How many times a day do you tell yourself or someone else that “you’re too busy to do X” or “you don’t have enough time for Y”?
Scaling your law firm is about working hard once. This requires an upfront investment of time – you need to lay the right groundwork (systems). As your systems settle in you’ll benefit from them for years to come by having more money, impact and time for what matters most.
Here are four ways to create time to scale your law firm:
1. Change your busy-ness mindset
Einstein said there’s no limit to time, that time is infinite. So, here is my challenge to you:
Step 1: write this and stick it on your computer: “I have exactly the right amount of time to enjoy everything I’m doing.” ← read this regularly peeps, and believe it.
Step 2: for 1 week don’t blame anything on time. If someone asks you to do something and you can’t/don’t want to do it, say “I can’t do that as it isn’t a priority for me right now”, rather than saying “I’m too busy” or “I don’t have enough time”.
See how you feel after that week – you’ll stop rushing around, enjoy what you’re doing and get things done way faster than you usually would. Give it a go – what have you got to lose?
2. Use the 5 ones to simplify your law firm
Offering 20 different legal services is complicating your law firm and your life. The good news is you can find time, simplicity and clarity, all in the power of one.
Here are the 5 ones:
Here’s how it works:
- Choose one target client and focus on solving one of their problems. For example, you help founders of tech companies with raising capital. This freaks most lawyers out – you want to cling to your complicated law firm offering ALL THE THINGS because you’re scared of the financial impact of focusing on one ideal client. I get it. But you can take smaller steps towards this by initially focusing your marketing on one ideal client – you can continue serving clients in the way you do right now, but your marketing efforts focus on one type of client only. Over time your marketing will bring on more of your ideal clients, so you will naturally start doing more and more work for one type of client and your work for other types of client will naturally decrease.
- Create one offer or solution to that problem. You may bundle different services into this one offer. For example, create a capital raising package for founders of tech companies that includes reviewing their pitch deck and Information Memorandum, drafting all their investment related docs and giving them feedback on their pitch.
- Pick one way for people to find out about your legal solution. You do this by driving traffic to your website. There are 3 main ways to drive traffic to your firm’s website – so pick one:
Free traffic: you drive traffic to your website for free by writing useful content that comes up in Google when your target clients are searching (this is content marketing).
Paid traffic: you can drive traffic to your website by paying for ads on social media and Google.
Partners: you can drive traffic to your website using partners (partnering with businesses who have an audience of your target clients and creating content or ads for them to share).
- Find one way to convert your website visitors into paying clients. You can do this with a compelling landing page, an email nurture sequence, by offering a free consult, or hosting a webinar or live event.
- Focus on the above for one year. FOCUS. Don’t start trying to do all the things until you’ve done the five ones for one year.
3. Redo your to-do-list like this
People often ask me how I get so much done. The reason is I have FOCUS ← I see a lot of lawyers struggle to work out what to focus on and as a result they focus on nothing. OR they focus on so many things they get nothing done…..or they get average results.
The way I stay focused is by creating my Top 5 list every single day. Sometimes I do it in the evening. Sometimes I do it first thing in the morning. But I always do it….every day.
Here’s how it works: each day I write down the top 5 things I need to get done to move me closer to achieving my goals and rank them in order of importance. Not 6 things. Not 14 things. Just 5 things. Then I focus on getting those 5 things done. Nothing else. Some days I will only get 1 thing done because it is a task that takes hours, and that’s fine. But the key point is that I’ve got the most important thing done towards scaling my business.
Here’s a pic of my Top 5 for today:
4. Hire a coach
Investing in a coach will help you make sure you make time to get shit done to scale your firm. Not only that, a coach will help you focus on which key levers you need to pull to scale your law firm. So you’ll scale and increase your revenue faster.
No regrets
You won’t regret starting today to create time to scale your law firm. When you double, quadruple or even 10x your income in a few years’ time you’ll be stoked that you did.