Looking for clients in all the wrong places

December 11, 2017 by
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When you’re new, starting to build a practice, you do everything and anything to bring in business. If you’re still doing that after you’ve been around awhile, you’re missing the boat.

When you’re new, the objective is to build a client base. Once you do that, that base of existing and former clients, prospective clients, and professional contacts you’ve made along the way is your best source of new business.

I’m not saying you should stop networking or advertising or creating content. I’m saying it shouldn’t be your main focus.

Focus on retaining existing clients. Keep them happy. Get them to hire you again. Make it easy for them to refer.

Focus on getting existing and former clients to hire you again and buy your other services. If you don’t have other services they need, promote the services of other professionals you know and ask them to do the same for you.

Focus on converting prospects into clients. Offer them an introductory deal they can’t refuse and if they’re not ready, stay in touch with them until they are.

Focus on getting your professional contacts to refer more often and to introduce you to their colleagues.

Focus on building stronger relationships with influential people you know, and new relationships with the people they know.

Focus on the people who already know, like, and trust you, instead of trying to convince strangers to take a chance.

Why do most attorneys focus elsewhere? Because they hear that it’s important to continually generate more leads, build a bigger social media following, network more, advertise more, speak and write more, so that’s what they do.

If that’s you, you’re working too hard. Stop acting like you’re new. All of the clients you could want, and more, are right in front of you.

If you want a simple marketing plan, get this

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Filed Under: Leverage, Marketing legal services

You’re smart enough but are you lazy enough?

October 10, 2017 by
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You know I’m a fan of the book, “The 80/20 Principle” by Richard Koch. He wrote a sequel, “Living the 80/20 Way: Work Less, Worry Less, Succeed More, Enjoy More. In it, Koch quotes General Erich von Manstein, an officer in the German army, speaking about leadership:

“There are only four types of officers.

First, there are the lazy, stupid ones. Leave them alone, they do no harm.

Second, there are the hard-working intelligent ones. They make excellent staff officers, ensuring that every detail is properly considered.

Third, there are the hard-working, stupid ones. These people are a menace, and must be fired at once. They create irrelevant work for everybody.

Finally, there are the intelligent lazy ones. They are suited for the highest office.”

Different versions of this citation have appeared, sometimes attributing the quote to others. In 1942 Viscount Swinton (Philip Lloyd-Greame) spoke in the House of Lords in London. He described the four classes of officers and credited an unnamed German General:

The clever and lazy you make Chief of Staff, because he will not try to do everybody else’s work, and will always have time to think.

What does this tell us? I think it tells us that maybe we are too industrious for our own good. Maybe we need to do less work and more thinking. Maybe we need to delegate more work to hard-working intelligent people who will take care of the details while we take care of the big picture.

I’m going to take some time to think about this. How about you?

Behold: an easier way to get more referrals from other professionals

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Filed Under: Leverage, success Tagged With:

Live, from your office. . .

October 2, 2017 by
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The other day I recommended not relying solely on live presentations but to record them so they can go to work for you 24/7.

It’s leverage. Do it once, use it over and over again.

But don’t stop doing live presentations.

I don’t just mean “live and in person”. I mean live online. Podcasts, hangouts, chats, webinars, and so on, that are presented in real time. There’s magic in something done live.

When you promote a recorded video, it’s harder to create a sense of urgency. You can say, “This will only be available until. . .” but you then lose the ability to get eyeballs on an ongoing basis. If you leave it up all the time, many people say, “I’ll catch it later,” but we all know that later often never comes.

When you do it live, however, you can promote it as a special event because it is special. You can say, or more likely imply “Never before and never again,” has this been done, creating an even bigger sense of urgency.

When it’s live, you can say, “Join me” or “Ask me anything” and thus provide more value and build a closer relationship with your followers. Or you can promote it by saying you’re presenting some new or timely information that shouldn’t be missed.

One of the biggest draws of a live event is that nobody knows what will happen. What will be said, what will be asked, what information will be shared for the first time? And let’s face it, one reason people watch live events is that they know it could be a train wreck and they want to see that.

