How to upgrade your client list

January 30, 2020 by
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Go through your current client list. Look at the numbers: how much did each client pay you over the last year and over their lifetime?

How much are they likely to pay you in the next few years?

Some clients might not have a lot of work for you but may send you a lot of referrals.

Add this to your numbers.

You should see that some of your clients (and cases) are worth a lot more to you than others.

Let’s call those “high value” clients.

Everyone else is either “average” or “low value”.

Study your numbers. You should see some patterns.

You should see that a large percentage of your total revenue comes from a small percentage of your client list.

Maybe 80/20, maybe a different ratio, but you should find that “a precious few” of your clients and cases bring in a disproportionate amount of your income.

Obviously, you want more of this type of client or case.

One way to get them is to reduce the number of low value clients, and also perhaps many of the “average” clients, to free up your time and other resources so you can focus on attracting more high value clients.

How do you “reduce” the number of low value clients in order to do that?

You could increase your fees. That’s the easiest way to do it. If it doesn’t, keep raising them until it does.

You could ask for bigger retainers. Reject cases with smaller damages. “Fire” clients who slow pay or who are “more trouble than they’re worth”.

I know, the idea makes perfect sense to you but it also makes you nervous. So you’re unlikely to go “cold turkey”. You don’t want to let go of low value clients until you see more high value clients coming your way.

Okay. Go through your list and study the high value clients you identified.

Where did they come from? What marketing methods did you use to attract them? Did they find you through search? Referral? Ads? Did they hear your presentation or meet you at an event?

Who are their colleagues, clients, friends or neighbors? Who do they know who might have legal needs or know people who do?

Then, get busy.

You might not be ready to let go of (all) low value clients just yet but there’s something you can do. You can stop marketing to them.

From this day forward, focus exclusively on marketing to your high value clients.

This will help

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Filed Under: Increase your income, Marketing legal services Tagged With: ,

Frustrated, overwhelmed and disillusioned

April 26, 2019 by
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Somethings wrong. You’re working hard but spinning your wheels. You’re stressed out and you don’t know what you’re doing wrong.

Am I incompetent? An imposter? A fool?

Maybe. But probably not. That’s probably your frustration, overwhelm, and disillusionment talking.

More likely, you’re simply trying to do too much.

I’ve been there. Early in my practice. Ready to pull my hair out because I was working hard but not making any money.

I hadn’t heard about The Pareto Principle–the 80/20 rule–and the power of doing less to accomplish more.

But something told me I had to start taking things off my plate, and I did.

I eliminated or delegated things that weren’t working (or that I hated), no matter how “promising” they seemed or how much I wanted them to work, and freed up time and mental energy to do the few things that were actually working.

The “20% activities that produce 80% of your results”.

What happened? Besides being scared to death that I was cutting out too much and doing too little, my income went up.

Because I was focusing on (and getting good at) a few things, instead of trying to do “everything”.

I was earning more and working less.

One of the things I focused on was marketing. Ah, but not all kinds of marketing. I focused on a few strategies. One of these was learning how to bring in more referrals.

You can learn how to do that, here

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

Who says there are no shortcuts?

September 10, 2015 by
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Some say there are no shortcuts. You must do the work and put in the time. There are no shortcuts in life.

Balderdash.

Of course there are shortcuts. Untold numbers of shortcuts. Everywhere we look and everything we do there are shortcuts.

Law school is a shortcut. Imagine having to prepare yourself to practice law without it. A bar preparation course is a shortcut. In fact, every class, course, or book, is a (potential) shortcut. You learn what others know and what they did, so you can avoid their mistakes and follow their path to success.

A franchise is a shortcut. So is a network marketing business.

Do you (or did you) have another lawyer mentor you? That’s a shortcut.

Form books, checklists email templates, are shortcuts.

I dictated this post with dictation software. Yep, a shortcut.

The 80/20 principle says that in just about everything we do, a small percentage of our activities or effort produce a disproportionate percentage of our results. Do more of those activities (and less of the others) and you will have a shortcut to achieving more.

So if someone tells you there are no shortcuts, don’t listen to them. Shortcuts are everywhere and we use them all the time. Do you want a shortcut to success? Go find more shortcuts.

