Put a smile on your face.

My daughter is 14 months old, and when I can't be at home playing with her, I check out this link -- which puts a smile on my face every time.

Naming Law Firms (Again)

I have spent a lot of time talking about naming law firms because I am still struggling to find that perfect name for my perfect firm. I have posted here and here about naming strategies. In this article, Jeff Wuorio adds his naming suggestions. His seven tips:

Don't make up a name. "It's good to be creative when considering names for your business. But don't bend the English language to a point where you're cooking up a purely ersatz title. Verizon and other big companies can get away with it because they have the muscle of name recognition. But calling your coin-operated laundry Cleanacopia, Sudsadelphia or some other like concoction is not merely confusing, but it also conveys nothing to a customer with sacks of muddy clothes and jingling quarters at the ready."
Avoid forced alliteration. "If your name is Smith and you sell highly seasoned breakfast foods, then Smith's Spicy Sausages may be a perfectly appropriate name. But, it's generally a good idea to avoid alliteration for the sake of alliteration. Again, unless it occurs naturally, you may confuse prospective customers about what it is you do."
Never say "aaaaaa," or even "aaa.""We've all seen this at the very front of the phone book — business after business naming itself AAA, Aaaabracadabra or something like it in hopes of elbowing its way to No. 1 in the listings. Sure, it's fine to be first but, once again, a hollow name that sacrifices information and persuasion for numerical order is likely to be a loser."
Wuorios need not apply. The author makes the point that having a name that is difficult to spell or pronounce (like his) is rarely a good thing.
Keep it short. "Unless you're a law firm with a dozen partners, it's rarely a good idea to have an unduly long name. Keeping things short and to the point makes your name easier to remember, easier to look up if need be and visually less obtrusive on everything from signs to business cards." (Author's note: I think that these rules should apply especially if you are a law firm with a dozen partners.)
Don't limit growth. "Surprisingly enough, a poorly chosen name can actually hinder your business's development. For instance, Jim's Stereo Repair might seem like a perfectly suitable name. But the trouble comes when Jimbo wants to move into televisions as well. So make sure that your name is sufficiently broad to encompass whatever direction your business may take."
Make sure it's for the taking. "Once you've settled on a name, check to make certain you can, in fact, use it."

Saw this on the Viral Marketing Blog about a New York restaurant offering a $2,500 prize to the person who submits the best name for the new venture. Would that work with a law firm? I'll see if I can come up with an extra $500 or so and maybe do the same thing. Look for details next week.

Customer-centricity for Law Firms

Can law firms be more customer-centric? My first exposure to that term comes from this post on Chris Lawer's Creating Positive Context weblog. Chris says:

[By] thinking broadly about the challenges people face, rather than narrowly about what firms can sell them, new ways to make their lives easier and their decisions simpler can almost always be found. Individual-centric customer innovating businesses understand this and aim to overcome these challenges. They focus on creating a more positive brand, marketing and customer context; one that reconfigures mostly intangible (and hitherto unrecognised) aspects of people’s needs and problems into new forms of social, relational and brand capital. These intangible value dimensions include new drivers such as time, attention, knowledge, uncertainty, trust, privacy, personal productivity and simplicity.

Though a bit heavy on business-speak, Chris' ideas dovetail with my thoughts on value billing that I've been trying to articulate in this weblog. By focusing on those "intangible value dimensions" important to my customers (trust, certainty, security), I am hoping to build a lasting legal relationship with them that isn't tied to the time I spend working on their individual matters, but rather the value they get from me. Chris continues:

By viewing markets from an explicit individual value perspective . . . customer innovating organisations are able to locate and address the new intangible forms of customer value. ... [B]y shifting from a world view of an assembler or value-added player in part of a supply- (or demand) -chain to one of becoming a nodal or partner player in an enhanced interactive positive context customer value network, the opportunity to identify, define and unlock new forms of holistic customer and business value are simply, huge.

