We recently connected with Kayla Hill and have shared our conversation below.

Kayla, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Looking back on your career, have you ever worked with a great leader or boss? We’d love to hear about the experience and what you think made them such a great leader.

Tamara Brown was not only my boss, she was my mentor and inspiration. She was the one who encouraged me to pursue a career in law and that it wouldn’t limit my ability to pursue my creative interests as well. She taught me how to navigate difficulties in my life, using her own lessons as examples of overcoming and committing to who you want to be. I started working for her law firm while I was in high school and continued working with her on and off through college and well into the start of my professional career.

She was a great boss because she believed in me. She truly wanted to see me succeed and she would push me to learn more about myself, take chances, meet new people and try new things. She encouraged me to see the life I wanted to live and to take the steps every day to make that vision a reality. She had a sense of humor and she reminded me that when life had unexpected turns that finding gratitude in the smallest of things is what can get you through.

It is because of her that I continue to use my profession to help aid people in discovering ways to fulfill their dreams. I learned from her the importance of finding my own voice and to not be afraid to use it in whatever room I step into. That even if I’m the only one who believes in myself, that is enough and that I don’t need others to validate who I am.

I take these lessons and reflect on them as I work with my clients. Whether they’re discouraged or uncertain about what path to take, I recognize that sometimes all we need is for someone to remind us that we are capable of anything. And even more than that, that working together is so important to build something great.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

My name is Kayla Hill and I am the Co-Founder and Managing Attorney of The CPG Law Group, LLC based in Indianapolis, Indiana. My path to law wasn’t a straight path. I had always been interested in the idea of working for myself, with my first entrepreneurial venture starting in elementary school where created a magazine to sell to classmates that detailed info about our school and interviews from our teachers and staff. It was so successful that I was actually asked to stop selling the magazines as students were getting distracted in class by reading them.

I also developed a love of the arts and graduated from college with a degree in Film & Video Studies. Throughout high school and college, I developed experience in theatre production, film production, television production and writing. I also had a more technology based interest as I had been a part of an IT Honors Program and went on to obtain a Master of Science in Cybersecurity Risk Management in later years.

But even more important to me was finding a way to take my passions and turn them into something that could become a way I could help others. It was a mentor who suggested that I pursue a law degree, encouraging me to become a lawyer where I could use this legal background to help those who had the same entrepreneurial and creative pursuits as I did. I thought this was a great challenge, as I was able to take my professional experience where I worked with companies to develop processes and procedures to work more efficiently, brainstorm ways to expand services and internal mechanisms for growth and my love of learning and research and combine it with my love of being an entrepreneur into something that could help others.

I connected with Soroya Garner, the other Co-Founder of The CPG Law Group, LLC while attending IU McKinney School of Law and found that she had a similar passion and love for the arts. We also had synergy on our goals to helping the community by helping people with their entrepreneurial pursuits as we believe this is an avenue to building generational wealth.

And that is exactly what The CPG Law Group, LLC aims to do! In fact, the “CPG” stands for “Create.Protect.Grow.” We offer a holistic approach to working with clients to assess their unique and individual needs and goals and develop a legal strategy that will support them throughout the life cycle of their business. Our areas of law include Intellectual Property Law (trademark, copyright and trade secrets), Real Estate Law, Data Privacy Law, Estate Planning and Business Consultation and Development. We offer services in packages, a la carte and even monthly subscriptions for those who are at a stage of continuous growth and development.

We work with clients who are just starting their journey to become business owners, creatives who are seeking to protect their craft and leverage it for financial growth and seasoned business owners who are building and growing their enterprises. Our goal is to not only guide you in how to start, operate and maintain a business, but to also protect your assets not only during your lifetime, but to ensure it can be passed on to the generation after you. Some of our services, such as estate planning, real estate and even data privacy concerns can also be tailored to non-business owners on a family and personal scale. So, we are able to help families who are trying to ensure their assets are properly passed to the next generation, as well as those who are attempting to buy or sell homes or individuals who wish to have help with privacy concerns on the internet.

