Is it better to find clients or help them find you? Okay, I know which of these options you prefer. You want clients to find you, call you, and hire you.

You want to put up a website and have people find it, on their own, without any prompting by you. You want them to become enamored by what they see and call you to hire you or take the next step.

You want to be a fisherman, putting hooks in the water and letting the fish find them. You don’t want to be a hunter, finding prey and taking it down.

You want to advertise. Or write articles for someone else’s publication, or speak at someone else’s event. You want your clients and other professionals to recognize your greatness and tell their friends and clients about you.

Who doesn’t?

In marketing professional services, posture is important. You don’t want to knock on doors, you want clients to knock on yours. You want clients to see you as important and successful. You don’t want them to think you need them.

So make “clients finding you” your priority.

But. . . don’t turn up your nose at the idea of you finding clients.

Besides, what exactly does that mean?

When you network with prospective clients, are you finding them or are you giving them the opportunity to find you? When you friend or follow a prospective client on social media, are you finding them or allowing them to find you?

Want to know what I think? I think it’s a bunch of semantics and, as Rick said to Ilsa, “it don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” Letting clients find you is great. But finding clients is not a bad thing.

Your number one marketing method? Referrals.

Would you be willing to ignore thousands of prospective clients in exchange for an audience of hundreds of prospective “ideal” clients?

Yes? Good. You understand marketing.

You know that in a vast, undifferentiated mass market, you need to focus.

You know it’s foolish and expensive to try to appeal to everyone. And it’s smart and profitable to craft a finely-tailored message to a select group of prospective clients whom you have identified as ideal for you and your practice.

You know that “law” is not a specialty. You know that your ideal client prefers (and will seek out and pay more for) the lawyer who specializes. You also know that they favor the lawyer who specializes in their niche, industry, or demographic group.

You know they want to work with a lawyer who understands them and has experience with clients like them. Your ideal client doesn’t want a lawyer who does everything, for anyone. They want you.

Of course you also know that marketing is much easier when you focus on niche markets. You know your expenses are less, your results are bigger and come sooner, your clients pay more and argue less, and you get lots of word of mouth referrals.

That’s what makes ideal clients ideal.

But your lawyer friends don’t want to hear this. They’re afraid that if they focus, they’ll lose business. So they pretend it’s not true and continue to waive a giant flag that says “call us, we’re lawyers” and wonder why they can’t compete with lawyers who focus.

No, your lawyer friends don’t get this, but that’s okay. You do. And you can get rich while they stubbornly compete with thousands of new lawyers who enter their market each year and fight with them for clients who are anything but ideal.

Do them a solid. Tell them what I’ve told you and taught you. Send them to me and let me enlighten them. Most won’t listen. But hey, you can still be friends.

Here’s how to focus so you can earn more and work less

I played a lot of poker in college. I wasn’t necessarily a great player but I usually won because I got a few things right.

One thing I got good at was bluffing. Poker teaches you that you don’t have to have “the goods” (the best hand) to win the pot, as long as the other players think you do. In a law practice, we call that “faking it” until you make it.

You can get clients and win cases if you sound like you know what you’re doing, even when you don’t. But like poker, you can’t bluff all the time. If you do it too much, you’ll eventually get caught.

Do what you have to do as a new lawyer to get your practice started, but get some help when you’re in over your head. And whatever you do, make sure your clients don’t know how much you don’t know.

Poker also taught me that you don’t have to always win the big pots to win the game. You can do nicely by winning a preponderance of small to medium-size hands and letting the other players fight over the long shots. Some players in our game went hard after the biggest pots and while they sometimes won them, their net for the night was often a big loss.

By contrast, I almost always walked away from the table a winner. I did the same thing in my law career, focusing on small to medium-sized cases. They didn’t bring me many of the biggest pots, but I didn’t have any great losses, either.

The biggest thing poker taught me about marketing is that you don’t have to be a great player, you just have to be better than the other players at the table. Apparently, that’s how I was able to do so well.

In building a law practice, you may have a large number of competitors, but most of them aren’t very good at marketing. You can beat them by getting good at a few key marketing strategies. If you’re a little better at getting referrals, for example, you can become a “top player” in your market.

You can let others spend big on advertising and chase the big prizes while you consistently go home a winner.

The best way to get good at getting referrals