Use leverage to get bigger, faster 

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There are a lot of ways to grow your practice. Most involve improving and expanding what you’re already doing. 

Things like: 

  • Improving your SEO
  • Getting more sign-ups for your seminars
  • Getting more subscribers for your newsletter
  • Creating better content or ads
  • Learning how to better use LinkedIn (etc.) 
  • Converting more leads and prospects to clients
  • Getting more repeat business and referrals
  • Promoting your podcast, blog, newsletter, or channel
  • Getting more social media followers
  • Improving your networking or speaking skills
  • And so on

These are all worth considering. Each can help you grow your practice. But that growth is unlikely to be more than “incremental,” meaning single digit. 

That’s not bad, especially if you continue to do them and allow your results to compound. But if you’re looking to do something bigger or quicker, such as doubling or tripling your revenue this year, you should focus on strategies that can create that kind of result. 

One of the best, most leveraged methods for doing that is setting up strategic alliances with other professionals and businesses that sell to or serve your target markets. 

In short, you form a relationship with another lawyer or business professional, they endorse or recommend you and your services to their customers or clients, subscribers or followers, and you do the same for them. 

Because their clients trust them, their recommendations can quickly result in a large number of new clients for you. You don’t have to invest a lot of time or create new infrastructure. Your job is to identify suitable candidates, connect with them and propose an alliance. 

To start, that alliance can be as simple as mentioning each other’s upcoming event or recommending each other’s blog or podcast. As you get to know each other better, this might evolve into full-throated endorsements and referrals. 

You don’t need dozens of strategic alliances partners to make this a very profitable undertaking for you; you only need a few.

To learn how to do this, see my course on Lawyer-to-Lawyer Referrals

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It’s not a problem if you can write a check

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I’ve mentioned before that a lawyer friend of mine who did a lot of speaking and training used to tell his audience, “It’s not a problem if you can write a check”. He meant that most problems aren’t fatal, they usually have a solution, and that if you have enough money, the solution is simple.  

What if you don’t have enough money?

That’s a different problem, isn’t it? But it also has a solution. 

If you’re a self-employed lawyer, for example, and are struggling financially or want to up your game, go get 5 new cases or clients. Problem solved.

Sure, you need to know how to do that, you need to do it, but first, you need a plan. 

Not a complex plan with lots of contingencies and moving parts, a simple plan. For me, that means easy to start and get some results, however small, relatively quickly. A plan that allows you to leverage your resources—your time, your staff, your contacts, your skills and knowledge, and your email list.

You might start by asking yourself the “Focusing Question” at the heart of the book, The One Thing by Gary Keller: 

“What is the one thing I can do such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”

Leverage.

If you want to bring in 5 new cases or clients, ask yourself that question. And answer it. 

There is an answer. There’s always an answer. Even if the answer is to read or re-read something written by yours truly.

How to use email to build a successful law practice

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Leveraging other people’s talent, knowledge, and resources

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One of the best ways to grow a law practice is to conduct joint ventures with other professionals and businesses that target the same markets and clients you target. 

If you handle family law and target high-income executives in the health-care industry, for example, you should talk to business owners, insurance brokers, financial planners, consultants, accountants, and other (non-competing) lawyers who have an established clientele and/or actively target the types of people who fit the profile of your ideal client (and the people who can refer them).

You identify joint venture candidates, find ways to meet them, and learn more about what they do. You then tell them what you do and see if there is some common ground for working together for your mutual benefit. 

This might mean conducting seminars together, sharing the costs of a mailing, or interviewing each other for your respective newsletters or blogs.

It might mean inviting each other to networking functions, co-authoring articles or books, or sending emails to each other’s lists with information or offers.

It might be keeping each other on a list of recommended “vendors” and referring to each other when a client or contact says they are looking for someone who does what you (and they) do. 

And it might simply mean providing suggestions, feedback and encouragement to each other in your individual marketing ventures.

But don’t try to figure that out right now. 

Just make a profile of the kinds of joint venture partners who might make a good fit for you. Once you’ve done that, you may discover that you already know people who fit that profile. Talk to them, tell them you think you should talk about “working together” and see what develops. 

How to get referrals from, and set up joint ventures with, lawyer and other professionals

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To dream (and achieve) the impossible dream

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Think bigger. Follow your dreams. Don’t play small. We’ve heard all this before (and probably said it a time or two) but do we do it? 

No. We’re lawyers. Logical, careful, traditional. We don’t like risk. At least when it comes to our business. 

So we take ten years to reach our goals, if we reach them at all, when we might reach those goals in one. That’s what authors like Tim Ferriss, Benjamin Hardy, Grant Cardone, and others tell us. 

“Impossible goals are easier to accomplish than “possible goals” they say. And they actually have a point. 

When you set reasonable goals and seek incremental growth, to increase your income by 10%, for example, you have too many options and strategies to choose from. These are the “trivial many” in 80/20 parlance. Small ideas, common strategies, that are likely to only reach small results. 

To grow by more than 10%, we should be looking at the “precious few”. 

