I’m going to run you through 5 steps you should take right now to keep growing your law firm through a recession.
Why? Bad things happen.
Your law firm needs to be able to survive bad things happening – recessions, pandemics, health problems…. Anything adverse that comes your way.
And it’s not just about disasters either – what if you have a bad day or a week when you’re in a funk – you need to be able to give yourself the time and space to be able to sort yourself out without your law firm taking a financial hit.
My story.
I owned a law firm with my Dad. He got sick in 2015 and died a few months later. My firm’s revenue and cashflow took a significant hit – Dad’s practice couldn’t carry on without him. Before I knew it, my firm was plunging into overdraft and we were nearly at our limit.
We also had an online conveyancing service called Legal Beagle. We had set up great systems to get leads, convert those leads into clients, and deliver legal services – almost completely without my involvement.
Because we had built a strong brand and a reliable, scalable marketing system using Google and Facebook ads, I was able to pour more money into ads and significantly increase our revenue.
Spending this much money on marketing made me feel sick at the time. But when I looked at the numbers I could see that I could reliably turn $1 of advertising into $10 of revenue. Plus, I didn’t really have a choice – I was about to go broke!
So I invested the last of the money I had available to me into the marketing system we had built, and it paid off big time. We were out of overdraft within months and we went on to scale our law firm and grow our revenue.
My blueprint.
When your law firm is based on YOU finding new clients and YOU selling your time to deliver legal services, you haven’t laid strong foundations for a sustainable, scalable business.
So how can you move away from a law firm that relies heavily on you, to one that has strong foundations to weather any storm?
When I do training with lawyers, I take you through my Scale Up Model. This is my 9 step blueprint to take your law firm from 6 figures to 7 figures – to take you from a place where your firm relies heavily on you to make money, to one that will thrive without your day-to-day involvement.
The steps I’m about to show you focus on 3 areas of the Scale Up Model:
- Amplify Your Authority – this is about getting into a content marketing rhythm.
- Sell Your Signature Solution – this is about creating an offer for your ideal clients that gets them amazing results, and selling it.
- Streamline Your Systems – this is about putting in place systems that will help save your law firm during hard times.
With that in mind, here are the 5 steps you can take now to grow your law firm:
- Grow your audience – you need to build an audience of your ideal clients online. To build an audience you need to find people who fit your ideal client profile and persuade them to become part of your audience. The fastest way to do this is with paid advertising. Ads are much cheaper at the moment so it’s a good time to get started or increase your ad spend. Lawyers often say to me “I’ve tried ads – they don’t work”. They do work – you just need to start doing them the right way.
- Show up consistently – as you build your audience, you need to position yourself as an expert by regularly showing up and adding value to your community. Think about your audience – what do they need from you right now? What are their problems? Use that to guide what content you create. If you haven’t set up a weekly email newsletter for your audience and client list, perhaps it’s time to do that. Perhaps it’s time to launch a podcast or a You-Tube channel. Think about how you can show up consistently because your audience is listening right now.
- Create a Signature Solution – a Signature Solution is a package of your legal expertise and intellectual property you can deliver over and over again to your ideal clients at scale and get your clients excellent results. It is built on your own step-by-step system that is clear and inspiring for both you and your ideal clients. Your Signature Solution solves a clear problem, promises a clear result, and has a clear step-by-step process for getting your ideal client from their problem to the result you have promised.
- Re-engage with existing clients – it’s easier to sell to a happy past client than a new one. Go through your client list to find your existing clients who fit your ideal client profile. Contact them about your Signature Solution and ask if they’d like to work with you.
- Strengthen your mindset – mindset is everything and having a strong mindset is a result of the community you surround yourself with. I surround myself with a group of entrepreneurial lawyers that are focused on scaling online. Lawyers who are making hundreds of thousands of dollars and having their best months ever. So many of our Scale Uppers have had their best months in March and April which is pretty incredible. Success inspires and enables even greater success.
