Author Chats

Shavon Smith Offers Straightforward Steps to Solving Business Problems

October 04, 2024

By Jeremy Conrad

As principal of The SJS Law Firm, PLLC, Shavon Smith counsels a variety of businesses, including start-ups, franchisees, government contractors, and professional services organizations, as well as technology, construction, and design firms. Distilling her experience with a broad range of challenges faced by her clients, Smith has written Tell Me About the Hard Part: Five Steps to Help Businesses Face, Solve & Prevent Problems, providing readers an approach to identifying and resolving emerging problems that is easily applicable to businesses regardless of their size or industry.

“The problems that businesses face have always interested me. The name of my book comes from a podcast I hosted. I called it Tell Me About the Hard Part because if you look at how business ownership is depicted on Instagram and TikTok, it can seem so glamorous. I felt like it was important for people to hear about the hard part,” Smith says. “I wanted to change the discussion about business ownership to include health problems, stress, and other challenges. Discussing the hard part of business ownership with owners was redemptive because they often learned something from the experience and used it to make their business stronger.”

In Tell Me About the Hard Part, Smith draws upon her experience as a business attorney to provide entrepreneurs and business owners a concise yet flexible framework for addressing issues that arise. “My book will be useful for anyone who is in business,” Smith says. “One of my uncles said, ‘This isn’t even a business book; it’s a life book.’ I feel like I could apply this to any problem that I’m going through. So, I think the book has a broad reach for people thinking about problem solving, but certainly all manner of business owners.”

Here, Smith talks about the practicality of her approach to addressing business problems, starting with facing them head on.

What led you to write the book?

There were a lot of reasons. It was something that I always wanted to do. It was one of those ideas that God kind of drops in your spirit, but also I noticed that I had a way of approaching problems that I thought other people could benefit from. I saw clients get in these loops of problems that they couldn’t get out of, and it seemed to really bog them down. I thought, there has to be a better way to think about these things … that would help people step back from the many problems they are trying to solve at the same time and begin to address them. It was really a combination of things, but I felt that I had a unique and simple way of viewing things that I wanted to share with people.

I worked in Big Law for many years and in the D.C. Courts. After I was let go from a law firm in my early 30s, I decided to pursue a longtime interest in starting a business. I was fascinated by the notion that a person could have an idea and create a business out of it. That led me to talk to friends who were business owners about the problems that they faced. Many of them didn’t know how to even find a lawyer who could address their issues.

I’m originally from Detroit where my grandfather owned a convenience store. It was in my mother’s neighborhood, and that’s where my parents met. I always tell people I was born out of business ownership.

Can you describe the methodology your book uses to address problems?

The first step is to face your issue, and I find that that’s really the hardest part because people tend to tuck the letter in the closet, ignore the email, and ignore the symptoms of a problem that is all around them. So, the first step is really facing your problems.

The second part is diagnosing. Sometimes you are looking at something and you’re not really quite sure what it is. You need to take a step back and ask what it is you are really looking at here.

The next step involves quantifying the problem. So often people want to take a sledgehammer to a very delicate problem, and that’s not how you address it. Or they want to throw a lot of money at something because of emotional reasons, or because they’ve been caught up in the principle of the thing. But sometimes when you quantify something you find out that it’s a hundred-dollar problem, not a ten thousand- or hundred thousand-dollar problem. Quantifying is important to help understand what problem you are dealing with and what bucket to put it in.

Next is treating the issue. It’s about who you get on your team to help you work through the acute things happening in your business.

Finally, the most important piece is, I think, prevention. It’s the thing that’s going to help you if you ever need to go through steps one, two, and three again because you have a prevention plan in place and you have people who are going to help you prevent the problems. You have future-proofed your business. As I sometimes say to clients, you have to presolve a problem. Having the right kinds of contracts and business agreements in place is really a matter of presolving a problem.

How does your book improve on existing business development literature?

Sometimes books about business can get a little pie in the sky. My book is very practical. I provide concrete examples, and throughout the book, I use one business as an example to illustrate how the ideas are applied in practice. I think that’s an improvement on the existing literature.

It’s also easy to read. My clients are incredibly busy people, and they have meetings and other obligations to get to. So, I knew I couldn’t write something that would be 400 pages, but I knew that if I wrote something that was 100 pages, people could commit to internalizing that information.

How do psychology and emotion relate to your understanding of business issues?

I haven’t met a business owner yet who hasn’t felt some emotion around their work. That can take a toll on a person. You can’t outrun your own psychological state, so it’s always going to show up in a business. I can often see these stresses reflected in the problems the business is experiencing.

Do they have a lot of turnover? Do they have a lot of friction with their employees? Those may be signs that a person is taking things very personally, and that can come across in staff interactions.

It’s all psychological. While my work is very much that of a lawyer, given the people that I work with, and the problems I address, I often find myself acting as a kind of therapist.

Where can readers find your book?

Readers can learn more about the book on my website, www.thesjslawfirm.com, and purchase a copy from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online booksellers.