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RJon Robins

Don’t Set Yourself Up to Fail: Five Signs That Your Factory Can’t Keep Up With Your Marketing and Sales

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Many of you know that there are seven “Main Parts” of your law business. Building a seven-figure business requires that you have all seven of these Main Parts working together in synergy. When everything is working together properly, it’s a beautiful thing. But when one part of your business falls out of alignment with the other… watch out, because bad things are going to happen.

One common example is when your Factory can’t keep up with the business that is being generated by your Marketing and Sales. This usually occurs when you and your team are doing a GREAT job reaching your target audience and converting them into clients… but your associates and your support staff aren’t able to handle all of the new work.

Is your Factory being overwhelmed? Here are five signs that this may be the case:

  1. Clients are complaining about delays. Is it taking too long for you to deliver the promised work? Do you find that you can’t produce the work as quickly as your marketing & sales say that you can?
  2. Clients are upset because the work is sub-par. Are you and your team increasingly prone to making mistakes? Does your work lack the quality that previous clients have come to expect, or that your marketing & sales promise? This is a major problem and can lead to bar grievances or worse.
  3. Your people are overworked. Are your associates and your support staff increasingly stressed out and unhappy? Are they putting in longer hours than they should be? Are they grumbling and talking about leaving the firm?  
  4. You’re stressed and can’t stop thinking about work even when you’re at home. If you can’t relax and stop thinking about the work while you’re at home… if you’re distant and not fully present… consider whether the root of your anxiety is fear that your Factory can’t meet its obligations.
  5. You are terrified to take a vacation. If the idea of taking a vacation is out of the question for you… most likely your Factory is not keeping up with workflow. If you feel that your business can’t keep producing without your physical presence, something is wrong with your Factory.

Do any of these symptoms sound familiar? You’re not alone! Many lawyers become “victims of their own success” in this way. It’s GREAT that your marketing and sales efforts are working. But make sure you give your Factory the resources and attention it demands so that your marketing success doesn’t ultimately sink your business.

Small Law Firm Business Development: How to Get Started

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“How do I get started with my law firm business development?”  First of all, if you are asking this question I’m going to presume you’re probably still in the first stage of growth with your law practice meaning you have not yet achieved $20,000 of sustainable predictable monthly gross revenue.

If you’re in the first stage of growth with less than $20,000 a month in monthly gross revenue the way you get started is pretty simple, reliable, predictable and does not require a lot of money. By strategizing and planning you will not only improve your law firm but you will save lots of money!

The following steps will help you surpass the first stage of growth. First, come up with your goals. These goals include financial goals, personal goals and professional goals. When thinking in terms of financial goals, you may ask yourself questions like, “how much net income does my business need to earn in order to live the way I reasonably want to be living?”  Once you have these financial goals in mind and you can picture exactly what it is that you want in your financial future, marketing and everything it entails now has a clear purpose and makes much more sense.

Personal goals are just as important as financial. You need to think about how many hours per week and weeks of the year you want to be giving your firm on average. I know we live in the real world and it’s never going to be exactly the same week after week. It’s going to fluctuate but you always need to have an average amount in mind. Do you want to be working a 40-hour week, a 50-hour week, or do you want to not have any control over it at all and have your law firm eat you alive?

Professionally you also need to set goals. Ask yourself, “where do I want to be professionally three years from now, five years from now?” Setting these goals is the first step in getting started with your marketing. The rest of the tools, the techniques, and the tasks are pretty simple. As your marketing firm propels past the first stage of growth, there is going to be one question that you will be asked over and over again.

The question is, what do you do? You need to be able to give people an answer that they care about when they ask you this. When people ask you what do you do, what they’re really asking is what can you do for me?  Don’t bother to give them the obvious answer : I’m a lawyer, I’m a bankruptcy lawyer, I’m a family law attorney. No one cares about that, answer what you can do for them. We call that giving them your magic statement.

Also, you need to go to networking events. Here’s a secret, the best way for an introvert like me, people don’t realize I’m an introvert but I am, is to go to these events with a plan. Try and identify two or three influencers and meet them. Ask them about their favorite subject, their business and their favorite hobby. They will love to talk about their favorite things and will eventually ask you what you do. At that point you unleash your magic statement and set the hook so they remember you.

Next, you create what we call a (rainmaking) rolodex. Take your old-fashioned rolodex and every time you meet someone you add their name to the rolodex under every topic that you discover they’re interested in. This way, you keep these influencers favorite topics organized and you find ways to better network with them.

Another step for your firm’s development is calling all of your former and current clients and using your new and improved pitch or “magic words”. Using these magic words with clients will put an extra 10% revenue in your pocket consistently, reliably, and predictably every year. This works for everyone who does this, it will work for you too!

