The great news is, the idea that you need to accept a lean month is as real as the jolly fat man himself. So in the spirit of the season, let me tell you how your law firm can sleigh it (pun intended) over the holidays.
A festive feast or famine?
Inconsistent workload and revenue isn’t just a yuletide problem – it’s an issue that’s plagued the legal profession throughout its entire history, irrespective of what month is on the calendar.
You probably know the cycle all too well having experienced it first-hand. One month you’re working 60+ hour weeks. You’re in early, home late, with only a vague idea that things called weekends exist and are made for spending time with family and friends. It’s stressful and you worry that you aren’t bringing your normal AAA game 100 percent of the time. Most days you don’t have the time to eat lunch – let alone think about wooing a new client.
Fast forward to the following month. Your appointment planner is empty. You can practically hear the crickets and see the tumbleweed rolling past your desk. You look at your meagre projected billings for the month and gulp – this is going to effect this quarter’s results. Sure you’ve got loads of time to devote to your life outside of work, but you’re stressed and can’t enjoy it when you think about your flatlining revenue.
Put a stop to rollercoaster revenue
It doesn’t have to be that way. You can have a consistent, comfortable workload, reliable revenue (and actually earn more while doing less) when you do these three things:
· Figure out how to automate key aspects of what you do
· Develop a modern marketing system
· Change your mindset
Free yourself with automation
The reason I’m constantly telling lawyers how amazing automation is (All. The. Time.) is that it transformed my legal practice and my life. Seriously.
Before I figured out how to use automation I was stuck in exactly the same feast or famine cycle. I spent hours every week doing boring, repetitive, but essential tasks. I was burnt out but hardly ever allowed myself to take a holiday – dreading the revenue drop I knew would follow time off.
Then I discovered automation and once I “got it”, I was able to create a kick-ass online legal solution (a boutique, premium priced suite of tools for first home buyers) that I could sell anytime, anywhere.
I didn’t spend hours getting information from my clients and then hours more creating near identical legal documents for each home buyer. Legal Bots took care of all of that, freeing me up to spend my time, energy and legal expertise on more challenging – and rewarding – aspects of my law firm. When I took a holiday, the Legal Bots kept working. They didn’t care if it was 2am, Christmas Day or the week we spend camping in Northland every year!
Create a modern marketing system
If I could wave a wand and make marketing an essential component of all legal degrees I would. We simply cannot do our best work or have consistent, reliable revenue if we don’t have a steady stream of ideal clients.
Finding new, ideal clients is essential to any law firm and one of the keys to ending the feast or famine revenue cycle. It has also traditionally taken time and energy. By embracing automation, you will have clawed back a chunk of both.
You could invest that time and energy taking an old school approach to marketing yourself to new clients – attending networking events, relying on referrals, investing in each potential client and spending one-on-one time to win their business.
Or you could spend your time and energy developing a modern marketing system designed to speak to and win over large numbers of potential ideal clients at once (without needing to dish out your business cards at any more boring events!).
I’ve devoted an entire blog to the subject – check out how you can Stop Leaving Money On The Table And Start Getting New Clients For Your Law Firm.
By using smart legal tech (like Automio’s Lead Generation Bots) you can free up even more of your time. But the real benefit is that a modern marketing system keeps delivering a steady stream of new ideal clients (whether you’re too busy to recruit because you’re doing legal work you love or because you’re taking time off), and this spells an end to the famine months. Imagine how kick-ass your law firm would be without those revenue dips!
Change your thinking
When it comes to freeing your law firm from rollercoaster revenue, the final piece of the puzzle is all about you. You need to throw out the old school mindsets that your legal career to date has ingrained in your brain. You need to embrace fresh, modern thinking and – most importantly – refuse to accept that, just because something has traditionally been true, that it needs to continue being so.
Some lawyers scoff at this final point, maybe they think I add it as a nice “warm fuzzy” at the end. I don’t. The way you think directly affects the reality you create. And it takes a strong, smart, determined lawyer to create a law firm with consistent (and by that I mean consistently climbing!) work and revenue.
You’ll need to push yourself and get uncomfortable. For lots of lawyers it means confronting how their perfectionism is holding them back. It means being brave enough to think differently than the “pack” – not caring what colleagues and contemporaries think. It will probably mean learning lots of new things about areas you never thought were relevant to your legal career. It will mean, learning from others and knowing when to ask for help.
Scale Up and end the feast or famine revenue cycle
If you’re serious about creating strong, consistent, predictable work and revenue flows for your law firm then I have the framework and tools to help you make it happen.
My Scale Up programme teaches the roadmap I have used to create two 7-figure revenue businesses. Plus it comes with a subscription to all of Automio’s great automation software, aka the tools you need to create a scalable law firm and a modern marketing system so you can avoid future revenue nose dives.
Click here to schedule a FREE Scale Up Session with our team today. During the session, we’ll have a chat with you to determine:
● Where you want your law firm to be in the next 12 months
● The #1 thing holding your firm back from achieving the results you deserve
● The 3 strategies you need to implement to take your firm to the next level
Schedule your Scale Up Session today and let’s figure out how we are going to free you from the feast or famine revenue cycle by Christmas 2020.
