If you had to choose, would you choose more clients or better clients? Quantity or quality?
There are benefits to having a lot of clients:
- More opportunities to learn and improve your skills
- More opportunities to test different approaches and strategies (marketing, client relations, promotions, etc.
- More clients mean more people contributing to overhead
- Protection from loss. If you lose a few clients, you’ll have others to fill the gap.
- More opportunities for repeat business, referrals, and introductions to other professionals
- More opportunities to grow with small clients who become big clients
On the other hand, more clients mean more risks. More opportunities to make mistakes, more people clamoring for your attention, more people who might be unhappy and file a complaint or leave a bad review. There’s also more competition for smaller clients from the majority of lawyers who focus on them.
Well, how about the benefits that come with quality?
- Bigger cases or clients means higher margins; you earn more per case or client
- Higher profits allows you to deliver more value to each client, earning their repeat business and referrals
- Better clients have more work for you; you don’t have to do additional outside marketing to get it
- Better clients means referrals and introductions to better prospective clients
- Better clients make it easier to build your reputation and stand out from the crowd
- Leverage: one client could provide you with ten times the revenue of one new average client
- Potential for more interesting work
But better clients aren’t all sunshine and lollipops. Lose one big client and your income could drop precipitously. Bigger clients aren’t as easy to replace. Bigger clients can be more demanding and more expensive to serve (more staff, better office, bigger overhead).
So, if the question is quantity or quality, what’s the answer?
How about “both”. How about a quantity of better clients and bigger cases?
That’s the goal. Getting there is a process.
When you’re starting out, you take what you can get. Later, you replace smaller clients with bigger and better ones and reject or refer smaller cases.
Your client mix changes over time as you continually work to increase revenue, lower costs, and increase profits. And it never stops. You never find the perfect balance because as soon as you get to a certain level you’ll want to get to the next one.
The only constant is constant change. Managing that is why you earn the big bucks.
Learn how to choose your target market and ideal client