I think Chris is right on. We lawyers need to concentrate on the value of our services to our customers. Finding the "price" of that value is never going to be easy (I'll post more later on my efforts to "zero-in" on the price I'll charge for certain legal services), but begin by asking a potential or existing client, "What do you think X would be worth to you?" And remember, "X" is not a contract, will, or deed, but rather peace of mind, security, or some other intengible benefit tied to the specific legal service you'll be providing.

How not to treat one billion potential clients.

The Nub reports about how law firm Dewey Ballantine is "fast gaining infamy among Asian-Americans." It seems that an e-mail sent by a partner in the firm's London office, responding to a note about a puppy up for adoption, suggested: "Don't let them go to a Chinese restaurant." This comes after a racially-insensitive poem got the firm in hot water last year.

Word having got out, Asian-American legal representative bodies are distinctly unimpressed. They are treating the e-mail as 'a racial incident' and want answers from Dewey Ballantine leaders as to how they intend to respond. The firm has apologised and plans a fresh round of sensitivity training for employees.

Read the entire article here.

Quote of the Week

Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. --Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Meaningful Marketing

Every once in a while I find a book I can't put down. I don't know if I have gotten lucky with the last two books I've read, but after reading The Brand Gap, I picked up Meaningful Marketing by Doug Hall, and realized that I'd just gone two-for-two! The author is the founder of Eureka! Ranch, a well-known business idea thinktank. Hall, with his co-author Jeffrey Stamp, looked at over 2,000 business studies and distilled the results into 100+ "Data Proven Truths" set out in the book. Each "Truth" is accompanied by two to four practical ways to apply the truth to your business.

When I read books, I fold down the corner of the pages that contain pasages I want to review later. Looking at my copy of the book, I am certain that more pages have folded-down corners than pages that don't! To be sure, many of the studies upon which the book is based relate to the retail industry, but I gleaned dozens of great ideas. For example:

Do one thing right. Meaningful Marketing is about building a trust between customers and your brand. Trust is built on the belief that you and your company have a higher-than-normal level of expertise in a specific area. This trust results in greater customer loyalty and less price sensitivity. A customer's trust in yor expertise is dramatically enhanced when you focus on doing one thing better than anyone else. Analysis of over 901 new products found that when the marketing message was highly focused on one benefit, the brand was 60 percent more likely to succeed in the marketplace than when the message was unfocused. . . . Think hard aobut your offering. What is the one element that, above all others, defines why someone should become your customer? What is the one Meaningful difference that is most Meaningful to your customers?

Doug Hall has this to say about naming your business:

Your brand name defines who and what you are. The more your sales and marketing message offers a Meaningful difference that aligns with the suggestive nature of your brand name, the more likely customers will recall and remember it. . . . Your brand name is a clear and overt declaration of what you offer. The more related and synergistic your name is whith your message, the more effective your marketing will be. A[n] analysis of some 901 new products found that the odds of long-term marketplace survival were 34 percent greater when the new product's brand name evoked the benefit instead of being an absract or unrelated name.

My favorite idea comes from the section titled, "Keep it Simple, Stupid," where the authors cite a study that found that brands with messages written at or below a fifth-grade reading level were 25% more likely to survive than those with more complex messages. The authors suggest explaining your sales and marketing story to a fifth-grader, and asking him to repeat what he just heard -- and correcting the difference between what you said and what he said.

The book comes with an audio CD that I haven't yet listened to, but it is going in my car's changer tomorrow.

Life Balance

I have been playing around today with a new kind of time management tool called Life Balance. Life Balance is a kind of goal setting/to-do management/calendaring program that purports to help you strike the appropriate balance between your personal and professional life. A great review can be found here. I'll post an update next week after I've had some time to work with it. It seems pretty promising so far.

Time to make the donuts.

Found a new weblog today -- Cracked Cauldron Spillings -- which is kind of an on-line diary from a mother/daughter tandem who are opening a bakery in Oklahoma. In this post, the bakers hit upon a fundamental business truth:

Having discovered the most wonderful donuts in town, we will not provide donuts in our bakery. It seems - redundant - to try to make donuts when someone else makes really really good donuts. Especially since they are located just down the street from the locations we've been investigating. . . . Like any other sensible people, we will buy our donuts from The Best Donuts Shop. . . . So, it will work out well. Their donuts are soooo good. Yes, we could probably make donuts every bit as good (or better), but why? It's not part of our menu, equipment purchase plans, or business plans. I don't think there is any point at which we will be offering donuts.

