Progress: A Love Story, Vol. 1 — Drinking from a Firehose

A This Is Fine: A COO Story Segment

When I accepted the role of Chief Operations Officer, I did what every overachieving lawyer does when presented with a new challenge: I said, “Absolutely, I can do that,” and then immediately Googled what a COO actually does.

The thing is, I wasn’t wrong to take the job. I knew how to run cases, lead teams, and make things happen. I’d been building systems and solving chaos for years. But once the shiny title settled in, it hit me—this wasn’t about managing cases anymore. This was about managing a business. And no one had handed me a syllabus for that.

Suddenly, everyone was speaking fluent Business while I was over here trying to decode a foreign language. Margins. KPIs. Forecasting. Cash flow. Client acquisition cost. Gross profit versus net profit (and yes, they’re different—I learned that the hard way). It was like stepping onto a treadmill already going ten miles an hour.

I didn’t just need to do my job. I needed to understand it.

The Firehose Phase

There’s a phrase I’d heard people use before – “drinking from a firehose” – but until this year, I hadn’t truly lived it.

Every day felt like an unrelenting flood of information and acronyms. Slack notifications. Staff questions. A 47-tab browser situation that would make any IT person cry. A podcast about operational leadership in one ear and a YouTube video about reading P&Ls in the other. My desk was covered in sticky notes with words like “OKR???” and “what even is a P&L?”

It was chaos. Beautiful, humbling chaos.

At first, I thought I could just muscle through it – read everything, watch everything, absorb it all through sheer willpower. Spoiler alert: that’s not how the human brain works. I wasn’t learning; I was drowning.

Somewhere between a webinar on “scaling sustainably” and an emergency text to Amy (“Is our turnover normal or a sign that I’m a terrible manager?”), I realized I needed a new strategy. I didn’t just need information—I needed education. 

And there it was—the voice of my 1L legal writing professor from SMU, echoing across the years. She’d drilled it into us three times a week for an entire year: “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.”

Building My Own Business School

No one teaches lawyers how to run a law firm like a business. We’re taught how to argue, how to research, how to win—but not how to lead, scale, or forecast. So I decided to make my own business school, one very messy, caffeine-fueled module at a time.

The Baby COO’s Reading List and Podcast Playlist

I started with Traction because everyone in operations apparently has to. Then Profit First, which made me question every financial decision I’d ever made and forced me to actually understand where our money goes. The E-Myth Revisited gave me my first “aha” moment—realizing I’d been the Technician far too long, trapped in doing the work instead of designing the systems. And Leaders Eat Last completely reframed my understanding of leadership. It’s not about being in charge or being the hero. It’s about sacrifice, trust, and creating the conditions where your people feel safe enough to actually lead—to take ownership, to grow, to do their best work.

I also became a walking podcast. Brian Glass’s content taught me how to think about operations beyond just “getting it done” and made me feel less alone in the specific weirdness of scaling a legal practice while trying to maintain a life outside of it. Mike Mogill’s Game Changing Attorney podcast taught me how to think strategically about firm growth and what actually moves the needle. Radical Candor gave me language for the kind of leadership I actually wanted to practice—honest feedback without the ego.

But the real education came from asking questions. Out loud. To consultants. To other business owners. To Amy, our CEO, who somehow never made me feel dumb for not knowing what a P&L actually showed. To myself. Turns out, the only truly dumb question is the one you’re too proud to ask.

The Shift From Imposter to Investigator

At some point, the panic softened. I still didn’t feel like a “real” COO, but I stopped feeling like a fraud. Like any good love story, it happened “slowly, and then all at once.” Because the truth is, you don’t need an MBA to run a business. You need humility, curiosity, and the willingness to admit that Google might be your best employee for a while.

Leadership doesn’t mean knowing everything. It means being curious enough to find out, and humble enough to ask for help figuring it out.

I started to treat my questions not as evidence of incompetence, but as evidence of growth. Every time I didn’t know something, I made a note to learn it. Every time I learned something new, I built a system to make it easier next time. It became a game—one that was less about proving myself and more about building something sustainable.

What Progress Actually Looks Like

If the first installment of This Is Fine was about saying yes to a new role, this one is about surviving the part that comes next—the awkward, exhausting, exhilarating learning curve that nobody warns you about.

Progress doesn’t look like mastery. It looks like curiosity. It looks like setting aside time every week to learn something new. It looks like texting your tech person, “Can you explain this like I’m five?” It looks like building your own education instead of waiting for someone else to hand it to you.

You’ll have firehose moments—days when you’re drowning in acronyms and metrics and wondering what the hell you were thinking taking this job. Days when you realize how much you still don’t know. Days when you want to Google “What does a COO do?”

But slowly, gradually, competence turns into confidence. The questions build on each other. You start hearing common threads across your podcast library, making deeper connections because you actually know the vocabulary now. The acronyms stop feeling like a foreign language and start feeling like tools. And now you’re googling questions that don’t have one right answer—like “How do you balance growth with culture?”

So, if you’re stepping into a role you don’t quite feel qualified for—good. That means you’re growing. Build your syllabus. Read the books. Ask the questions. Laugh at yourself a lot. Text your CEO asking what a write-off is (because you know David Rose was wrong but you don’t totally understand why).

Yea, I’m still drinking from a firehose. But at least now, I know where the water’s coming from.

And that damn elephant is getting devoured, one bite at a time.