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The biggest difference between owning your own law firm and working for someone else is freedom.
This could mean the freedom to get rich or it could mean the freedom to go broke.
It could mean the freedom to live life on your own terms or it could mean the freedom to be under constant pressure from demanding clients.
Being in your own law firm, a law firm that you own and control means you call the shots. You choose which clients to accept and which to reject. You choose who else (if anyone) gets to work in your law firm. You choose what direction you want your law firm to take.
The part about choosing the direction of your firm is called strategy.
In business school they taught us many different ways to develop a law firm strategic plan. I’ve spent the better part of my career creating strategic plans for companies and law firms. Now I teach lawyers how to do that for themselves. And I can teach you how to boil your business strategy down to two words:
What’s Next?
That two word phrase is all you need to know if you want to develop a sound business strategy for your law firm.
Here’s how this sophisticated strategic planning session works:
First: Decide what you want your law firm to look like when you retire or die. (I say retire in case you want to stop working one day and I say die in case you never want to stop working – either way is fine.)
Next: Take a good, hard, realistic look at your law firm now. Then take a deep breath and promise yourself that you will get to the desired end result.
You now have a goal and you have a starting point.
After you have committed to getting to where you want to go, you need to create the map that will lead you there. So look at your law firm as it is today and ask yourself: “What’s next?”
You will be amazed at the power of this question. These two words keep you focused on the growth and development of your law firm.
The words “what’s next” are about moving forward. They are about not being satisfied with the status quo. They are about operating your law firm in a state of continuous improvement.
Over the course of the next few weeks you will see lots of commercials on television for New Year’s Resolutions. Unfortunately 99% of these resolutions will fall by the wayside before the end of the month of January.
My challenge to you is to make new resolutions each and every single day of the upcoming year. That is the power of having a vision of your future. And that is the power of taking one step each day, no matter how small, to help you get closer to making that vision a reality.
I wish you much success and happiness in this New Year and beyond.
And I ask you now, as we enter 2011: What’s next?