Want a shortcut to getting more clients and increasing your income? click here

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Filed Under: Personal development, Productivity, Time Management Tagged With: , ,

Getting the right things done

July 28, 2015 by
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Venture capitalist Mark Suster has a rule he lives by that helps him be more productive and successful. The rule: “Do Less. More.” It means doing fewer things overall, and getting the right things done. “Success often comes from doing a few things extraordinarily well and noticeably better than the competition,” he says.

Richard Koch, author of The 80/20 Principle, says, “Everyone can achieve something significant. The key is not effort, but finding the right thing to achieve. You are hugely more productive at some things than at others, but dilute the effectiveness of this by doing too many things where your comparative skill is nowhere near as good.”

Koch also says, “Few people take objectives really seriously. They put average effort into too many things, rather than superior thought and effort into a few important things. People who achieve the most are selective as well as determined.”

So, what do you do better than most? What should you focus on? I asked this question in an earlier post:

Look at your practice and tell me what you see.

  • Practice areas: Are you a Jack or Jill of all trades or a master of one? Are you good at many things or outstanding at one or two?
  • Clients: Do you target anyone who needs what you do or a very specifically defined “ideal client” who can hire you more often, pay higher fees, and refer others like themselves who can do the same?
  • Services: Do you offer low fee/low margin services because they contribute something to overhead or do you keep your overhead low and maximize profits?
  • Fees: Do you trade your time for dollars or do you get paid commensurate with the value you deliver?
  • Marketing: Do you do too many things that produce no results, or modest results, or one or two things that bring in the bulk of your new business?
  • Time: Do you do too much yourself, or do you delegate as much as possible and do “only that which only you can do”?
  • Work: Do you do everything from scratch or do you save time, reduce errors, and increase speed by using forms, checklists, and templates?

Leverage is the key to the 80/20 principle. It is the key to getting more done with less effort and to earning more without working more.

Take some time to examine your practice, and yourself. Make a short list of the things you do better than most and focus on them. Eliminate or delegate the rest.

Do Less. More.

This will help with getting the right things done

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

The 80/20 Principle and your law practice

September 11, 2013 by
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One of my favorite books is The 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch. In it, Koch makes the case first articulated as The Pareto Principle, that “a minority of causes, inputs, or effort usually lead to a majority of the results, outputs, or rewards”.

The idea is that as much as 80% of your results may come from 20% of your effort. In the context of practicing law, that might mean that 20% of your clients produce 80% of your income. The actual numbers, however, aren’t necessarily 80/20. They might be 90/30, 60/20, or 55/5. The point is that some things we do bring results that are disproportionate to our effort and that it behooves us to look for those things and do more of them.

Koch says, “Few people take objectives really seriously. They put average effort into too many things, rather than superior thought and effort into a few important things. People who achieve the most are selective as well as determined.”

We’re talking about focus. About doing more of what works and less of what doesn’t. About using leverage to earn more without working more.

Look at your practice and tell me what you see.

  • Practice areas: Are you a Jack or Jill of all trades or a master of one? Are you good at many things or outstanding at one or two?
  • Clients: Do you target anyone who needs what you do or a very specifically defined “ideal client” who can hire you more often, pay higher fees, and refer others like themselves who can do the same?
  • Services: Do you offer low fee/low margin services because they contribute something to overhead or do you keep your overhead low and maximize profits?
  • Fees: Do you trade your time for dollars or do you get paid commensurate with the value you deliver?
  • Marketing: Do you do too many things that produce no results, or modest results, or one or two things that bring in the bulk of your new business?
  • Time: Do you do too much yourself, or do you delegate as much as possible and do “only that which only you can do”?
  • Work: Do you do everything from scratch or do you save time, reduce errors, and increase speed by using forms, checklists, and templates?

Leverage is the key to the 80/20 principle. It is the key to getting more done with less effort and to earning more without working more.

Take inventory of where you are today. If you’re not on track to meeting your goals, if you are working too hard and earning too little, the answer may be to do less of most things, the “trivial many,” as Koch defines them, so you can do more of the “precious few”.

My course, The Attorney Marketing Formula, can help you.

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Filed Under: Increase your income, Leverage, Marketing legal services, Marketing Plan, Personal development, Productivity, Specializing, success Tagged With: , , ,