One way to make your live events have more train-wreck potential is to have someone else speak with you. If you have a co-presenter, a panel discussion, you interview someone or have someone interview you, the likelihood of something noteworthy or cringeworthy happening is even greater. (You’ll also get the other speakers’ followers to tune in.)

Do some live events and watch your subscriber numbers and engagement soar. Of course, you should also record these events so you can use them again or make them available 24/7. But you might not want to mention that you’re recording it when you promote it for the first time.

Let your website do the heavy lifting: Marketing online for attorneys

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Filed Under: Blogging, Leverage, List building, Marketing legal services, Online Marketing, Presentations, Seminars and webinars

If I could save time in a bottle

September 29, 2017 by
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If I could save time in a bottle. . . I’d sell it. I mean, who wouldn’t want to buy more time? More time with your family. More time for hobbies or worthy causes, more time get more work done.

How much would like to buy?

Unfortunately, I can’t sell you any time. But I can show you how to get it for yourself.

The first way to get more time is to steal it. Steal it from what you’re currently doing by taking on fewer tasks and projects or fewer cases and clients, and focusing on a smaller number of more valuable matters. Delegate less valuable work to others.

The second way to get more time is to get your work done more quickly. You can do that by improving your skills and knowledge, learning new skills and methods, using better tools, and developing better habits and workflows. Delegating work to others will also help.

The third way to get more time is to specialize in your practice areas and in the clients you target. This will allow you to charge higher fees and attract more clients (and better clients) who prefer attorneys who specialize.

The fourth way to steal time is through marketing, which will allow you to bring in bigger cases and clients, and allow you to hire more help.

Even better, instead of “one and done” marketing activities, do things that can bring in new business with little or no additional effort. Instead of only doing live presentations or seminars, for example, record them so they can go to work for you 24/7. Instead of networking to find clients, network to find more referral sources.

All of these will give you more time and more income. I know, because this is what I did to build my practice when I was struggling.

Work on fewer more valuable things, become more efficient, specialize, and get better at marketing. That’s how I was able to earn more and work less, and that’s how you can, too.

How I did it: the formula

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Filed Under: Leverage, Marketing legal services, Productivity, Specializing

Put this in your pipe and smoke it

June 26, 2017 by
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Suppose I am a notary who works near you. I call you and offer to provide my services to your clients for a few hours each week, at no cost to you or your clients.

Interested?

You can promote this as an added benefit to your clients. You can put “free notary services” in your advertising and on your website and attract more prospective clients.

And it won’t cost you a dime.

I’m willing to do it because it lets me introduce my services to lots of new clients.

Do we have a deal?

Okay, you like the idea but you’re not getting calls from notaries offering this.

Well, you could ask someone in your office to take the class and become a notary, or you could do it yourself. That’s good, but how about thinking bigger?

How about picking up the phone and calling some notaries, to see if they like the idea of getting some free exposure. Why is this better than doing it yourself?

Because some of their notary clients will need legal services.

And there you are.

Many real estate agents are notaries, and open to a bit of creative marketing. Or you might partner up with a real estate attorney who has a notary in the office (assuming you don’t compete with them). Accountants, escrow officers, mortgage brokers, and banks also have notaries.

If free notary services doesn’t work for your practice, find something that does.

Make a list of the types of professionals and small businesses that target the same clients you target. Contact them and see if they have a free or discounted service you could offer to your clients. Or a free consultation. Or free information.

Then, see if you can do the same for their clients.

Are you picking up what I’m laying down?

More ways to work smarter

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Filed Under: Leverage, Marketing legal services Tagged With: ,

Know, like, trust, rinse, repeat

December 9, 2016 by
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You’ve heard it before: “All things being equal, clients prefer to hire attorneys they know, like, and trust”.

You need all three but let’s take a minute and talk about “know”.

In a sense, it is the easiest of the three because it is the simplest. The more people who know you, the more clients you are likely to get. Assuming you are reasonably likable and trustworthy, getting more people to know you is the 20% activity that brings you 80% of your results.

Note that it’s not necessarily how many people you know, it’s how many people know you. How many recognize your name? How many people who go looking for an attorney will find you?

