I recently sat down with Bill Simon, former managing partner of San Diego Law Firm, and current Founder and Chief Counsel at Sollertis, a law firm that specializes in personal and business asset protection. Bill has been a fixture in the San Diego business law scene for over 30 years, and has a wealth of experience in both business and life that made him a fascinating interview.

Bill and I covered a number of topics that went a different, but much more profound, direction than what I originally anticipated. We talked about the importance of planning to be disrupted, Bill’s thoughts on risk, the questions that he asks himself every morning, the importance and beauty of work-life balance, and much more. I firmly believe that Bill’s philosophies of emphasizing health, helping others, and building strong personal relationships are crucial and beneficial for anyone pursuing a successful and meaningful life.

If you’d like to learn more, check out Sollertis or connect with Bill on LinkedIn. 

I’m primarily interested in the concept of resilience – whether personal, communal, or societal. What does the concept of resilience mean to you?

That’s a great question!

I went out to lunch one time with Fred Port, the former Vice President at Callaway Golf, who is both a client and a mentor of mine. He asked me if I knew the one thing that every single person on this planet was going to have to deal with in the coming years. I was trying so hard to figure out the answer, and I went down the routes of health problems and financial issues and whatnot. I wasn’t smart enough to figure it out, so finally Fred gave it to me – the answer is disruption.

He told me, and I think he’s spot on, “Everyone is going to have to deal with disruption. There are no exceptions – everyone deals with it. Your ability to deal with disruption is going to determine how you do in life.” And I always thought that was super smart of him to come up with that. He told me this probably 20 years ago, and I’ve been thinking about that ever since.

It’s something that I try to teach my kids. Most people like to think that everything will go according to plan. But when you reshape your mind around disruption, you realize that relatively little goes according to plan. And your ability to deal with all the changes that life throws at you determines how successful you are – however you define success. So yeah, when I think about resilience, I think it is the ability to continuously overcome disruption, things ranging from having to get knee surgery, a client who isn’t happy, a great employee leaving, finding out a loved one has cancer – resilience is just overcoming the disruptions to life, big and small, that keep coming day after day after day.

You mentioned that overcoming disruption is something you try and teach your kids. What are some ways you try and instill that?

Well, I don’t consider myself a qualified teacher, but I can talk about how I try to deal with it! For me, it’s all about anticipation. Don’t go through your day expecting everything is going to work out according to plan. Expect disruption. Look for it. Anticipate it. And sometimes the anticipation is easy – if you need to be somewhere at 3:00 pm and it takes 30 minutes to get there, don’t leave at 2:30!

I remember I had to go to court one day and I was with my partner Tom. We were driving different cars, and Tom actually got in a car accident on the way there. He had to stop, exchange information, do all that, and was still only two minutes late! Meanwhile, the opposing counsel was 15 minutes late and he didn’t even have a car accident! That just goes to show you how good Tom was at anticipating and dealing with disruption.

You can turn this anticipation of disruption into a positive, too. Something I always try to do is help at least one person a day. One of these times I was with my wife and kids driving somewhere when a car accident happened in front of us. We pulled over and I got out, and the girl who was in the accident was a young driver and didn’t know what to do. She needed someone to help her right there and be with her through it, and I was able to help her through that process and help her realize that things would be okay. You can’t do that for somebody if you don’t have time set aside to deal with disruptions. So perhaps another facet of this is not trying to cram so much stuff in your life, instead building in some time for those little disruptions that will always occur.

Your dad actually has a great line around this. He always says, “Plan the work, work the plan.” I say that myself all the time now. Because when you plan, you don’t want to just plan for work you know about. You want to plan the work that you don’t know about that invariably will come up.

That makes sense. So this sense of anticipation, of working through disruption, seems like a great quality for a lawyer to have. Is this something that you see often in law?

Well, I think they’re good qualities for anyone to have. But you’re right, they come up a lot in law, especially on the litigation side, since you can’t control what the other side is going to do – you just know that they’re going to do something!

So it comes up a lot in law, but I think it really just comes more in life. I actually think I can plan around that kind of stuff in the law firm better than I can in life. I mean, I don’t have a whole lot of surprises at the law firm anymore. And I have people who work for me and deal with those surprises more than me.

But I still have to not pack my schedule and plan time every day. I know there will be certain clients who have things that come up and they’re going to need to talk to me or my attorneys. They’re going to need help getting through a situation. So if I have an eight hour day, I can’t plan back to back meetings for eight hours. I have to have windows where I can slide things in. If nothing comes up, then that’s great! I can do other things. But you have to reasonably anticipate disruption.

So let’s talk about that law firm. You’re the founder and Chief Counsel of Sollertis, a law firm focused on maximizing and protecting assets. Could you give me a little bit of background on your career journey? What motivated you to open your own firm?

