Written By: Valentina Spadea
Studying my dad’s small business has been an ongoing endeavor that has lasted (and probably will last) far longer than the span of this one semester. I have always been surrounded by the plethora of new ideas that he shares around the dinner table. His work ethic has been a model for my own life, and first-hand I have seen just how important being a small business owner is to his ethos. My dad and his best friend from high school are the founding partners of Spadea Lignana Franchise Attorneys, a boutique law firm based in Philadelphia that specializes in all the legal work within the economic niche of franchising. Both my dad (Spadea) and his partner (Lignana) are lawyers. However, my dad identifies as an entrepreneur and a small business owner in addition to a lawyer. The dichotomy of his professional and personal identities is highlighted by the intersection of his law degree and managerial role in the firm.
Being the founder of a small business is a marker and virtue signal for a puritan work ethic that people use to build identity. As a dual player in the game of the firm, my dad is able to show that he is not only a hard worker, but also someone with a varied skill set. My dad had a full career before he went to law school. He was a salesman, an inventor (he even earned a patent for radio wiring), and an entrepreneur before his life as a lawyer. His first business was unsuccessful, but through going back to school and rebranding himself, he became the small business owner that he feels he was destined to be.
Many of these values came from his family growing up. My dad worked in his family’s machine shop, and through his experiences growing up in a family of small business owners, he found that it was the best way to navigate having a work/life balance. His goal was to be able to construct his identity around this idea of providing for his own family through a new family business. So Spadea Lignana, is a goal achieved.
The two founding partners identify as small business owners first and lawyers second in their day-to-day lives. They are not engaging in a quotidian routine centered around doing the nitty gritty contracts and legal work surrounding franchises, although they’re very capable of doing so. Instead, they spend their days in meetings thinking about the future of the firm or managing the different personalities in their clientele and personnel or dealing with emergency extenuating circumstances. With their 16 lawyers, 9 paralegals, and 3 additional organizational staff, the firm is a melting pot of different experiences.
The firm culture is something that both partners pride themselves on, and therefore the pair have spent much of their time hiring the right personnel. They feel that the right person in the right position is the recipe for success, and attribute much of their ability to grow to their rigorous hiring process. Qualifications are important, but so is a good fit. Hiring people who are going to take ownership of their role, show initiative, and pay attention to detail is key. They are not a traditional 9-5 firm. They are task-oriented and task based for their legal team, which allowed for a significant amount of working from home pre-pandemic. Then, in adapting to COVID the firm made technology accessible to all staff and made the work from home schedule a self-designed model. People are able to be flexible with the way that they get their work done, which has allowed for more creativity and a positive working environment.
Why is this important to the identity construction of being a small business owner? The founding partners, Spadea and Lignana, are directly responsible for the success of the business. This success is about lucrative profit margins, but also the well-being of the employees and clientele. Additionally, and importantly, the success of the business is the success of the partners. It represents them as people because they have made it their mission to make it a good business in every sense of the word. They are personally invested. Being a small business owner is a central facet of the way my dad sees himself professionally. This opportunity to study Spadea Lignana as Spadea’s daughter has been truly transformative in the way that I see small businesses within the broader model of identity construction.