How to manage your legal marketing so you don’t have too much of a good thing

How to manage your legal marketing so you don’t have too much of a good thing.

How to manage your legal marketing so you don’t have too much of a good thing.First of all, the best way to kill a poorly run business is with great marketing because great marketing is going to give you many, many, many more opportunities to fail at a much faster pace.  So the first thing is you got to get your factory under control, your processes, your policies, your systems and procedures.  You’ve got to understand, you’ve got to just blueprint it out, just flowchart it out, how the work flows through your firm from beginning to end; just flowchart it out on a whiteboard.  You don’t need any kind of fancy computers or anything.

And you figure out what is the capacity, if our firm can handle a capacity of, let’s just say for argument sake,100 active cases or matters at a time and our marketing, right now let’s say we’re at 50 active cases or matters and we’re adding ten every month and we’re closing five every month that means we’re growing at a net rate of five per month, right?  If we’re at 50 and we grow net five per month then we know that in ten months, I’m not a math guy either, in ten months we’re going to reach capacity.

And when we reach capacity if we don’t turn down the dial on the marketing, if we don’t turn that switch down, turn that valve off or slow it down, we’re going to overwhelm our staff, we’re going to overwhelm our systems, we’re going to overwhelm our procedures and what’s going to start to happen is your clients are going to start getting disappointed, your staffs going to get stressed out, you’re going to get burned out and too much of a good thing will have been the downfall of your business.  So you’ve got to get your factory under control, you’ve got to understand what is making your marketing work and you’ve got to run out your projections 3, 6, 9, 12 months out to know when are we going to reach capacity and either turn down the marketing dial or build up the factory in anticipation of reaching that point.