Here are the five top challenges that entrepreneurial lawyers who are trying to grow their law firms are facing:
Challenge #1: You don’t have a system that consistently generates client leads.
A lot of entrepreneurial lawyers I talk to rely on referrals to make ends meet. This is risky because referral sources can dry up in an instant. I know a lawyer who is too scared to take more than a day or two off at a time because he is afraid his two good referrers will stop sending clients his way.
When you’re used to people sending you clients, you don’t know how to empower yourself by setting up a repeatable system that would grow your audience significantly with your ideal clients.
Challenge #2: Your law firm is too complicated.
I see this causing so much stress for ambitious lawyers. They are afraid to narrow their niche and focus on serving one ideal client. As a result, they offer a range of different legal services to a range of different clients.
This means you need to keep your knowledge and expertise current across a range of different legal areas. You also need different marketing strategies for different services, and you need to chop and change between different work types all day long. And some of the services you offer don’t even interest you! This is so exhausting.
How do you think this would change if you focused your energy on selling one or two different legal services or solutions to one type of ideal client, and getting them great, consistent results?
Challenge #3: You only selling one-on-one legal services.
Do you work long hours…..and still worry about cashflow? This is such a common challenge. What’s worse is that this challenge tricks savvy lawyers into thinking they’re “too busy” to try and overcome it. Selling one-on-one legal services means you are leaving money on the table.
Leverage is key to scaling your law firm. One thing all ambitious lawyers have in spades is intellectual property. Yet most lawyers I know don’t use it in innovative ways to make money….they continue to sell one-on-one legal services ONLY. This means you’re super busy with client meeting after client meeting and doing ‘billable work’. You have no time to work on scaling your law firm and marketing your legal services. You can only make money when you’re working and your revenue earning potential will always be limited to the number of hours in the day.
Challenge #4: Your legal work isn’t impactful enough.
You became a lawyer to make a real difference in the lives of your clients, but the daily grind stops you from making a real impact on the world <— sound familiar?? Your vision of helping thousands has been dimmed because you believe the number of hours in the day limits how many people you can help.
How would you feel if you could use your unique skills and expertise to help the lives of many instead of just a few?
Challenge #5: You don’t have the time or energy to grow your firm.
You are ambitious and you know that to scale your law firm you need to do certain things. But you have so much work to do and so many obligations and responsibilities that right now isn’t a good time. How long have you been saying this for now?
As time goes on, business only gets more complicated, which is why getting your law firm sorted sooner rather than later is really a necessity. How would you feel if you could get systems and strategies in place that help you scale your firm in a way so that it can improve your life – not steal from it?
I’m interested in your challenges – if you were to rank your top 3 challenges at your law firm, what would they be?
If these challenges sound familiar to you and you’re looking for a better to grow your law firm, join 300+ other entrepreneurial lawyers in my free Savvy Lawyers Facebook Group. This group is for lawyers who want to leverage their unique skills and expertise to scale their law firms with online legal solutions.
