By Joseph E. Seagle, Esq.

👋 Happy Friday! Today is National Food Bank Day, and it falls inside National Preparedness Month. In Florida, that phrase means something more specific than a flashlight and a case of water, because September is when the paperwork you did not do in March starts to matter.

❗Situation Awareness: Our offices will be closed Monday, September 7, for Labor Day. Orders and requests placed over the long weekend will be picked up Tuesday morning.

Yesterday was my 30th anniversary of practicing law. A lot has changed since September 3, 1996, when I first raised my hand before a judge in Newton, North Carolina, and swore to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States and North Carolina. I started out in a small firm in a small town that practiced “threshhold law” — if the client could get across our threshhold, we’d take the case. I handled everything from personal injury to speeding tickets to divorces to the burgeoning field of “internet law.” I’ve come a long way over those 30 years. Each day is an education that adds to my experience and knowledge. Sometimes that education is expensive, costing me hundreds of times more than all the tuition and fees I paid for my undergraduate and law school degrees. But that’s what I can bring to a client’s matter that a lawyer with much less experience can’t.

Experience in preparation is the throughline this week. A company that separated itself from its owner on paper turned out to be separately pardonable. A mother who signed a personal guarantee found out what her entity actually shielded. A parent standing in an emergency room learned the document had to be signed by the kid, not by them. And a medical-device founder makes the case that waiting for certainty is its own kind of failure.

President Trump has granted clemency to nine companies since the start of his second term, wiping out close to $200 million in financial penalties, some of it headed to victims of the underlying conduct, according to a July 21 Bloomberg feature. No modern president had pardoned a business before.

Ryan LaLone pleaded guilty to conspiring to violate the Clean Air Act by deleting emissions controls on diesel vehicles. He was fined $7,500. His Michigan trucking-parts shop, Diesel Freak LLC, was fined $750,000 separately. He had paid roughly $80,000 of it when pardons came through for both him and the company.

The template came from a fellow mechanic. Troy Lake convinced the Justice Department's Pardon Attorney's Office that he and his business were one and the same, got his own pardon, and three months later his company Elite Diesel got one too. Bigger names followed the same path. Trump pardoned BitMEX co-founder Arthur Hayes and three former executives, then the parent company itself, the same week its $100 million anti-money-laundering fine came due. A commutation for Carlos Watson and Ozy Media erased $97 million more.

The constitutional question is live. Frank Bowman of the University of Missouri School of Law told Bloomberg that "in any previous era no president would touch this with a barge pole." The White House position is that the Constitution says nothing about the pardon power applying only to people. Jimmy Carter's administration looked at pardoning a business in 1977 and passed, with the FBI director and the Justice Department reading the Constitution differently.

Here is the part that matters to an operator, and it has nothing to do with who is in office. Your entity is a separate legal person for liability purposes. That is the whole reason you formed it. Federal prosecutors have always understood that, which is why they charge the LLC and the member separately and collect twice.

None of these stories change your exposure, because the pardon power in Article II, Section 2 reaches federal offenses only. It does not touch a Florida state prosecution, a civil judgment, a private plaintiff's suit, a DBPR or DOH license action, or an insurance carrier's denial. Nine companies got relief from one specific president willing to push the limits of the Constitution. Yours has no realistic path to it.

For home services businesses in HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and roofing — every federal regulatory regime you operate under can charge the company as well as you. Assume the entity is a defendant rather than a shield, and check that your general liability and E&O name the entity as an insured in its own right. Most policies don’t cover criminal activities or fraud, so you’d want to read the policy carefully to see if you have coverage for criminal fines at all before relying on insurance to cover you.

For real estate investors and private lenders — the same separateness that draws a second fine is what makes a properly maintained entity worth having. Separateness you can prove in the records is the only kind that counts.

For licensed professionals — a corporate resolution does not travel with you to the license board. Personal discipline and entity penalty run on independent tracks.

Watch for: whether a court is ever asked to decide the scope question. Every company pardoned so far has had every reason to accept the relief and none to litigate it, so the issue has stayed out of the appellate courts.

Sources: Bloomberg, "Trump's Corporate Pardon Power Echoes a 17th Century English King," July 21, 2026; U.S. Const. art. II, § 2.

More than 455,000 women left the workforce in 2025, and 42% named caregiving as the reason, Fast Company reported in a feature built on interviews with more than ten mothers who left corporate jobs. A meaningful share of them did not stop working. They bought companies instead.

Entrepreneurship through acquisition means buying an existing business rather than starting one. Anica John left Amazon in April 2025 and bought DiggyPOD, a book-printing business, on a $10 million SBA loan. Kelly Conway left a chief HR officer seat and has bought two companies with a third closing in the wings. The appeal is not romance about small business. It is that an established company already has revenue, customers, and a payroll, which is a different risk profile than a startup.