As a general practitioner, I still find it very difficult to stop trying to help everyone who comes through the door, and instead focus on that small segment of legal consumers I can help most (and best). However, I have reluctantly come to recognize that other lawyers in my area can do many things better and more efficiently than I can. I now know that offering a novel way to deliver legal services to my core customer is the way that I will achieve my goal of becoming a more satisfied (and more successful) lawyer. I just wish that I would have realized five years ago that I didn't have to make donuts when my competition was already making great donuts.

Multiple Monitors for Lawyers

I have had an old 17 inch Dell CRT monitor sitting around the office. My computer has a Radeon 9700 video card which supports multiple video outputs. After looking around a bit for the approprite adapter cable, I hooked up the second monitor to my computer. Very, very cool. Now I can keep my PCLaw timesheet (I know, I haven't abandoned them totally yet) open on one monitor and my e-mail and web browser open on the other. I just need to upgrade to LCD's to reclaim some of my desk real estate.

Not sure if two monitors are for you? Take a look at this article: Multiple Monitors Increase Productivity.

Quote of the Day

There's as much risk in doing nothing as in doing something. -- Trammell Crow

My First Week

OK, it has been a bit longer than one week since I wrote my first post here at "the [non]billable hour" and I want to thank everyone who has been so kind to read my musings, comment on them, and even link to my stuff. Special thanks go out this first week to:

David at ethicalEsq who has driven a lot of traffic here and engaged me in spirited debate on the ethical issues of value billing.

Evan at Notes from the Legal Underground encouraged me to start this weblog. Evan is a friend and fellow Madison County Illinois lawyer who has a really unique take on this "judicial hellhole" we call home.

Carolyn at MyShingle for giving me a kind plug and setting a great example of how solo lawyers can blog for fun and recognition.

Thanks again. Matt

Resolutions vs. "Ideal Scenes"

David St. Lawrence left this comment about my focus on business planning:

I'm glad to see that you include business plans as part of your overall strategy. You may already have done this, but you can gain an entirely different perspective by writing up the ideal scene for your business and your personal life before going much further. An ideal scene can give you a view of your future from the 10,000 foot level.

David pointed me to his post on how creating an ideal scene in you mind can be far more effective than making a traditional "resolution." His tips:

1. Write with all the certainty that you can muster. If you feel that this is a useless exercise, don't bother wasting your time. Go back to watching TV. Do not write anything that you have doubts about. This is not a wish list. This is a description of things that need to happen and you are willing to make happen.

2. Write as though it is happening and write those things you know you can do: For example, "I network until I find a new job." "We work out a plan to home school our children." "I find extra work to pay off my loan."

3. Do not allow anyone to belittle your ideal scene. If this is a scene that others in the family must share, you must let everyone contribute to the description of this future state that we call an ideal scene. If you can't get agreement, then you will have to work out an ideal scene for yourself.

4. Be aware that achievement of your ideal scene depends on the intentions of those involved. An ideal scene that involves getting your spouse to give up smoking, or your boss to act more decent, is unlikely to occur unless they participate in the process.

5. Take a look at how your ideal scene will affect others. You may wish to rewrite it so that others will not be negatively impacted when your ideal scene occurs. Otherwise, you may feel guilty which will produce intense counter-intention to your predicted future and can prevent it from happening.

6. If there are known barriers, try not to use conditional statements about overcoming them. Rather than, "We move to Vermont, if we can find a good home for Lassie, or Grandfather," write something like, "We work out a way that Lassie, or Grandfather, gets to live where he wants and then we move to Vermont."

David's suggestions are very timely for me. In my innaugural post, I set forth my resolutions. I'll try to recast them, as David suggests, as my "ideal scenes" this weekend.