It’s called exposure.

One of the best ways to get more exposure is to leverage the contacts of influential people in your target market.

Centers of interest in your community. Professionals, executives, business owners. People who run blogs and video channels. Authors, consultants, and sales people who write for, sell to, or advise people in your target market.

They can give you direct referrals. They can publish your guest post on their blog or in their newsletter. They can interview you for their podcast or video channel. They can promote your seminar, become an affiliate for your book or course, and promote your free report to their subscribers.

They can give you exposure to a large number of prospective clients. Even better, they can influence them to follow you and hire you. When they promote you, or even just mention you to their clients, readers, and contacts, they are impliedly endorsing you.

That’s the best kind of exposure you can get.

Do yourself a favor and get to know more people like that. Start by asking your existing professional contacts to introduce you to other professionals in their line of work.

You still have work to do with these new contacts but the most important part is done. Thanks to your mutual friend, they now know you. They’ll take your call and reply to your email. You’re on your way to getting their contacts to know, like, and trust you.

How to get referrals and other help from attorneys and other professionals: here

 

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Filed Under: Leverage, Referrals Tagged With:

Can you really earn more by working less?

November 16, 2016 by
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We’ve all been taught that more is better so how is it that some people earn more and achieve more by working less?

They do it by choosing the right things to do.

The most successful among us focus on doing things that allow them to take giant leaps instead of incremental steps. The kinds of things that let them leverage their resources and get “eighty percent results with twenty percent effort”.

It’s not that they ignore the little things. It’s that at any given moment, they’re able to zero in on the one thing they can do that will give them the most bang for their buck.

Real estate entrepreneur, Gary Keller, made this the theme of his bestselling book, The ONE Thing. He says that we can become much more successful by finding and doing the one thing (activity, task, decision, etc.) that can allow us to achieve extraordinary results.

Keller suggests that we look at our goals and for each one, ask, “What’s the ‘ONE Thing’ [I] can do such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”

If your goal is to bring in ten new clients per month within 90 days, for example, out of all the things you MIGHT do, you should find and do the one thing that is likely to make it most likely that you will achieve that goal.

Start by brainstorming possibilities. You’ll probably think of hundreds of ideas, and if you don’t, read through my blog and courses. Put your list aside for a few days, come back to it and look for your ‘one thing’.

You may reason your way to a decision, but it is just as likely that your “gut” will tell you. If you’re not sure, go through your list slowly, think about each idea and see how you feel about it. If it feels good to think about it, if you find yourself getting excited about it, the odds are that’s what you should choose.

Your ‘one thing’ will likely be different than any other lawyer’s. You might decide that your one thing is to hire someone to create a new website for you. Another lawyer might decide that his or her one thing is to meet prospective new referral sources. Someone else may decide that advertising is the right thing for them.

All of these things, and others, might help you reach your goal, but you should consider them later. Right now,  you should find your one thing and do it.

Your website can bring you a lot of new clients

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Filed Under: Leverage, success Tagged With: , , ,

You don’t have time? What if you did?

October 27, 2016 by
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Fill in the blank: “I don’t have time to do ___________ [something that would be good for you. How about writing a weekly newsletter?]

Okay, play a little game with me. You say you don’t have time to write a newsletter? Well, what if you did?

What could happen?

What if your newsletter brought you five new clients every month? Take a moment to imagine what that would be like.

Now, how long do you think it would take you to write a weekly email newsletter? 30 minutes a week? An hour?

Let’s say you get paid $500 an hour. And let’s say a new client is worth $3,000 to you. So you would invest $2,000 per month writing your newsletter and bring in $15,000 in new business. Would that be worth it? Could you find the time to write a newsletter if it would increase your income by $12,000 per month?

Numbers don’t work for you? Adjust them If you don’t think you could possibly bring in five new clients per month, how about two? You don’t earn $500 an hour? Okay, ratchet down the cost. An average client is worth $8,000 to you? Bump up the income side of the equation.

When you do this exercise, you may realize that you can’t afford to not write a newsletter.

Look at it another way–if you’re doing billable work instead of writing a newsletter, you’re losing money.

Make sense?

