Top Tips to Take Tremendous Treasures
JS Logan shares The Best Revenue Growth Tip You’ll Ever Receive. Well, what are you waiting for. Go read it.
Ignorance is Bliss?
The great folks at JD Bliss were kind enough to interview me and post my “success story” here. The interview was done a while ago, and I’d like to think I’d sound much more intelligent and interesting now. ;-)
Treat your clients like dogs?
Patti Digh at 37 Days shares some lessons she learned about communicating with others from the Animal Planet show Who Gets the Dog? — a show where contestants compete to adopt a dog. The episode she watched pitted three groups of contestants against one another as they were each assigned a “trick” to teach Rocky, the dog in question. Patti’s entire post is worth a read, but I thought I’d excerpt some of her lessons:
2) There often needs to be a “treat” associated with learning a new trick: a tidbit, some praise, a clear reason, or (to use the happy vernacular of management consultants worldwide) a “business case” for doing what we’re asking Rocky to do. Rocky’s business case clearly revolves around liver treats.
3) I have to motivate Rocky with what matters to him (the liver treats of #2), not what matters to me (Hefeweisen, Joan Armatrading, those truffles).
5) We need to celebrate success more than we do. Whip out those liver treats and pig ears, let’s party!
7) It takes time to teach new tricks to a dog. A lot of dedicated, focused, engaged, consistent, and individualized time. Enough said.
8) We all make meaning in different ways.
10) Rocky learned best from the group of three goofy guys who got down on the floor and rolled around with him like a dog, shedding their human superiority; they honestly enjoyed him for who he is now, not who they wanted him to be. They went where he was.
Read the last tip again. Your clients will learn the most from you when you shed your legal superiority and appreciate your clients for who they are, not who you want them to be.
More Coffee Talk
Dana VanDen Huevel talks a bit more about marketing with coffee:
We were at a home-town place this morning called 'Ann's Sunshine Cafe' where, get this - there are four shelves of mugs on the wall - all with this Ann's logo and all with the patrons' names printed on them. Wow - holy personalization and loyalty.
About $3.00 per customer to wow them and keep them coming back? Sounds pretty cheap to me.
Evaluate your Distractions
Jason Womack shares an interesting productivity idea he received from a client, the Distraction Evaluation:
That's the process I use to eliminate anything in my field of vision that bothers me in any way and interferes with my ability to proceed with what needs to get done. It could be something as simple as a picture I am tired of looking at, or it could be processing the Inbox earlier in the day than I might otherwise. Whatever interferes with my mind's eye of where I see I need to be, if that makes sense, gets dealt with during "Distraction evacuation.
I’ve already set aside time to do mine this evening.
Next time you order business cards ...
Eric Mack just returned from a conference with a bunch of notes scribbled on the backs of the business cards he received from others. It gave him this idea, which is worth a look before your order your next batch of cards.
On the other hand ...
I ran across Dan Kennedy’s “Official” web site this morning. Dan is a speaker, author, coach, and marketer. Here is a bit about working with him:
Kennedy is not easy to do business with. He maintains a grueling schedule of speaking, consulting, copywriting, coaching, producing infomercials and managing his own business. He is never in his office, never takes incoming calls and new 'private' clients are asked to submit information by fax before getting a telephone appointment with him. He's militantly resistant to having his time wasted and has 'fired clients' on occasion for doing so.
Not exactly “touchy-feely” is it? Still, it is honest. I’m guessing that Dan has gotten a few clients who like his No B.S. brand. OK lawyers, who’s going to be the next one to add the quote from above to your retainer agreement?
What your clients want to tell you.
Michelle Golden, in her blog Golden Practices relays some great advice for CPA’s from a panel of “A-List” accounting firm clients. The entire post is required reading because there is some really great stuff on it. Here are just a few favorites:
- Be there when we need you. A great example is when my accountant was on vacation but was able to be reached and even came in, off the beach in his shorts, to the attorney's office to help us finalize a critical deal.
- I feel like my firm sees me as a "nobody." I just can't get good service. My firm checks in with my CFO who thinks things are fine but I'm going to fire my firm in the next few weeks because they aren't meeting MY needs. I may go back to a sole practitioner.
- I don't appreciate when a firm acts like they can be all things to all people.