Market your law firm like Harley does.

In this MarketingProfs.com article, Sean D’Souza looks at how Harley-Davidson's Harley Owner's Group (HOG) has energized the brand. The community of Harley riders that is probably Harley's best salesforce cost Harley next to nothing.

In 1997, Harley Davidson spent just $1 million on advertising. Before you say, “Oh, I don’t have a million,” look at Harley’s advertising budget for 1996, 1995, 1994, 1993, 1992... all the way to 1984. Zero. A big fat zero. All their money, squillions of dollars, went into creating an absolutely top-notch product. And then creating a community that would buy into the brand.

You don't have to be a big company to build a community of your customers. The article gives the following example many law firms could implement:

Katrina runs a little dress store in a town that boasts of less than 15,000 residents. Business can be cutthroat, especially with the big mega-stores within small business gobbling distance. Yet, Katrina’s done a “Harley.” Every month, Katrina heads out for coffee. And she’s not alone. In the quaint little cafe down the road, there’s a hubbub of excitement. Katrina’s customers are having a whale of a time. They’re laughing, chatting and tucking into cheesecake—while Katrina picks up the tab month after month. Do you see the word advertising anywhere? Printing of glossy brochures? Hundreds of dollars spent on publicity? All it costs is $2.50 for a coffee. Per customer. Per month. That’s all it takes. And Katrina’s community builds one customer at a time. Customers bring friends, friends bring friends and the dresses fly out of Katrina’s dress store.

If you are going to build a customer community, you don't have to spend a lot of money, but you will have to spend some time. Institutionalize the event. Make it like Southwest Airline's chili cookoff. I am planning my new firm's first customer appreciation event -- an outing to a Minor League Baseball Game. My cost is about $10.00 per person, which will include transportation and tickets. My dad and I will BBQ before the game in my office parking lot and we'll all take a bus to the game. I will invite fifty or so clients (and ask them to bring their family members, friends, and business associates) and one will be able to throw out the first pitch. For the cost of one yellow pages ad, I hope to have 100+ people talking about what a fun time they had because of my firm. What is your firm's signature event?

Speaking of Southwest Airlines, David has this post up on ethicalEsq about a law firm with Southwest Airlines-like focus on employee hapiness.

A Perfect Life/A Perfect Job

It is often easy to separate in our minds our home life and work life, but they are two sides of the same coin. In this Inc.com article an entrepreneur works with a coach to develop her "life plan" and finds that changing her life started with changing her business. The questions she answered are ones we all should think about:

Core values What's most important to us?
Dreams What do we dream about? What do we want to splurge on?
Family Is the business allowing us time with our children?
Employees Are we helping them accomplish their personal goals?
Exit plan Do we want to retire? If so, what do we want the business to look like when we are ready to leave it? Who will run it? Or do we just want to reduce our hours, and if so, when?
Financial How much money do we want to make? Can the business support our income goals? How much do we need to expand the business? How much do we need to save for our later years?
Friendships Are we spending enough time with people who are important to us?
Fun Are we still having fun at work?
Interests Do we have the time and the resources to entertain and travel? What places do we want to visit in the next two to three years?
Location Where do we want to live?
Physical Health How can we maintain our health?
Relationship with each other Are we continually developing and improving our relationship?
Society Are we giving back to our community?

I've been thinking a lot about life/work balance lately. I am convinced that making my working environment better will make me a better lawyer, husband, and father -- though hopefully not in that order. I hope to post a snapshot of my business plan tomorrow. Until then, how can you improve your work to improve your life?

Top Ten Business Ideas, 2003

In his How to Save the World Blog, Dave Pollard sets out his list of 2003's Ten Most Important Business Ideas. Dave's weblog is always an interesting read, and this is some of the best business writing I've seen on the net in a while. Very cool.

Quote of the Day

"Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom." Sam Walton

FedEx gets it.

