Practice Smart.

John Jantsch, author of the Duct Tape Marketing Blog, posted a fantastic article this morning on exactly how to get your clients to become your most effective sales force (i.e., refer business to you directly and indirectly). Some of the things John says you need to do:

1. Educate your clients — so they recognize good potential clients to send your way.
2. Get testimonials — got a happy client?  Get a written, audio or video testimonial from her.
3. Create a client community — have a regular (quarterly, annual) event and invite all your clients to participate.

It’s not a long post and well worth your time.  Just substitute “client” for “customer” and give it a read!

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Developing a portable book of business is not your debutante ball.

I understand the allure of the grand gesture:  trapping a witness with the perfect cross examination question, cashing out of stock just before the market crashes, hitting the walk-off home run in your softball game.  They’re rare but unbelievably satisfying when they happen.  They’re the stories of your achievement you bore your friends and family with for years.

They also have less than nothing to do with business development.

Business development — building your law practice with a book full of clients and referral sources who provide you a steady revenue stream — is impervious to the grand gesture.  You can’t say or do the one perfect thing and suddenly have a line of clients outside your door hoping you will be their lawyer.  In order to win at business development you’ve got to follow two simple rules:  1) business development is more like practice than game day, and 2) it’s not about you.

Rule #1:  business development is more like practice than game day

The reason building your practice is impervious to the grand gesture is that business development is not game day — which is to say it is about steady, continuous, small steps rather than superlative performance at one moment in time.  Practice is about honing your skills steadily and over time through diligent work, while game day is about being in the zone and performing well when it counts.

You can’t grow a crop by doing one really fantastic day of watering and tilling.

Networking, social networking, marketing, advertising, PR — whatever your combined strategy for building your practice (and you really ought to have a strategy that involves most, if not all of those five elements), slow and steady wins the race.

Think of it this way: which would be more valuable to building your practice, one 30 second spot during the Super Bowl ($2.6 million in 2008) or spending $220,000 per month over the course of the year in your marketplace to make your potential clients aware of your business?

Rule #2:  business development is not about you

Business Development Is Not About You.  It is about reaching the potential clients who have the kind of problem you want to solve for them.  That’s what makes it so different from the hugely ego-satisfying grand gesture.  The grand gesture is about us, about our need to compete and triumph and display our skills.  I’m not saying the grand gesture is unimportant or valueless in life, just that it will not be the thing that builds you a successful client base.

Create your marketing plan and go out and start working it a little bit every day.  It’s no debutante ball, but it will help make the difference between successful and failure in the big game of building a law practice.

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One of the news stories making the rounds in the legal world is the story of the screwed up excel spreadsheet in the Barclay’s - Lehman deal.  In short, as the story goes, an associate and a law clerk made a formatting mistake in a giant excel spreadsheet, causing Barclay’s to buy millions in Lehman assets it did not want to buy.  Barclay’s is now looking for relief from a bankruptcy judge.  This story is passed around as a cautionary tale about the dangers of technology, the dangers of associates, or the dangers of associates using technology.

Doesn’t that kind of miss the point though:  where are all the partners?

I’m not defending the associate and law clerk involved.  I’m just saying: when a law firm really blows a gajillion dollar deal like this, it might be nice for someone to take responsibility besides the two lowest paid people in the room.

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This morning I consulted my Magic 8 Ball about the impact of the economic meltdown on law practice (which, as I understand it, is the same technology currently utilized by Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke) and the results were sobering:

As the stock market makes yet another pirrouetting nosedive, we have by now heard opinions from both ends of the spectrum:  “don’t panic, it’s panic that is the problem” and “it’s all over, barter your legal services for canned goods”  If that doesn’t cause you some massive cognitive dissonance, go buy yourself another cup of coffee and wake up.  I traded my 401k portfolio to a barista for a grande latte this morning.  But I digress.

Here’s the thing:  you can only control what you can control.

I don’t want to go all Yoda on you or anything, but this is a good time to figure out the difference between what you can control in your practice and what you can’t.  Freaking out about the things that you can not control not only doesn’t help, it also comes with the opportunity cost of not doing some things that might help at least a little.

The things you control will not solve this problem (unless you happen to be a key member of the international financial community, in which case I humbly suggest that you STOP READING THIS BLOG POST AND FIX THE ECONOMY), but they may help dampen the negative impact.  Think of it as boarding up windows before a hurricane.  If the storm is bad enough it won’t save you, but it can’t hurt and might help.

In that vein, here are 3 things you can control, 3 things you can focus all your excess worry and energy on right now:

1. Collect — your outstanding accounts receivable.
2. Stop — working for clients who are not paying you.
3. Slash — budget items that are not mission critical.

You might have other things that you can control, as well, but if you focus on just these three, you may collect a bit more income, stop doing some unprofitable work, and slash a few expenses that don’t help you serve your clients or make money.  The result is a bit more positive cash flow to help you keep on trucking.

At least that is what my Magic 8 Ball told me.

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