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I was totally embarrassed when I heard that statement. I’ll admit it was the first time I had ever heard it after being in business of providing professional services for nearly 20 years.
Here’s the story:
A few years ago I was working with an attorney who had a solid book of business. The guy was doing just north of a half million dollars a year and it was coming from about 21 different clients.
He was a person of high integrity and he built his practice one relationship at a time. The big problem facing this forty-something attorney was that all the income was completely dependent upon him. He acquired the clients. He did the work and he answered every phone call.
And he was sick of working so hard.
My job was to help him figure out how to grow his law firm enough so that he could make the same (or more) money and not have to work so hard – while keeping his client relationships intact.
The solution we created transformed his business.
We decided to hire three new associates into his firm. Each one was assigned seven of the firm’s clients. They were each dedicated to taking care of their seven clients – no more and no less. Each associate received a base salary and a bonus based upon the growth of their relationships. So if one of their clients grew by $10,000 in any given year, the attorney who worked with that client received a $2,000 bonus.
This solution forced each of the attorneys to deepen their relationship with their clients and, in one year, they doubled the firm’s revenue.
At year end, when my client took me to lunch during the holidays, he uttered those magic words: “Your fee is too low”. He went on to say: “That one strategy – dedicating lawyers to a set number of clients and compensating them for deepening the relationship – has transformed my law firm”. As he finished uttering those words he slid an envelope across the table. In it was a sizable “bonus” for me.
Keep in mind that I did not perform any magic in my work with this client. All I did was get him to look at the situation from a different perspective.
Within 12 months, this lawyer went from running a one attorney practice that produced slightly over $500,000 in revenue to running a 4 lawyer law firm that produced $1.3 million.
Take a few minutes this week and look at your law firm from a different perspective. What could you be doing differently to make the practice of law easier for you and more valuable for your clients?