One of my favorite books is The 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch. In it, Koch makes the case first articulated as The Pareto Principle, that “a minority of causes, inputs, or effort usually lead to a majority of the results, outputs, or rewards”.
The idea is that as much as 80% of your results may come from 20% of your effort. In the context of practicing law, that might mean that 20% of your clients produce 80% of your income. The actual numbers, however, aren’t necessarily 80/20. They might be 90/30, 60/20, or 55/5. The point is that some things we do bring results that are disproportionate to our effort and that it behooves us to look for those things and do more of them.
Koch says, “Few people take objectives really seriously. They put average effort into too many things, rather than superior thought and effort into a few important things. People who achieve the most are selective as well as determined.”
We’re talking about focus. About doing more of what works and less of what doesn’t. About using leverage to earn more without working more.
Look at your practice and tell me what you see.
- Practice areas: Are you a Jack or Jill of all trades or a master of one? Are you good at many things or outstanding at one or two?
- Clients: Do you target anyone who needs what you do or a very specifically defined “ideal client” who can hire you more often, pay higher fees, and refer others like themselves who can do the same?
- Services: Do you offer low fee/low margin services because they contribute something to overhead or do you keep your overhead low and maximize profits?
- Fees: Do you trade your time for dollars or do you get paid commensurate with the value you deliver?
- Marketing: Do you do too many things that produce no results, or modest results, or one or two things that bring in the bulk of your new business?
- Time: Do you do too much yourself, or do you delegate as much as possible and do “only that which only you can do”?
- Work: Do you do everything from scratch or do you save time, reduce errors, and increase speed by using forms, checklists, and templates?
Leverage is the key to the 80/20 principle. It is the key to getting more done with less effort and to earning more without working more.
Take inventory of where you are today. If you’re not on track to meeting your goals, if you are working too hard and earning too little, the answer may be to do less of most things, the “trivial many,” as Koch defines them, so you can do more of the “precious few”.
My course, The Attorney Marketing Formula, can help you.