To increase your income by 10%, you might look for a new marketing technique or improve an existing one. You’ll do what you’re already doing or something like it. With hard work and a little luck, you might achieve the goal. But because the goal is small and unexciting, you also might lose enthusiasm, get busy with other things, or bump heads with every other lawyer who is trying to do what you’re trying to do. 

Instead of walking, you need to run. Instead of playing it safe, you need to do things you’ve never done before. 

Not only are these likely to be more exciting and motivating, they are the only things that offer you a chance of achieving massive growth. 

The reason they do that is simple. Impossible goals force you to innovate and find things nobody else has thought of, let alone is doing. Find and focus on those precious few ideas, connections, or strategies, and you can grow much bigger and much faster.  

Impossibly big goals help us to “shape the process,” in part by making us ask better questions. If you ask, “What would I have to do to increase my income by 10% this year?” you get a long list of options. If you ask, “What would I have to do, or what would have to happen, to grow my income by 1000%?” you get a very small list of options to choose from, and you only need one.

The idea comes from “constraint theory” which is explained in the book, “The Goal”. Every goal, but especially a big goal, has a core restraint or bottleneck that is keeping the business from achieving it. Most people don’t focus on the bottleneck or constraint. They focus on the 80% that doesn’t matter. 

Growing by 10% is about doing more. Possibly a lot more and for a long time. Growing by 1000% and achieving your impossible dream is about doing something different. 

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Build family to build your practice

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Your clients and former clients, your professional contacts, everyone who knows your name and would take your call—that’s your family.

One of the simplest and best ways to grow your practice is to grow your family. 

That means (a) increasing their number, and (b) increasing the strength and depth of your relationships

And you do that by going out of your way to serve them and help them, not just with legal matters but with other areas of their business or personal life.

Make them feel good about themselves for hiring you or referring people to you

You also increase their number by looking for opportunities to meet the people they know—their employees, partners, friends and colleagues. People they can introduce to you and who can become a part of your ever-growing professional family. 

As your family grows, look for ways to get to know these people better and help them. Give them referrals, advice, and introductions. Give them helpful information and stay in touch with them.

In other words, by networking with the people you know and the people they know., your family will grow and so will your practice. 

What does it take to do this successfully? 

You need to be willing to talk to people who aren’t necessarily in need of an attorney, and be genuinely interested in them and not just what they can do for you. You need to be a good listener, because that’s how you show them you are interested in them and how you learn what they need or want so you can help them get it.  

And you only need to find a few.  

Yes, you need to talk to more than a few to find that few. But just long enough to learn what they do to see if they might be a good match for you.  

Find a few of the right people and they can lead you to more.  

To start, commit to getting to know your clients better than you do now. Call or email them off the clock, say hello and ask how they’re doing. Don’t be surprised when they’re glad you called and ask you about a new legal matter or tell you about someone they know who might need your help.  

If that happens, enjoy the win. But don’t contact them solely for that purpose. Contact them to say hello. 

Heres a step-by-step plan for growing your professional family

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Run

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Building a business or law practice, especially from scratch, is best done quickly.

If you want to build yours, run, don’t walk. Sprint, don’t jog.

Here’s why:

  • Building fast gives you less time to think and more time to do. Once you have some sound marketing strategies in place, spend most of your time executing those strategies, not refining your plans or making new ones.
  • Building quickly means you’ll talk to more people, create more content, get more subscribers, do more presentations, and so on. You’ll have more opportunities to find things that work and get better at doing them.
  • Building quickly allows you to compress time, that is, to do in minutes what might otherwise take hours, by finding ways to do things faster and by productively using the spaces between activities that are often wasted.
  • Moving quickly forces you to adopt routines and simple daily activities, which are the building blocks for success.
  • Whether you are new or seasoned, the faster you move, the sooner you find bigger cases and/or better clients and referral sources (and employees), which lead to compound growth as first time clients become repeat clients and referrals lead to more referrals.
  • Moving quickly allows you to create personal momentum. You get faster (and better) at what you do, delivering more outcomes to more clients and bringing in more revenue and more success stories, which leads to more of the same.
  • Moving quickly allows you to discover flaws and eliminate them, make mistakes and fix them, and get better at what you do.
  • Fast is exciting, and excitement is contagious. You’ll be perceived in the marketplace as someone who is going places and doing things and attract people who recognize your pace and energy and want to work with you.

Don’t confuse “fast” with “busy”. They aren’t the same thing. Being busy doesn’t necessarily mean being productive.

You can build quickly even if you aren’t particularly busy. But only if when you work, you run.

How to build your practice bigger, faster

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How to get 4 articles out of one idea

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Leverage is my name. Content my game. If you want to play this game, behold a simple way to turn one idea for an article or blog post, video or podcast, into 4.

Choose a subject. It doesn’t matter what it is—anything you know something about. It can be as simple as “torts” or “trusts” or “the rule against perpetuities” (JK).

If you’re not sure, choose something at random.

