Marlon Griffith grew up in a Brooklyn apartment where, as he tells it, “our idea of grass was the sidewalk.” So when he bought his first home in the Washington, DC area, lawn care was not a skill he came equipped with or enjoyed.
He ran the first mower over a few rocks and ruined the blade. He forgot to oil the second one and seized the motor. By the third, he overcorrected—started pouring in too much oil—until one Sunday he was making so much smoke in the backyard that his neighbors leaned over the fence to check whether the house was on fire.
That was the moment something clicked. “I said, ‘Why am I doing this? Why do I want to spend 2 hours, 3 hours mowing the grass?'” he recalls in episode two of his podcast, Kicking Ass and Taking Names. He finally asked a friend for a referral. Since then good old Ron has been cutting his grass for more than twenty years.
The story sounds like a homeowner anecdote. It is not. It is the clearest possible illustration of a mistake that quietly costs business owners far more than any invoice they were trying to avoid.
You Can Do It. That Doesn’t Mean You Should.
Most owners do not fall into the DIY trap because they think it is the best strategy. They fall into it for three predictable reasons.
Some genuinely enjoy the work—and there is nothing wrong with that, as long as the enjoyment isn’t costing the business. Some are simply creatures of habit; the instincts that built the company in year one are hard to retire in year five. And some, as Marlon puts it plainly, “don’t want to spend the money to have someone else do it.”
That last group is where the real damage happens. The instinct to save money is reasonable. But the mental math a DIY owner runs—I’ll do this myself instead of paying someone—is missing the most important variable in the equation.
Their own time.
The Invoice You Never Receive
Marlon’s lawn mower story has a simple punchline: his hourly rate as an attorney is significantly higher than what he pays Ron. Every Saturday he spent fighting a smoking lawn mower was a Saturday he was not billing clients, building referrals, or growing his firm. The lawn care wasn’t free. He just wasn’t seeing the cost on a receipt.
The same logic runs inside a business, only the stakes are higher and the receipts are even harder to find.
“Your greatest asset is your time,” Marlon says. Not your product. Not your relationships. Not your reputation. Your time, because time is what lets you think about where the business is going. It’s what lets you strategize, build the relationships, and meet the people who will help you get there. And it’s the only resource you can’t earn more of.
When a business owner spends that resource on tasks a $20-an-hour assistant could handle, the savings are an illusion. They have traded the most expensive labor in the company for the cheapest possible output. Ron was not an expense. Ron was leverage.
The question every owner needs to ask—about every task they are doing themselves—isn’t Can I do this? It’s: Should I be the one doing this?
Those are different questions. The first is about capability. The second is about strategy. And the owners who learn to ask the second one are the ones who stop mowing their own grass.
Working For the Business vs. Working On the Business
Marlon learned this lesson inside his own firm. For the first decade of the Griffith Law Group, he had a partner. They split expenses and shared income, which gave the business a kind of built-in cushion. Then his partner left to become a judge.
“Probably like a lot of business owners, particularly small business owners, I panicked,” he says. He downsized the staff. He told himself he had to contract before he could expand. Within six months he was the one running into the office on Saturdays and Sundays to handle administrative work, talking to clients on weekends, answering every phone call himself.
“Just like that lawn mower,” he says, “I don’t enjoy this. I don’t want to do this. This is not what I signed up for.”
That is the moment he names the distinction at the center of the whole conversation: “You should be spending your time working on your business, not for your business.”
Working for the business means handling the daily output—answering calls, running invoices, fixing what breaks. Working on the business means strategy, vision, growth, and the relationships that compound over years. Both are necessary. The problem is that DIY owners spend almost all of their time on the first and almost none on the second.
Two Ways to Think About Money
Marlon frames the difference between a DIY owner and an owner who scales as a difference in how they think about spending.
The DIY owner thinks: The less I spend, the more I keep.
The owner who scales thinks: The better I spend, the more I make.