- Collaborate WITH us. Talk to us and tell us what you're doing. Our accountant recodes/reclassifies things, redoes budgets, etc, and it seems duplicative. They should be teaching us how to do it better so they don't have to re-do it.
- Don't nickel and dime us with a bill for $100 or so.
- Even though I know I'm being charged $100-200 for a single phone call, I don't really want to see it broken out on the bill!
- I’d rather have a “package” price then one based on hours.
- I love to have an idea, say within 10% or so, of what my monthly bills will be.
- The firm has never yet put me in front of another client with whom my business has something in common. I cannot figure out why...
- Offer to be on my board--don't charge for the time...it's an opportunity for you!
- It flabbergasts me that no one has called to offer me another service -- even as my business is changing/growing so rapidly.
- I had no idea of the other services our CPA firm offers. I had to ask my CFO who used to work for the firm so that I could answer questions today about other services I might be interested in. I thought it was neat that they offer to help interview and screen financial people I would hire.
- It's best when you talk to me in person. Maybe a yearly meeting where we talk about what's going on for the next year, touch base, share updates and tell me about additional services.
Lawyers, are you listening?
And they'll tell two friends, and so on, and so on...
Is your firm like shampoo? In this post from his Confessions of a Brand Evangelist, Aaron Dignan talks about hair, dandruff, and the commoditization of clean:
The funny thing about shampoo though, is that cleaning hair is its purpose, and yet almost every shampoo brand on the planet is building a story around something else. Head and Shoulders fights dandruff. Nioxin stimulates the scalp and fights hair loss. Brilliant Brunette by John Frieda keeps those lovely espresso tones in your hair going strong. Nobody's talking about cleaner hair.
Why? Because the purpose of the category has been commoditized. Everybody's shampoo works, so they've changed the discussion. My guess is that if you look at your category, you'll find that it's more like shampoo than you'd like to admit. Everybody's stuff works. The real question now is: what's the something extra that you're going to talk about on the side of the bottle?
So, even though you may think you have a “distinctive global law firm with a diversified practice that offers a broad range of services and has become a leader in every area of law you practice because of your client focus and legal skill,” you still need to articulate that “something extra” on the side of the bottle.
If you think I’m wrong here, go to your bathroom and look at your shampoo. Unless you are using a generic no-name brand that just says “SHAMPOO” on the bottle, you’ve looked for that “something extra” the last time you went to the store. What makes you think your potential clients won’t as well?
One Way not to "Brand" Your Firm
Why not firm uniforms?
Check out this hilarious collection of European band photos.
(Thanks to Law Geek for the tip).
Living in RSSia. My new feeds.
I’ve been adding RSS feeds to my aggregator at an alarming clip. While I’ve been pretty diligent at deleting at least one feed for every two I add, I’m still swimming in data. One thing that helps is that at the end of each week, I delete everything that is clogging up my “unread items” folder in my aggregator and start new on Monday. It is an amazingly liberating experience.
One thing I’ve wanted to do for a while is resuscitate my “Weekly Five” feature where I’d share five new/cool sites I’d found the week before. Since I’m living in RSSland now (“RSSia”), I thought I’d do something a bit different. Each week I’ll share the sites whose feeds have taken up a permanent residence in my aggregator.
In the last week, here is what’s new, in no particular order:
Trends I’m Watching (Thanks to Zane for the tip)
Make a Million Dollars
Marshall Brain (what a great name!) has a cool article titled, How to Make a Million Dollars. He has some pretty sound advice, but what made me laugh out loud was when he was talking about one way to do it:
Or there is the well-worn path to a lawsuit. The problem is, a lawsuit can take a long time and you have to spend most of that time talking to lawyers. I'm not sure the rewards outweigh the pain.
I wish those big firms had taken this advice.
Fresh off my post yesterday about all of those AmLaw 100 firms that wouldn’t have hired me out of law school comes this bit of advice from StartupNation I’d wish those hiring partners had embraced:
Whenever you need to add a new person to your team, make the decision easy on yourself: just hire the ones who smile.
. . .