Here’s the next step, you call these clients and you say what else can I take off your plate? Everyone has a problem, everyone has an opportunity, everyone’s got something going on in their life that they would welcome getting some help with. Don’t worry about if what they need help with is legal work. Don’t limit yourself, just be of service to your clients, to your former clients, and to your potential referral sources.

Last and not least, is a quick, easy and reliable step. I shouldn’t say easy, this stuff is not easy but it is worth it. It’s simple all you have to do is make as many referrals as you possibly can. If you’re out there making referrals to everyone in your network, connecting people and being of value and of service to them they will think of you. These are very simple things that lawyers have been doing for hundreds and hundreds of years. Before we had computers, before we had the Internet, before we had videos we had worth of mouth.

These steps are reliable. Rewind this recording to the beginning and watch it again and take notes. These things will get you started and will propel you past that first stage of growth.

One last thing, I just want to share with you; the second stage from $250,000 to $500,000 requires less work than the first stage from zero to $250,000. That’s why it’s so important that we get you through that first stage quickly so that you don’t burn yourself out.

How To Avoid the Most Costly Legal Marketing Mistakes

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How can I avoid the most expensive legal marketing mistakes? First of all, you have to identify what these mistakes are. If you can identify them, you can avoid them. The first mistake and one of the most costly ones is not having a plan. This means you don’t know the right client, the right time to bring in the right clients and your message is not compelling. If you don’t have this information and a compelling message, you won’t be able to prescreen clients. This leaves you with all the wrong clients and then business suffers.

One way to avoid the most costly marketing mistakes is by getting a projection. You know you want to generate whether it is $20,000 a month or $80,000 a month. By knowing these figures, you can decipher how many cases or matters you need to bring in per month to reach these goals. With this in mind, you can better identify:

  • A client
  • B client
  • C client
  • D client
  • F client

By identifying these clients you can  build your marketing message so that it appeals powerfully to the right clients. Even if you get less people walking in through your door, you are now getting the right clients, which are the ones you need.

Don’t waste time with the wrong clients. Not only your time but their time as well. Don’t waste time, energy and money meeting with someone only to discover they’re the wrong clients for you. That is another costly marketing mistake. Marketing to the wrong clients burns up your time, burns up your energy, burns up your staff’s patience with you and, wastes the prospective clients time. Good marketing aimed to the wrong client sinks you.

How to Become a Happy Lawyer and Make A Profit in the Process

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How to become a happy lawyer and make more money in the process?  Why do we say happy lawyers make more money?  Well, happy lawyers do make more money. Once you understand what it is that causes us as lawyers to be happy, it’ll be pretty obvious to you why the net effect helps you make more money. You need to understand that once you do the things that make you happy, then the law firm becomes more profitable. It doesn’t work the other way around. You don’t spend five or ten years of your life doing work that you’re miserable with for clients, make a bunch of money and then wake up one day and say, wow, now I’m happy! No, that’s not the way it works.

The way it works is you build a business. There are seven main parts of every law firm.  First part, is having a business plan.  You would never do business with someone if you knew they didn’t have a business plan. You’d never get on an airplane with someone that didn’t have a flight plan. You’d never let a doctor operate on you if he or she didn’t have a plan for how they were going to do the things that they do, right?  Same goes for a business. You need to have a business plan that addresses your marketing, your sales, your factory, your physical plan, your people, your money and your metrics, your financial controls and, of course, your mindset. Those are your goals.

Once you get those things working in your favor, your law firm has a predictable consistent flow of prospective new clients. This way you never have to be tempted to take business from someone you shouldn’t be taking business from.

You have to create a systematic reliable predictable way of converting prospective clients into paying clients at the right fee. If you do this, you won’t have to be strapped for cash and make risky decisions. At this point, you can get your factory working. Your factory creates a workflow that will deliver  to the clients predictably and reliably. The best part is you don’t have to be a slave to your firm! The factory has got to make sure that the right work gets done by the right people in the right way.

The fourth part is the physical plant.  You’ve got to make sure that all of the people that are working on your team, whether they’re in-house full time or part-time or virtual have everything they need. They need the right resources, the right surroundings,the right instructions, etc. A big part of the physical plant are your policies and procedures, your written instructions for how you want things done. When you’ve got that in place now your factory is under control which leads to the people. Every law firm, your law firm, my law firm (when I had one), has a receptionist, a secretary, a paralegal, an associate, a (rainmaker), a manager, a chief operating officer, a chief financial officer, and an owner. Every law firm has these positions on staff even though sometimes some of these positions go vacant.

