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Productivi-Tree: The Human Side of Productivity

One Lawsuit From Losing Everything You Built with Scherrie L. Prince

Season 3, Ep. 79
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Nearly all productivity advice assumes you get to keep what you build. Scherrie L. Prince spends her working Life proving that assumption wrong.

She is a trial attorney, a JD MBA, managing partner of Prince & Associates PLLC, and host of the Play Big Faster Podcast, now past 252 episodes. She got here the hard way: a probate fight after her mother died, a business built on a handshake that fell apart, and a mortgage brokerage wiped out in 2008. Those three losses sent her to law school and into asset protection.

In this episode, she gives Santi the framework she uses with entrepreneurs. Four questions to answer before you even think about an LLC or a corporation. Why your estate plan and your business plan cannot live in separate drawers. What "own nothing, control everything" really means, and why nobody is fully judgment-proof. Then the productivity half: how she runs a law firm, a coaching practice, and a twice-weekly podcast, all based on one rule she got from a commercial real estate broker: plan your fun first.

She also tells the story of the AI mistake that made it into her court filings and what she changed afterward. If you have been growing something without protecting it, this conversation is the audit you have been putting off.


Key takeaways
  1. Answer four questions before you pick a structure: do you have a will-centered or trust-centered estate plan, is the business product, service, or hybrid, is it physical, virtual, or e-commerce, and do you need anonymity or are you public-facing? Structure comes after, not before.
  2. An exit is not a failure. It can be a sale, a retirement, a handover to the next generation, or a reorganisation. Deciding which one you want changes what you build today.
  3. A trust does not stop anyone suing you. It organises what you own and builds a moat around it. Nobody is 100 percent judgment proof, and any adviser who claims otherwise is selling something.
  4. Insurance is not only about dying. Disability and incapacity are the more likely events. If the business stops when you stop, you are the bottleneck.
  5. Plan your fun first. Family events, holidays and the things that light you up go on the calendar before the work does, and the work fills in around them.
  6. Every major activity gets a system. Separate CRMs where privacy demands it, Dropbox as the common file layer, Zapier for the gaps, Asana for tasks, and SOPs that get updated by voice into an AI tool.
  7. AI is a tool, not a solution. Her firm had an SOP and training and still filed fictitious legal precedent while she was out. The control is human review, not a ban.
  8. Service businesses can scale, but only with scope clarity. Group coaching, masterminds and one-to-many delivery are how you duplicate yourself without a clone.


Chapters

00:00 The one document you are missing

00:47 Who is Scherrie L. Prince

01:49 Two failed businesses and a probate fight

03:15 Begin with the end in mind, even at day one

04:58 What playing big actually costs

06:15 The four questions to answer before you pick a structure

09:24 Estate plan and business plan, explained simply

10:32 Why founders avoid planning for disability and death

11:26 Own nothing, control everything 12:56 Plan your fun first

14:35 Court dates you cannot move

15:49 The system behind 252 podcast episodes

17:44 Mindset or structure, what separates the founders who scale

19:36 The calendar advice she would give her younger self

21:09 The AI mistake that reached her court filings

23:59 Using AI to do more instead of to work less

25:31 Can a service business detach income from time

27:24 The guest who impressed her most

29:12 Quickfire round

31:28 What Santi took away


Guest links

Scherrie L. Prince on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scherriespeaks/

Website: https://scherrieprince.com/

Prince & Associates PLLC: https://princelawassociates.com/

Play Big Faster Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/play-big-faster-podcast/id1635345946

Want to know where you are losing time and energy?Take the free Productivity Assessment and get your personal results in minutes. https://links.santiagotacoronte.com/Productivity-Assessment

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