Practice Management

I saw this spot some time back on CBS News and I just cannot seem to get it out of my mind.  It is not that a 100 year old bank in Orwell, Vermont is not a quaint little story, it is that a small bank founded in 1832 really demonstrates what the Third Wave practice could be and should be -- even with banks.

I had read somewhere that a de novo (new) bank could not really survive without $100 million dollars in deposits.  Well, maybe that is true because banks are trying to be too big, too powerful, all things to all people, and it feels it needs the big new digs, large number of employees, and all of the trappings of wealth that being a bank owner portends.

Here is a bank connected to the owner's house.  A door seperates the residence from the bank.  The bank only has $36 million in deposits, yet it is able to survive and provide the owner and the few who help him run it with good returns in solid investments.

Almost all banks, like almost all lawyers, simply want to live greater than they really have to do.  It is all about vainglory, amour-propre, or pride.  Yet, in the end what does the vice provide?  A stiff overhead, the obligation to care for even more people, a overly complicated life, worry and grief.  The pursuit of this will rob you of your life, your ultimate happines, and the ability to have real earnings not committed to other things.  Yet, like in Indiana ones and the Last Crusade in which Dr. Jones has to guide himself over, under and around all of the skeltons of all of those before him that could not see or did not know of all of the deadly booby traps just to find the Holy Grail among all of the false cups, we know, we know, most of us will not survive to stare in wonder at the Grail.  We know, we know, are chances of pure satisfaction are something akin to winning the lottery.

CBS News calls this Vermont bank "A common sense approach for these uncommon economic times", and I think that is right.