Well, I think this actually opens up a discussion on risk. To me, working for someone else was more risky because they have layoffs. You don’t have as much control over what kind of work you do. Typically, you start working and you want responsibility. You don’t want to just sit there and do the same thing over and over, you want to grow. You just got out of school, you’re excited, and you want to bring it on, right!

So I felt that if I started my own practice out of law school that I would be able to get that growth. That was less risky to me. I barely had any bills. I was single, I had no kids, no wife. I thought it seemed like the perfect time to do my own thing and go solo from the very beginning. And so that’s what I did.

I did it with my best friend from law school, Tom Parashos. We were partners for over 25 years. When we started, we realized that my last name, Simon, was easier to spell, so we put my name first – our firm was Simon and Parashos. Then, when the internet came out, I went out and grabbed www.sandiegolawfirm.com, and we decided to change our name to that – so that if we ever sold the firm, we wouldn’t have to change the name! With lawyers, with business cards and brochures and all their stationary, every time someone added a new partner they had to throw away all the old materials and print new ones. And so we were just being proactive – everything could change and get disrupted, but we could keep the brand the same.

Tom and I had a lot of fun. When we started, we were both just a couple of guys out of law school. We both got married, had kids, bought homes. It really took us a long way. Tom ended up moving and starting a residential real estate brokerage with his wife, and they’re doing really well at that. So when he was phasing out, I started heating up. And that’s when I started Sollertis.

I decided to focus more on asset protection this time around. We did some of that at the San Diego Law Firm, but I really wanted to focus on that side with Sollertis.

So you’ve actually started two law firms then! What would you consider to be one of your major successes?

Most of my success stories are not through my law firm. They’re more on the personal side. And most of that gratification comes from the last 20 years when I’ve been married and had kids. That’s sort of a theme to my life, I really try to keep a balance. I wasn’t able to do this when I first started and worked longer hours like a typical attorney, but I saw other, older attorneys who were many years older than me and what their health was like and what their relationships were like, and I didn’t want that. So the law firm was part of my life, but the main part was the family. Family and health.

I have a couple of questions that I ask myself when I wake up every morning. The first thing I say is, “Am I healthy?” Because the opposite of health is death. And what good am I if I’m dead? So I always have to be healthy. I owe it to my wife and kids to be as healthy as I can so I can be around as long as possible to help them out. So, I ask myself if I’m healthy, and figure out what I need to do that day to stay that way – whether it’s workout, eating right, or seeing a doctor about something.

The next thing I think is “How’s my wife doing?” She takes care of my kids, after all. She’s a mother who looks after them nonstop, even though they’re all in their twenties now. She lets me know what I need to do or need to know. So she needs to be doing well too.

After that, it’s “How are my kids doing?” I think about each one. My son Max is getting ready for a trip while studying abroad, so I check in with him. My other son, William, is going through a job transition in New York, so I check in with him. My daughter Lauren just had a little dinner party last night. I check in with her. It’s short – sometimes a call, sometimes a text.  After that, I ask about how my friends are doing. One friend is transitioning to a new company this year. Another friend has moved to a different state. I like to keep tabs on my friends and be there for them too.

Then, finally, I think about work.

What’s a major obstacle you have overcome?

I really worked hard on work-life balance. The biggest occupational hazard I think, and not just for lawyers but professionals in general, is stress. And I learned that early when I was a young lawyer. There were so many lawyers in their 40s who were divorced, who were unhealthy, who were alcoholics, and they all worked 10-hour days and worked on the weekends and whatnot. And I didn’t think that looked sustainable.

I didn’t want that. I didn’t feel like I could be a good husband or father or friend or any of that stuff if I was spending my time for what, chasing money? I figured that maybe it would be okay if I drove a Honda to the gym instead of a BMW.

So that was a big thing for me – and the big success was being able to overcome that trap. I’m 58 right now. I work three days a week – Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and I work 5 hours each day. And believe it or not, in those 15 hours, I get more done than I used to get in 40 hours.

And it’s so hard to imagine how you could do that! But you start working smart, and to me, it’s all about kingpins. In bowling, when you knock the kingpin down, it knocks all the other pins down. So if you start thinking, what am I trying to accomplish, how can I accomplish that in the least amount of time, and in the most efficient way? What do I need to do this? What pin do I need to knock over to get the most amount done? So you can stop trying to be thorough and comprehensive, and focus your time on being precise and exact. You start to figure out the little things where you can bring about a result, or increase the probability of a result, by just doing one or two little things instead of a huge thing.

Being precise and exact to get more things done. I like that!

So you’ve structured your life in such a way that it allows you to have this work-life balance. Is that something that you talk to your clients about?