We believe in education and collaboration, because our own experiences showed us that we all should be life-long learners in whatever field we are in and that collaboration opens door for more opportunities to elevate yourself far beyond just working on your own. That is why we also offer educational resources for clients as well as opportunities to network in the community so that you can connect with your next business partnership. While we are Indiana based, we are able to help clients on a national scale through our Intellectual Property department, which gives us a chance to build a network of clients in various industries and crafts across the country.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

Since I was a child, I have found that I’ve had a habit of finding and pursuing new interests very quickly. Whether it was finding a new language to learn, picking up a new instrument, research the culture of a country, or reading so many books in a summer reading program that they had to find more books for me to read, I loved pursuing new things as it caught my interest. And I began to hear the phrase “jack-of-all-trades and master of none” which was a rather disheartening thing to hear for me. I thought that meant I couldn’t focus or that having a drive to discover new things was bad.

But as I got older and had a wide resume of various roles in various industries, I found that my ability to brainstorm and dream up new ideas and passions wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. For one, I realized that I was developing skills that were transferrable across industries. At almost every job I had, I was able to see how things operated and conceptualize ways to improve those processes. My love of learning new things translated to my ability to conduct research on a wide range of topics and have a focus on asking key questions to narrow the research to a specific goal. My love of the arts showed me how to work with different personalities, which enhanced my customer service skills.

I learned that being a “jack of all trades” actually equipped me to be able to pivot when I needed and that is essential for any business owner or creative. We have to be able to adapt to curveballs whether they are losing clients, a financial hardship, lack of support or an unsuccessful campaign. Instead of seeing failures, I see lessons and I use my ability to imagine new ideas or connecting to new interests to imagine a new path forward. It also helps me to connect with clients who are just as diverse as my interests, which makes me excited for my work every day. I meet so many talented and incredible individuals with their own unique passions and pursuits and for someone like me, that is an amazing thing. It wasn’t until recently that I learned that the full quote is “A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.” I think this quote is much more inspiring!

Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?

I actually met my co-founder, Soroya Garner in law school while attending a course dedicated to helping lawyers start and run their own law firms. We worked together on a project that asked us to imagine starting a firm and the requirements and challenges that came with it. At the time, we didn’t discuss the idea of a partnership, but it was a preview of what would come in the future. We had good synergy with each other and there was a mutual respect for each other’s skills and backgrounds that carried over into our friendship. We both were pursuing studies in Intellectual Property Law and we both had creative backgrounds.

It wasn’t until years after graduation that we reconnected again. Soroya had established her own successful firm and I had just passed the bar exam after continuing working in the corporate world. At the time, I had confirmed what I had known deep down – I was an entrepreneur and I was ready to pivot out of the corporate world and into the world of having a enterprise of my own. I reconnected with Soroya and found that our visions were aligned and our synergy was just as present as it was when we were in law school together. We found that we had experiences and skills that complimented one another and would allow us to expand both our reach and impact if we worked together.

However, we didn’t just jump into business together. We recognized that this would be a long-term venture and that we needed to make sure that our long-term goals, visions, goals and needs would be served by the partnership. We had multiple meetings to go over these things and maintained transparency with each other throughout the process. We asked ourselves questions that would determine how conflict resolution would work, what impact we wanted to have in our community and what our vision would be for the firm would be.

I believe that such conversations are essential to any partnership, regardless of the relationship. Going into business is a commitment to a person and it requires respect and understanding of the needs and goals of your partner, just as much as it is for yourself. Even if you get along well with a person, challenges will arise that can easily overrule those good feelings. And having conversations ahead of time on how to handle conflicts, finances, changing visions or goals and other unforeseen challenges can allow you to draft out something that will help navigate these things. Emotions may arise, but with a neutral document that you both agreed to ahead of time to guide you, hopefully it can alleviate the strain of disagreements. At and the end of the day, we both hold to the respect we have for one another that even if we disagree, we can use that as a guiding point to stay focused on how to treat each other with that respect.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.thecpglawgroup.com
• Instagram: @cpglaw
• Facebook: @thecgplawgroup
• Linkedin: @thecpglawgroup