If you’re all by yourself then you’re doing all of these jobs and you are all of these people. You’ve got to make sure that the right job is being done by the right person. If you get to the end of the week and you realize your cash flow sucks and you’re miserable, you need to take a closer look. What you’ll probably find is that you spent 20 hours that week doing the job a secretary could have done for you. That’s got to get fixed by adding people to your team. Yes, this leads to the financials, the budget, the budget variance report, the cash flow projections but it also brings predictability and control to your law firm. You should know where your revenues are coming from and what your expenses are going to be every week for about the next six weeks. Last but not least is the mindset, the goals. What are your financial goals? What are your personal goals? What are your professional goals?  Get all seven of these main parts of your law firm under control and you’ll have more fun, you’ll make more money, you’ll have more control over your time and you’ll be able to be more confident in making decisions. Not only will you be a happier lawyer but your firm will be a lot more profitable.

Three Reasons Most Solo Lawyers Never Create a Plan for their Small Law Firm (And Why This is a Recipe for Disaster)

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Running a law firm – or any business – without a business plan is setting yourself up for disaster. Sure, you might have “always done it that way.” And you might be making money, even without a plan. But operating your law firm without a strategic plan is likely to lead to any or all of these problems… and plenty more that we don’t have time to list in this blog entry:

You’re broke – you are consistently NOT making enough money, so you’re making lifestyle sacrifices.

You’re stuck in a boom or bust cycle. Some months are great, some are terrible. And you don’t feel like you have any control in the matter.

You’re miserable. You’re making money, but only because you are doing work that you hate, or for clients that you hate.

Any of these sound familiar? The good news is that creating a plan for your law firm can change all that. We’ve personally seen hundreds of lawyers create consistently profitable law businesses which allow them to spend their time doing work that they LOVE… or even better, spending their time golfing, traveling, or having fun with their family.

So why doesn’t EVERY owner of a solo or small law firm have a written plan?

Here are three common reasons we’ve encountered. What’s holding you back?

1) Ignorance. No one ever taught us anything about the business of how to manage a small law firm, back in law school.

The people who decide which CLE programs to offer are usually coming from the same school of thought as those who decided to send you out into the world without teaching you about how the heck a law firm actually operates.

“Just be a great lawyer and the magic law firm management elves will absolve you of your responsibilities as a business owner.” This is HORRIBLE business advice and a losing strategy.

2) Embarrassment. Probably 99% of the lawyers you will ever meet at a bar function have no written plan for how their firm is supposed to work.

Do this test and prove it to yourself: Ask the next 100 lawyers you meet, if they can explain to you in plain English how their law firm works. Then decide if that’s a business you’d feel comfortable with one of  your own clients investing in.

If you do this test with 10,000 lawyers, as we have, you will prove to yourself that 99% of the small law firms in this Country (and it’s the same in other Countries too) are drifting aimlessly with no strategic direction. But rather than face reality, most lawyers concoct stories about how the business of a law firm is somehow exempt from reality.

As if marketing, sales, staffing, financial controls, budgeting, and cash flow projections apply to every single OTHER kind of business on the Planet…but not law firms!

“We can evade reality but we cannot avoid the consequences of evading reality.” ~ Ayn Rand

Embrace reality… even if that means admitting that you don’t know everything about everything yet!

3) Compromise. At some point, many lawyers just give up. Maybe they didn’t go to law school with the intention of making a million dollars a year. But few people go to law school with the intention of working long hours, missing out on important family activities, doing the work of their own receptionist or secretary and having to scrape by, struggle or compromise on important “stuff” in their life.

Life isn’t all about driving a nice car, living in a beautiful home, taking luxurious vacations, eating at great restaurants, and being able to give your family the finer things in life.

But what if, by taking the time to create a strategic plan for your law firm, you could actually help more clients AND enjoy more material comforts too?

Your law firm needs a business plan. How long will ignorance, embarrassment, or compromise hold you back? Please contact us today to learn more!

What do you care what other lawyers do?

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This was posted on our private discussion forum.  I thought it would be a pretty good way for you to start your week…

  • Other lawyers who are just “interested” will give-up when things become inconvenient.
  • Other lawyers who don’t really enjoy the way their law firm works will allow themselves to be distracted too-easily and too-often to ever make any real progress with their business.
  • Other lawyers who don’t value them-self enough to make self-improvement a priority will find their own priorities reflected back to them in every interaction with prospective clients.
  • Other lawyers who lack the vision to see what’s possible will find every obstacle along the way.

Remember: No plan, no strategy, no skills, no experience, no credentials and no amount of money can compare to the person who just won’t stop.

->Where do you stop?

–>>Why do you stop there?

—>>>What would your life be like if you didn’t?

Have a great week-ahead.   And be sure make your plans today so you can join us in Dallas April 19th for a one day workshop “How To Build A Million Dollar Solo Law Firm (in 36 months or less)”.

~ RJON

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