The SBA requires a personal guarantee from anyone owning 20% or more. Morli Desai put up her house as collateral to buy a skincare company in 2022. Her click costs went from 60 cents to $3 within a year, her margins went with them, and she filed bankruptcy to manage the loan. The bank moved to foreclose on the house. A judge ruled against it and gave her ten years to repay.

Florida readers should pay attention to that sequence. Your homestead is protected from forced sale by most creditors under Article X, Section 4 of the Florida Constitution, and that protection has no dollar cap. It also does not stop you from voluntarily pledging the house as collateral. A guarantee you sign is a door you opened. The constitutional protection was never built to close a door you chose.

Harvard's Richard Ruback and Royce Yudkoff, authors of the HBR Guide to Buying a Small Business, tell searchers to plan six months to two years to find a company and another three months for diligence. Stanford's 2024 Search Fund study found only 63% of searchers ever closed a deal, and only 18% of 2023 searchers were women. A 2023 Women's Search Network study counted 116 women total who had launched a search since 2012. Yale's School of Management published a paper in 2023 titled "Ten Reasons to Absolutely Not Pursue Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition," which is the most useful item on this list precisely because it argues the other side.

If you are buying, get the holding structure decided before the letter of intent, not after diligence. Guarantee terms and the collateral schedule are negotiable while you still have alternatives. They stop being negotiable at closing.

What's next: watch whether SBA 7(a) collateral policy on personal residences shifts as self-funded search volume grows. That single line item decides how much of an acquisition's risk actually hits the buyer's family.

Sources: Fast Company, "These moms ditched corporate life to buy their own businesses"; Stanford GSB 2024 Search Fund Study; Yale SOM, "Ten Reasons to Absolutely Not Pursue Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition" (2023); Ruback and Yudkoff, Harvard Business Review.

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Stephen B. Dunbar III, JD, CLU, writing in Kiplinger, argues parents should have two hard conversations before a child turns 18: one about money, one about what happens in a medical emergency. He is right, and in Florida the second one comes with a document list.

The big picture: At 18 your child is an adult with full privacy rights. You are not on the chart. You have no standing to direct care, see records, or speak to the treating physician, and the hospital is not being difficult when it tells you so. The fix is not something you sign. It is something your child signs, voluntarily, while they still have capacity.

Why it matters:

What most people don't know: Florida abolished springing powers of attorney. Under Fla. Stat. § 709.2108, a power of attorney signed on or after October 1, 2011 is exercisable when it is executed. It cannot be written to activate only on incapacity or on some future event, and the one narrow exception, a military deployment-contingent power under Fla. Stat. § 709.2106(4), is not what a college send-off needs. Parents ask for the standby version constantly, and for this purpose it does not exist here. Your 19-year-old either trusts you with the authority now or you do not have it, which turns the conversation from paperwork into trust. That is what it always was.

Key takeaways:

Where people go wrong:

The bottom line: The money conversation Dunbar describes is a habit you build over years. The document conversation takes one afternoon and has a hard deadline printed on a birth certificate.

This is Florida law. Every state writes its own surrogate and power-of-attorney statutes, so get counsel where you live and where your child is enrolled.

Go deeper: Read the full long-form article on aspirelegal.com.

Sources: Kiplinger, Stephen B. Dunbar III, JD, CLU, June 13, 2026. Statutory framework: Fla. Stat. § 765.202, § 765.204, § 709.2105, § 709.2106, § 709.2108.

Lisa Anderson, cofounder and president of Paragonix Technologies, writes in Fast Company that innovation has become a word executives use without agreeing on what it means. Her three claims are worth stealing, because two of them run the same play EOS runs and the third is a hiring problem most owners have.

Building organ-preservation technology with no competitor to benchmark against, Anderson says every decision felt blind. What kept the company moving was a willingness to decide, execute, and adjust in real time rather than wait for information that was never coming.

She adds a counterintuitive corollary: early on, ignore your competitors. When you are building something new, they are still solving last year's problem, and benchmarking against them produces a slightly better version of something that already exists.

Anderson separates high-cost failure, which means committing serious money before testing whether the thing works, from low-cost failure, which means small fast experiments that answer the expensive question early. Take big swings on vision and small steps on execution. A high failure rate is only a problem if you fail slowly, fail without learning, or fail expensively.

The uncomfortable version: if your culture punishes failure and rewards consensus, you are not short on innovative people. You are training the ones you have to stop volunteering.

Bottom Line: Deciding slowly feels responsible and reads as caution. It is still a decision, and its cost shows up as a competitor who shipped.

This Week's Challenge: Pull the oldest item on your issues list. It has been sitting there because somebody is waiting for more information. In your next L10, name the smallest experiment that would settle it inside 30 days, assign it, and take it off the list.

Source: Fast Company, Lisa Anderson, "The top 3 secrets of innovation that nobody talks about."

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