So cut out a few hours of billable work if you have to, to make time for your newsletter. Or work an extra hour per week. Or how about this–hire someone to do most of the newsletter for you. Or hire someone to do some of the billable work you say is keeping you so busy.

When you start with what’s possible (i.e., five new clients each month), it changes your perspective. Or at least it should. You don’t have time to do something? What if you did?

Earn more without working more by working smarter, not harder

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Filed Under: Leverage, Marketing legal services

Working hard or hardly working?

September 15, 2016 by
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All our lives we’ve been told that hard work is essential to success. The person who works harder than other people generally achieves more than other people.

But is that always true? Does someone who earns a million dollars a year work ten times more than someone who earns $100k? What about people who work incredibly long hours every day but continually struggle?

We’ve also been told that there are no shortcuts to success. It doesn’t happen overnight. Okay, then how do you explain the many tech entrepreneurs who are billionaires before they’re 30?

I don’t purport to have all the answers but clearly, there isn’t an absolute causal connection between effort and results, hard work and success. There are other factors at play. That’s why I continually look for ways to work smarter.

Working smarter is about leverage. Getting bigger (or quicker) results with the same or less effort. Fortunately, there are lots of ways to do that.

You frequently hear me prattle on about the 80/20 principle. I do that because it is the quintessential illustration of leverage and I encourage you to continually look for ways to use it to increase your income and improve your life.

Where does most of your income come, for example? The odds are that a high percentage of it comes from a few things you’re doing, the so-called “20% activities that deliver 80% of your results”. Look at your practice area(s), target market(s), and marketing methods. You’re likely to see that most of your income comes from a “precious few” things, not from the “trivial many”.

When you find your precious few, do more of them. Get rid of other things to free up time and resources so that you can make that happen.

If 80% of your income now comes from one or two marketing activities, for example, doing more of those activities could increase your income by 160%. That’s because you’ll have two blocks of 20% activities instead of just one.

Back when I was a cub lawyer, struggling to figure things out, I made three changes to what I was doing and my income skyrocketed. In a matter of months. I also went from working six days a week to just three.

So nobody can tell me there aren’t any shortcuts. Now, if you will excuse me, it’s time for my nap.

How I learned to earn more and work less. Yep, it’s all here

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Filed Under: Leverage, Productivity, success Tagged With: ,

Why you should spy on other lawyers

May 16, 2016 by
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If I ask you to name a lawyer you admire whom would that be? Maybe you admire their lawyering skills or their marketing acumen or the way they run their office. Maybe you know them and are impressed with their interpersonal skills.

Write down the names of lawyers you would like to emulate and then set up a file for each. Add notes about what you see them doing. Study their website. Search for articles about them and add them to your file. Find their ads or marketing documents and add those, too.

Study them so you can get ideas and inspiration and model their behavior.

What do they do differently from other lawyers, including yourself? What do they do that other lawyers don’t?

Study attorneys in your practice area and in other practice areas. Study some attorneys for their marketing prowess, and others for their speaking or writing or courtroom skills.

Find attorneys who are good at marketing online and digest their websites and blogs. How are they organized? What kind of content do they write? How often do they post? Study their headlines, bullet points, and calls to action. Do they publish a newsletter? Subscribe to it and see what they send to their list.

Study their social media platforms. Observe how often the post and how they engage with their connections.

You might study another set of lawyers about how they manage their practice. Study their fees and billing and payment options. Study their office hours and parking policy.

If you admire attorneys for their speaking and writing abilities, read what they write, find where they are speaking and show up to listen. To study trial lawyers, you might reach out to them, compliment them, and find out if you can attend their next trial.

As you do this, no doubt you’ll get a lot of ideas. You’ll also find inspiration as you realize that you can do what they do. Don’t accept everything as gospel, however. They may be successful not because of what they do but in spite of it.

The biggest benefit of this exercise is that you may find out how much you’re doing that is as good or better than what they do.

You’ll be inspired to keep doing it, and someday, other lawyers will study you.

Marketing is easier when you know the formula

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Filed Under: Law office management, Leverage, Marketing legal services Tagged With:
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