Both sentences are about money. They point in opposite directions. The DIY mindset treats every dollar paid out as a loss. The other treats spending as an investment, as long as it is intentional. The owner who scales recognizes that buying back her time is what lets her focus on the work that only she can do.
When Boosters Become Dead Weight
One of the sharpest analogies in the episode comes from a NASA conference Marlon attended. An astronaut explained that a rocket needs to hit a specific exit velocity to leave Earth’s atmosphere, and that it uses a series of boosters to get there. Each booster fires for a stage of the climb, then disengages. By the time the rocket reaches orbit, every booster is gone.
“If those boosters do not release,” Marlon says, “the rocket cannot make it out of the Earth’s atmosphere.” The same thing that lifted the rocket starts to drag it down.
A business works the same way. In year one, the founder has to answer the phone, take the orders, schedule the appointments, and run the books. Those are boosters. They are what gets the company off the ground. But if the founder is still doing all of them in year five, those same duties stop being assets and become weight. Growth requires releasing them.
Where DIY Creates Real Business Legal Exposure
DIY doesn’t just slow growth. It creates risk.
Marlon has litigated enough business disputes to recognize the patterns. “You’d be surprised how many disputes originate not because of something wrong being done but because of a lack of communication about what was being done,” he says.
A DIY owner buried under daily tasks stops returning calls. Emails sit in the inbox. Clients who were happy with the work start questioning the work because they cannot reach anyone. A small misunderstanding becomes a refund request. A refund request becomes a lawsuit.
The same pattern shows up in employee classification. Owners who cannot bring themselves to hire full-time staff often misclassify workers as contractors. Two years later, the relevant labor department arrives with a bill for back taxes, penalties, and fees—and the case ends up in front of an administrative judge.
Most of those disputes, in Marlon’s experience, could have been prevented by engaging a payroll service or asking a lawyer the right question before the first paycheck went out.
Contracts that were never reviewed. Vendor agreements signed in a hurry. Compliance questions that got pushed to next week and stayed there. Every one of these is a legal exposure that grew because nobody had the time—or the right advisor in the room—to spot it early.
Three Questions Every Business Owner Should Ask
Rather than prescribe a fix, Marlon asks three questions. They are deceptively simple.
Where am I spending my time? Track one full week the way a lawyer tracks billable hours. Write down everything. Most owners discover that the places they thought were eating their week barely register, and the places they assumed were quick are quietly consuming entire days.
What is the cost of my own labor? Calculate your effective hourly rate. If yours is $200 an hour and the work you are doing could be handled by someone at $25 an hour, the math is telling you something important.
How much value am I actually adding by doing this myself? “How much value are you adding to your business when you’re serving as your business receptionist, when you’re serving as your business scheduler, when you’re serving as your business bookkeeper?” Marlon asks. The answer is often less than owners want to admit.
The Question That Changes the Calculation
Legal counsel is one of the areas owners delay the longest. The assumption is that it’s expensive. But the more useful question isn’t What does this cost? It’s What is it costing me to keep handling this myself?
Proactive legal counsel—the kind where an attorney already knows the business, reviews contracts before they are signed, and flags compliance issues before they become enforcement actions—is rarely where business owners think to invest first. It’s almost always where they wish they had invested sooner.
For businesses that have outgrown DIY but aren’t yet ready for a full-time in-house attorney, that relationship exists in a structured form. Legal risk prevention is far less expensive than legal risk litigation. It’s also far less stressful.
Protecting What You Are Building
Marlon’s clients built something real—often from very little—and they have a great deal to lose if the wrong dispute lands at the wrong moment. His firm’s job is to help them protect what they have already built and give them the support to keep building.
DIY is how most of them started. It is rarely how they should finish.
Releasing the boosters that got the business off the ground is part of how it gets where it is going.
As Marlon closes every episode: “Information is only as good as its application.”
If your business is growing and you are starting to wonder which risks should no longer be handled alone, schedule a conversation with the Griffith Law Group.