Most of us want more. We want more clients, more revenue, and more profit. We want to grow. That’s true whether we’ve been at this for 20 minutes or 20 years.
Growing faster is possible. It comes from focusing on and doing the right things. Unfortunately, most of us get distracted by the wrong things, and the growth doesn’t come like we’d like. Refocusing on these five elements of your business will get your growth going. That’s true regardless of whether you’re new to the game or have been playing for a long time.
These are the shortcuts to growth:
1. Spend the Majority of Your Time Networking
Are you doing 10 coffees and lunches per week? Are you spending most of your time building your network? Your highest-value client will come from your network. Sure, you’ll generate business (tons of it) on the web and from advertising in various ways, but the big clients with their big cases will come from the people you know who trust you. My networking course explains, step by step, this oldest, most time-tested, and most proven approach to practice building. Networking has always worked, and it continues to be the source of the biggest and best cases.
2. Grow Your Website Traffic by Writing Daily
Visitors come to your website to learn something about solving their problem. The only way that’s going to happen is if you write the answers to their questions and explain things in a systematic manner. You’ve got to find the time to write and build a content-rich site/blog. You’ll need tens of thousands of words of wisdom to attract an audience. You’ll need to reach out and be helpful to those in need. Writing every day is the only way you’ll accumulate a site filled with answers.
3. Tell Your Clients’ Story
Whether you’re speaking to a networking contact or talking directly to clients on your website, you need to be telling your clients’ story. They need to hear your words and get that “fly on the wall” feeling. You should tell their story so well that they wonder how you knew. Of course, you knew because this is what you do. When they know you understand them, they’ll hire you at any cost. Being understood is the key to a strong and powerful connection: if you understand me and my problem, you must have the solution.
4. Tell Your Story
Once your prospective clients know you understand, they want to know more about you. Your story should connect the dots between what your clients need, you, and the solution to the problem. Why are you here at this time and in this place to solve this problem? What’s unique and special about you that brings you along as the solution?
Tell your story to networking contacts and prospective clients. Tell it to anyone who’ll listen. Tell a compelling story that goes way beyond going to college and being on law review. Tell the story of your struggles, challenges, obstacles, failures, and successes. Who are you, and why should we care? Why are you here, and what does your presence mean to fixing this problem?
5. Ask for Help
Lawyers love to help. Remember the first year of law school when you asked 3Ls for input? Back then, you couldn’t shut them up. I’ve told you to ask for help before and you didn’t do it. Now is the time to reach out. Those 3Ls are now experienced lawyers who still can’t stop talking. They’re ready to offer valuable advice and assistance. Take it.
Spend your days networking, writing, telling your story and your client’s story, and asking for help, and your practice will grow. These shortcuts are the fast track to creating a thriving practice that meets client needs as well as your own.
