Some marketing goofball tells you to create a description of your ideal client. You sit down to do that and come up with some ideas.

You want clients with lots of money and lots of legal problems. Or you want clients who know a lot of other people with legal problems. Or you want clients who are easy to get along with and readily follow your advice.

Or you want all of the above.

You go through the exercise and make a long list of things you want and some you don’t want. You describe their industry or occupation, their market or niche, and other demographics.

Eventually, you come up with a profile. “There, that’s my ideal client.”

Very nice. Now you can optimize your marketing to attract more of these perfect specimens.

Sounds like a plan.

But there’s another plan you might want to follow, especially if you’re not sure what you want or how to describe them. Maybe you’re new to all this, or maybe you’re still not convinced you need to spend time on this exercise.

Fortunately, there’s another way you can go about this.

Sit down with a list or database of your current or former clients and point to the ones you consider your best clients. Your favorites.

Who paid or pays you the most? Who has the most work for you? Who sends you the most referrals, the biggest and best cases, or the work you most enjoy doing?

Don’t think too much. Go with your gut. And then narrow your list to no more than 30.

Pretend that marketing goof asked, “If you could only have 30 clients and would have to farm out everyone else, who would you choose?“

Once you have your list, study it and the people and/or businesses on it, and reverse engineer it.

What do these clients have in common in terms of industry or market, needs or wants, demographics, or other identifiable characteristics?

How did they find you? Why did they choose you? What do they like about you and what do you like about them?

Write down what you see and you have a profile of your ideal client.

Later, you can add to or modify that profile, to add different markets, practice areas, or other descriptors.

But you might not need to do that. Because you’ve already got a great list of clients you want to clone.

How to choose your ideal client and target market