In another Information Week article, FedEx chairman, president, and CEO Fred Smith talks about his company's business strategy for the next decade. Instead of tackling big project after big project, Smith says,

the one thing FedEx won't do is pursue its goals in what he calls "dim-the-lights" projects, big undertakings that suck up lots of resources. "There have been a lot of enormous screw-ups trying to do that," he says. "We try to do a lot of work on the front end, divide things into bite-size pieces, do things in a more evolutionary way."

The article continues:

The end-game is to make FedEx so valuable to customers that they keep coming back for more services. "What I can do is make the services and systems I offer so easy to use that I'm going to get a real sticky relationship with you," [Smith] says. "We want to give you end-to-end visibility and [let you take] cost out of your business."

Shouldn't a business law firm have a similar goal? How many law firms focus on "taking the cost out of" their clients' businesses?

An Employee's Perfect Law Firm

I've been giving a lot of thought lately to the question, "What is the perfect law firm?" As I work to change my practice, I admit that I have been looking at the firm from my perspective as the lawyer, and not from the perspective as a firm employee. In this article in Information Week the authors point out ways to motivate employees in uncertain times:

Focus on satisfying fundamental needs first, such as workload relief and compensation, then move on to higher-level motivators such as empowerment, creative work, and advancement opportunities.

The authors also suggest eleven factors to take into consideration when designing a job:

1. Direct feedback that is prompt, objective, constructive and actionable
2. New learning and skills that are valued by the employee for his growth or security
3. Efficient work processes and scheduling to alleviate deadline pressures
4. Control over scarce resources, i.e., mini-budgets
5. Open communications to counter the rumor mill
6. Accountability
7. Elimination of unnecessary threats and punishments
8. Tasks and group missions that are related to both personal and organizational goals, and that pay off in results
9. High levels of trust, respect, and encouragement
10. Recognition of accomplishments and
11. Re-matching people to jobs based on the new vision and direction

I am going to be hiring at least two new employees in the next twelve months. I am already planning on offering flexible part-time schedules and competitive pay, but these factors will be good for me to keep in mind when preparing the job descriptions and interviewing the candidates. However, the factors strike me as something all reasonably competent bosses/managers should do already -- then I remembered big law firm life.

How not to treat clients.

True story. A friend's brother called her this morning and asks her to accompany him to a doctor's appointment. The doctor's nurse had called a few minutes earlier and told her brother, "The doctor need to see you right away, I can't tell you on the phone why, and -- by the way -- bring a family member." The doctor's office calls back about fifteen minutes later and says, "The doctor can't see you until 3:30 this afternoon." Now, I don't know much about what is up with my friend's brother, but what a horrible way to treat your customers.

Branding vs. Naming Part III.

In my previous post, I discussed Marty Neumeier's advice on "branding" a business from his book "The Brand Gap." The author also sets out seven criteria for a good name:

1. Distinctiveness. Does it stand out from the crowd, especially from other names in its class? Does it separate well from ordinary text and speech? The best brand names have the "presence" of a proper noun.

2. Brevity. Is it short tenough to be easily recalled and used? Will it resist being reduced to a nickname? Long multi-word names will be quickly shortened to non-communicating initials.

3. Appropriateness. Is there a reasonable fit with the business purpose of the entity? If it would work just as well -- or better -- for another entity, keep looking.

4. Easy Spelling and Pronunciation. Will most people be able to spell the name after hearing it spoken? Will they be able to pronounce it after seeing it written? A name shouldn't turn into a spelling test or make people feel ignorant.

5. Likability. Will people enjoy using it? Names that are intellectually stimulating, or provide a good "mouth feel," have a headstart overt those that don't.

6. Extendability. Does it have "legs"? Does it suggest a visual interpretatiuon or lend itself to a number of creative executioins? Great names provide endless opportunities for brandplay.

7. Protectability. Can it be trademarked? Is it available for web use? While many names can be trademarked, some names are more defensible than others, making them safer and more valuable in the long run.

As I discussed in this previous post I have been thinking seriously about renaming my new firm. My present name: Homann Law and Mediation fails criteria 1, 2, 4, 5, and 6 set forth above. Wow, what a stupid name that was.

What are your favorite law firm names? Mine is Competition Law Group.