Once you’ve got a subject, write down ways you could write about that subject based on these 4 categories:

  1. Actionable (How to Do X, How I Do X)
  2. Inspirational (You Can Do X, You Can Get X)
  3. Analytical (How X Works, The Details, The Steps)
  4. Explanatory (Why it Works This Way, How Things Used to Be, What I’d Like to See Changed About X)

Let’s say you decide to write about “negligence”. Your 4 articles might be:

  1. Actionable: How to Represent Yourself in Small Claims Court, 3 Things I Always Do Before I File a Lawsuit, How to Maximize the Value of Your Case
  2. Inspirational: You May be Entitled to A and B and C, How I won a ‘Lost’ Case, What Happened When My Client Tripped and Fell and Thought it Was His Fault
  3. Analytical: How Damages are Calculated, What You Need to Prove to Win Your Case, What is The Reasonable Person Standard?
  4. Explanatory: How Our System Developed (and Why), How to Improve Our System, Why Legal Expenses Are So High

Hold on. We’re not done.

I promised you 4 articles out of one idea, but you can use these categories to dig deeper into your subject and come up with even more ideas.

For example, if you plan to write about why legal expenses and lawyers’ fees are so high, you might come up with 4 (more) articles:

  1. Actionable: Five Ways to Reduce Your Legal Fees
  2. Inspirational: How My Client Built an 8-Figure Business Without Spending a Fortune on Lawyers
  3. Analytical: What I Spend Each Month Just to Keep My Doors Open
  4. Explanatory: Why Hiring a ‘Low Cost’ Lawyer Costs You More, Not Less

And thus, one idea may lead to dozens.

If you find yourself unable to come up a subject to write about, instead of racing around wildly searching for ideas, take something you deal with every day and know well, extrapolate concepts related to it (based on these 4 categories) and come up with 4 (or more) ideas, not one.

Love means never having to say you’re sorry; leverage means never having to say “I don’t know what to write about”.

More ways to get ideas to write about

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Clone your best. Forget the rest.

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No doubt you have a favorite referral source or two. You know who I’m talking about. The ones who regularly send you good clients and cases. The ones who introduce you to people you need to know and do other things to help your practice grow.

They’re low maintenance, highly profitable, and you wish you had more like them.

Seek and ye shall find.

Instead of trying to meet “anyone” who can refer business, set your sites on cloning your best referral sources. It’s better to have a few studs than dozens of people who might try but can’t deliver.

The most effective way to increase referrals is to focus on your existing referral sources.

Get to know them better. Learn about their niche. Meet the people they know and work with. They’ll lead you to more referral sources and opportunities.

This will require time and energy, which is why you should focus on a handful of people who have already proven themselves rather than the many who haven’t.

Invest 80% of your “networking” and relationship-building time with your best sources.

You may not be able to reciprocate with referrals, but there are other ways you help them. You might have information they want or need, do other things for them or their clients or family, or introduce them to people who can.

Help them prosper and they’ll do (more of) the same for you.

How to get more referrals from lawyers and business contacts

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You only need a few

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Clients come and go. They pay us for our services and we may never hear from them again, even if they’re thrilled with our work.

They may return, they may refer, but as a whole, they are an unreliable asset. Treat them well, be there when they need you, stay in touch with them, but don’t count on them to do anything more than pay your bill.

Unless they show themselves to be among the precious few clients (and professional contacts) who can truly be described as a fan.

A fan is someone who promotes you, your services, your content, and your events. Someone who is not only willing to send you business but goes out of their way to do that, because they like you and appreciate you and want to help you.

They join your list and read everything you write. They share your content and send traffic to your blog. They praise you publicly, through reviews and testimonials, and privately, by telling people all about you.

When you recognize a fan, pay attention. Remember their name, take their calls, find out all about them and their business, and go out of your way to help them, and not just with legal services. Find out what they want or need in their business or personal life and help them get it.

Give your fans more attention than regular clients and contacts. Invite them into your inner circle and stay close to them.

Because they are your future. They can help your practice not just grow but multiply.

Fans will attract more fans, lead you to opportunities and opportunities to you. They are also a reminder that what you do is important.

Clients come and go. Fans are rare. But you only need a few.

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Big shots focus on the big picture

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You are a leader. Even if you are a one-person band, you are the guiding force in your practice or career.

You should do what leaders do.

You should spend most of your time and energy focused on big picture strategies that help you achieve your goals.

Most lawyers don’t. Most lawyers spend their days doing client work and mundane tasks, not building for the future.

Leaders lead. They choose the destination, the tactics and tools, and create an atmosphere that attracts and supports others who accompany them.

Leaders focus on

  • Strategic planning
  • Casting vision
  • Creating culture
  • Building relationships
  • Improving reputation
  • Professional development
  • Personal growth

The leader understands that the firm delivers professional services, but is also a business and must be profitable. The leader continually seeks ways to increase revenue and decrease expenses, to ensure the firm’s viability and future growth.

The leader prefers to grow the business by hiring new people, creating new marketing alliances, and expanding into new markets rather than putting in more hours.

Yes, someone has to see the clients, draft the documents, and win the cases. Sometimes the leader does that. Sometimes the leader delegates much of that to their team. Sometimes the leader delegates all of that to their team while they focus on the big picture.

As you look at this list, think about how you spend your time and ask yourself how much of it you spend doing what leaders do.

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