How much is your time really worth?

On my walk yesterday, I heard a doctor being interviewed on the radio. He was talking about his book. It was a one-hour interview and I wondered how much income he was giving up by not seeing patients during that time. 

When I got home, I checked the books ranking and saw that he was selling a ton of books. I guessed he probably earned $500 to $1,000 for the day. 

Was that a typical day or was there a spike in sales from his appearance on the radio?

Actually, it doesn’t matter. 

The book is clearly getting him a lot of exposure, and that exposure will bring him a lot of patients, and other opportunities to be interviewed. 

Promoting his book allows him to leverage his time and earn far more than he would have earned seeing patients for an hour.  

Which is how attorneys should think about all of their marketing. 

The hour you spend with a prospective referral source, for example, might open doors to an incalculable influx of new clients. Two hours invested in writing content for your website might lead to picking up a new client every month.

No, you don’t know if what you’re doing will work, or how well. You keep doing it, trusting that some things will work well enough to make it all worthwhile. 

In fact, if you keep doing “it” (marketing) long enough and consistently enough, you may eventually reach a tipping point where your practice starts growing at an accelerated rate. 

When that happens, when you’re bringing in more business than you can handle and your income is doubling and tripling, you won’t ask yourself if all that time you spent marketing was worth it.  You’ll ask yourself why you didn’t do more of it. 

The New Year is around the corner. Do you have a  marketing plan?