Make the Call

I have a client in the staffing business — I'll call him Frank — who I first represented back in 2001. We worked together for several years, then lost touch when he sold his company and I changed firms.

In 2018, he found me on LinkedIn and reached out. He was back in the staffing business — same industry, same geography, same model — and he had brought in a young guy to help run operations. The young man was smart, motivated, and eager to prove himself. He had no background in staffing or employment law. What he had was ambition, which is mostly a virtue and occasionally expensive.

Not long after we reconnected, the young man landed what looked like a great opportunity: a series of one-week assignments for workers across the country. The first one was in California.

This is the first moment he should have called me.

He didn't. He was eager to make his bones in the business, and the assignment seemed straightforward enough. He knew employment law in the Southeast — or thought he did — and figured California was close enough to the same.

It isn't. California's employment laws are among the most restrictive in the country, and they are different from Georgia's in ways that are specific, consequential, and not obvious to someone who hasn't dealt with them before. Had he called, I could have walked him through what compliance looked like in California, or helped him decide whether the assignment was worth the complexity. That conversation would have cost him $250.

He didn't make it.

---

His crew for the California job included two workers recruited from Nevada — men who were taking vacation from their regular jobs to pick up extra pay for the week. The assignment went reasonably well until the third night, when one of the Nevada workers went out and came back in rough shape. The next morning, the onsite foreman sent them both home.

At the end of the week, the young man made a decision. Since the Nevada workers had only worked half the assignment, he reasoned, they should only be reimbursed for half their airfare. He shorted each of them $250.

This is the second moment he should have called me.

He didn't. It seemed like a straightforward business decision — they didn't finish the job, so why should the company absorb the full travel cost? It had a certain logic to it. It also happened to be impermissible under California law, which has very specific rules about expense reimbursement that have nothing to do with whether an employee completes an assignment.

That call would have cost him $250.

He didn't make it.

---

Two weeks later, my client was served with a complaint filed in California court.

The two Nevada workers had retained an attorney licensed in both Nevada and California — a plaintiff's employment attorney, the kind who knows exactly how to turn a California wage-and-hour dispute into something much larger. The complaint was styled as a class action. It sought $1.3 million in damages based not just on the Nevada workers' claims, but on every worker the company had ever placed in California.

There was no choice but to defend.

I found California counsel, and my client asked me to stay involved throughout. Over the next three months, my firm billed approximately $100,000 in fees. The California firm billed approximately $200,000. The case settled for $60,000.

Total cost: $360,000.

The young man had made three decisions to save $250 each.

---

I have told this story — or some version of it — more times than I can count over 26 years of practice. The details change. The math always rhymes.

An entrepreneur skips a call to save a few hundred dollars. Not out of recklessness — out of a reasonable-seeming desire to keep costs down and keep moving. The problem gets deferred, not avoided. And deferred problems almost always arrive later with interest.

I blame the billable hour.

Not entirely, and not in every case. But the hourly rate — and specifically the *uncertainty* of the hourly rate — trains clients to make a subconscious calculation every time they think about picking up the phone. Is this question worth it? Is this a $200 call or a $2,000 call? I don't know, so maybe I'll just handle it myself.

That calculation is understandable. It is also, over time, reliably costly.

Here is the reframe I offer to every client I work with closely:

*There is no such thing as being uninsured. There is only being insured with others — paying a known, manageable premium against unknown future costs — or being self-insured, which means absorbing whatever comes.*

Self-insurance is not inherently irrational. Plenty of sophisticated businesses self-insure certain risks deliberately and intelligently. But self-insuring by default, because you didn't want to make the call, is not a strategy. It's just risk — unexamined, unpriced, and waiting.

---

The best client relationships I've had over 26 years share one feature more than any other. It isn't deal size or industry or outcome, though the outcomes have generally been good. It is that these clients called early and called often. They treated me like a member of their team. They asked "what should I be thinking about?" as often as they asked "what does this clause mean?"

Those open-ended conversations are where most of the real value gets made. Issues that never became problems. Opportunities spotted early. The contract that didn't go out with the bad provision, because someone made the call first.

This is one of the reasons I built my practice around subscription and fixed-fee arrangements — not because I don't value my time, but because I've watched the billable hour train good people to make bad decisions. When the cost of calling is predictable, or effectively zero at the margin, people call. And when people call early, they are almost never sorry they did.

If any of this sounds familiar, I'm always happy to talk — no meter running.