Well, I don’t really like telling other people how to do things! It’s like when you’re golfing and you see someone who doesn’t play that much pull the wrong club out…if they’re not asking, I’m not telling. You know what I mean?

I feel like, what I do works for me. And if someone along the way sees or hears about what I’m doing, and it influences them somehow, then great, so be it. But I’m not going to proactively tell people about things like that.

However, I do sometimes get a little pushy when I talk to my clients about how they manage their personal wealth. And I don’t mean by how they have it invested and whatnot, but typically my clients are entrepreneurs. They have someone at their business managing the financial matters and moving it around and collecting the receivables and things like that. And it runs really well.

But then on the personal side, they do all their own stuff. So when we set up our asset protection structures, I emphasize that, in addition to incorporating this asset protection structure into their situation, they really should have somebody handling all the bookkeeping, financials, loans, tax returns, that sort of thing. There’s a better use of their time, and that’s really what I push.

I’d like to talk about risk again. You mentioned earlier that you saw not starting your own business as a risk! And, as far as I understand it, asset protection works towards minimizing risk. What are your own personal philosophies around managing risk in your own life?

Well, again, this is just for me. I don’t know if this applies to everyone else, but there is no better bet than betting on yourself! That’s my philosophy.

So if I had my own business, I can control it. I can make sure it’s financially sound. I can make it run smoothly. I don’t have to rely on a bunch of other people to make sure I still have a job.

I just felt like, if you focus on work-life balance and some of the things we’ve talked about, working for yourself is a better situation. It carries less risk than all of those changes. I can set my own schedule. I could work as hard or as little as I wanted to. I always like consistency. I like steadiness. Like I talked about earlier, I want to minimize disruption, and it’s easier for me to plan for it when I work for myself.

I love the philosophy of betting on yourself. In that same vein, what’s next for Bill Simon?

Well, one of the challenges at the firm was that we deal with a lot of trustees, and the turnaround time when you deal with them can be long and difficult. It takes a lot of time to get things turned around, and it was slowing down our project. We solved that problem domestically by gaining control of trusteeship for our clients, and now we’re working on solving that at an international level when we deal with international trustees. Things were taking two or three months that we could normally turn around in two or three days. So that’s the new thing on the business front – we’re setting up an international trust company.

On the personal front, I have my son William in New York and my daughter Lauren in Dallas. We split our time between the two cities so we can spend time with each kid. My youngest son Max, we’re still figuring out where he’s going to be, but I think he’ll end up in Dallas. We’re just following the kids around and spending as much time as we can with them – but in a good way! Not in a, “Oh man, dad’s here again,” way, you know what I mean?

At this point, I really just want to keep things going! I’m golfing a lot. I’ve played Augusta National recently, what a treat that was. And I’m going to Scotland in July to golf with your dad.

What a year!

At this point, I’m just trying to stay as healthy as I can. What’s next? I just want to enjoy the time. I’ve done the work, I had the discipline to invest and not blow money on material things, and I want to just keep doing what I’m doing.

What’s the best way to get in contact if someone would like to learn more or follow up with you? 

We have a good newsletter, and everything from our newsletter is on our blog, and my daughter Lauren turns the blog posts into video animations too, which you can find on our YouTube. Or you can follow Sollertis or me on LinkedIn. But that’s pretty much it.

All of our business comes from relationships. Probably 95% of our clients are from relationships, only 5% found us on their own. Our clients are generally high net worth people who don’t really go online to look for us – they find us through their relationships. So for us, the social media and all that isn’t really to drive business, it’s to have a little street cred when someone checks us out.

Is there anything you’d like to talk about or highlight before we go?

I have been so fortunate to have some of the greatest mentors that you could ever imagine.

Something I’ve noticed is that people who are successful, if you ask them, generally want to impart that knowledge and that wisdom on you.

So even though, like we talked about earlier, I won’t tell someone what to do unprompted, if they ask for my advice, I’m very eager to share it with them. I’ve learned some good stuff. I want to pass on what I’ve learned.

I would just say that to anyone out there reading this, never be shy about going out and talking to the most important person in the room, who’s accomplished the most. You might think, “Oh, he’s so busy,” or “He wouldn’t talk to me.” No, you go ask that guy, “Hey, how did you end up playing NFL football?” Or, “How did you become the CEO of that company?” And it’s unbelievable how much those people welcome that, and love to tell you the story, and how much you can learn just from listening to what they say.

So I guess that’s my approach. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel. Just talk to people who have already done it, and they’ll give you the secret sauce.

Want to go more in depth? Learn more here:

Sollertis website

Sollertis blog

Sollertis LinkedIn

Sollertis YouTube channel

Bill Simon LinkedIn