Earlier this week I did some consulting with an attorney seeking to build his practice. We talked about the usual stuff as I moved through an interview about the basics of managing and marketing a family law practice.

We were rolling along and I was getting a sense of how things are going for the practice. We did some Google searches together to size up the competition when something suddenly hit me. It wasn’t something I was prepared to inquire about and suddenly I realized that we were talking about building a practice in one city when the office is located in another city.

To illustrate my point using my city as an example, I have an office in Raleigh. I actually live in an adjoining city called Cary. My home is about 8 miles from my office. Raleigh and Cary are both in Wake County. Raleigh is substantially bigger than Cary.

While these two cities are effectively one place, they have separate identities. People in Raleigh aren’t, generally, going to hire a lawyer in Cary. People in Cary might hire a Raleigh lawyer since it’s the county seat and it’s the larger city.

Lawyers in Cary do quite well since it’s a fairly affluent city of more than 100,000. It would be very different for Cary lawyers if Cary were a small town and/or didn’t have an affluent population. If that were the case, it would probably be much easier for a Cary lawyer to build a practice by locating their office in Raleigh.

Of course, having more than one office would always be an option.

Back to my phone call, as we talked I realized that the location of the office is a huge impediment to growing the practice. Our plan will likely be to open an office in the larger city in an executive suite as an experiment and see what happens. Low risk, high potential for reward.

You’ve got to meet the expectations and needs of the client. It’s what goes on in the client’s head that matters when you’re doing your marketing. If the client thinks they need a local lawyer then they need a local lawyer. That’s true even if that lawyer is farther away from them than a better lawyer in a city that is, in fact, closer to them. It’s all client, all the time.

It’s important to put on your marketing hat and think of things from the client’s perspective. Until you put yourself in the client’s shoes you won’t understand how they make decisions and you won’t know what you should do to build a successful practice.