforce-based mobile real-estate CRM, Apto, out of necessity—they needed something that worked well with their business, and because that something didn’t yet exist, they built it. After beta-testing their colleagues, they realized that this side project was becoming more successful than their primary real-estate brokerage firm. Mobile technology “is becoming a big part of real estate,” says Bouchard. “[People] want their information to be accessed anywhere, and they want data integrity and security.”
Tell me about Apto.
Apto is a CRM designed specifically for commercial real estate brokers. We built on the Salesforce platform—they opened up their platform and allowed third-party groups to customize it. So we essentially have a reseller agreement with Salesforce. Our system helps real estate brokers sell their properties. Our partnership with Salesforce has really allowed us to be ahead of the crowd. It’s really caught on.
How has mobile technology changed the real-estate business?
One thing’s for certain: Over the last couple years with social media, given our business, [mobile] technology has started to be leveraged more and more. That technology is becoming big part of commercial real estate. With the advent of the smart phone and cloud-based computing, it’s something that more and more people want to hear about. They want their information to be accessed anywhere, and they want data integrity and security. If you’re backed up on your hard drive and it crashes, you know, your entire business is in your hard drive. That’s painful. We’ve had clients come on board who’ve suffered through that, and they don’t want to go near that again.
The world is moving into the Web, and data is flowing cheaper and more easily, and [mobile technology] is going to implement itself more and more.
How will Apto look in 5-10 years?
At the rate we’re growing, there’s a good chance we’ll be changed. One of our main stalwarts, something we’ve tried to focus on, is not just providing something better than what’s out there, but something that pushes the envelope. Our relationship with Salesforce allows us to integrate with third-party services. When you’ve got your CRM storing all of your data, when it can communicate with other systems, it makes it extremely powerful.
In five years, it’ll probably look a whole lot different than it does now. Our goal is to continually evolve with technology. It means changing, adapting. That’s on the forefront of our minds. What it’ll look like? It’ll mold itself to what’s out there.
What’s been your biggest challenge in growing your business?
So far, it’s been pretty regular growing pains. We’re a small company getting started. We’ve only been actively selling licenses for eight months. It’s nothing out of the norm, other than there’s not enough hours in the day.
Are we talking 12-hour work days?
Yeah, I’d say so. It’s been pretty hectic.