Here’s my point ... when you’re making decisions about which humans to select for your team, even if these people will only communicate internally with other team members and not interact with your customer community, you can’t go wrong with smilers! Of course you’ll consider team chemistry/fit (in my opinion, THE most important conventional selection criteria – and I spent 19 years as an executive recruiter helping companies make these choices) and a person’s skill level to do the job at hand, along with lesser important factors as you make hiring decisions. But when it comes down to that ultimate choice differentiator, go with the smile!
At least I’m pretty sure I was smiling at the beginning of the interview.
Brew up some clients
Rosa Say passes on a great way to spend your marketing dollars:
This morning Kerwin and I walked into a Prescott Starbucks and both ordered their strong-brew coffee of the day to then find it was free. The barista at the cash register motioned over to a gentleman sitting in an animated discussion with a group of about six others, and said, “Your coffee is on Mr. Perez this morning.”
As Kerwin stirred cream and sugar into his coffee, we read a poster on the wall right above the condiment station with a picture of Mr. Perez’s smiling face explaining that every Wednesday morning from 8:30am-9:30am he buys coffee at that Starbucks for all his customers and anyone else who wants to talk story with him about investment banking and Prescott’s promising future.
Absolutely, frickin’ brilliant.
Trying Steve Pavlina's 30 Days Formula
I ran across Steve Pavlina’s blog post titled 30 Days to Success just over a month ago. In it, he outlines a fairly simple way to make dramatic changes to your life. First, Steve’s explanation:
A powerful personal growth tool is the 30-day trial. This is a concept I borrowed from the shareware industry, where you can download a trial version of a piece of software and try it out risk-free for 30 days before you’re required to buy the full version. It’s also a great way to develop new habits, and best of all, it’s brain-dead simple.
Let’s say you want to start a new habit like an exercise program or quit a bad habit like sucking on cancer sticks. We all know that getting started and sticking with the new habit for a few weeks is the hard part. Once you’ve overcome inertia, it’s much easier to keep going.
At the time, I was drinking 3–5 Diet Mountain Dews each day. I figured I’d take Steve’s advice, and resolve to stop drinking soda for “only” 30 days. Days 1–3 sucked, but I slowly replaced my morning Dews with one cup of Green Tea and drank water the rest of the day. Gotta tell you, it worked. The thirty days was an easy amount of time to measure, and though I fell off the wagon a couple of times, it was pretty easy to get back on. I don’t miss the soda at all.
Now I’m looking for another 30 day challenge. For you lawyers out there, how about resolving to return every phone call within 24 hours just for the next 30 days. I dare you!
Quote of the Day
Thanks to Getting Things Done, The Broad View for this quote from Edward de Bono:
“It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.”
Hackaday keeps the doldrums at bay.
Could your firm benefit from a hackathon? From Bnoopy:
The idea is that you make a day-long event (at whatever frequency you want) where everyone works on something that is:
- valuable to the company
- but not what they're "supposed" to be working on and
- that can be taken from idea to working prototype in one day
We started our hackathon at 9:00am and ended at 8:00pm. From 8:00-10:00pm we did presentations where each team member or group showed their work.
We did our first hackathon last Thursday and the results were amazing. It's unbelievable what you can get done in a day with a focused, motivated and creative team.When you give people the time to do the thing that always seems "just out of reach" people's creativity cracks wide open. Check out the specific results here.
What was particularly cool was the energy it brought to the team. People felt envigorated and recharged. In fact, one of our engineers was so excited he exclaimed (during the presentations) "Dude, I just want to crawl into my hole [his cube], grow a beard, a build shit!". I couldn't have put it any better myself.
Are you truly smart?
Scott Berkun writes essays. Really smart and useful ones. A recent favorite is Essay #40 Why Smart People Defend Bad Ideas. Now I know lawyers are trained to defend bad ideas (or at least advocate for clients with bad ideas), but what really struck me when I read the essay is just how often I’ve seen this behavior in opposing counsel, colleagues, and even myself. Read the entire essay. Here are just a few choice excerpts.
On the problem with smart people:
The problem with smart people is that they like to be right and sometimes will defend ideas to the death rather than admit they’re wrong. This is bad. Worse, if they got away with it when they were young (say, because they were smarter than their parents, their friends, and their parent’s friends) they’ve probably built an ego around being right, and will therefore defend their perfect record of invented righteousness to the death. Smart people often fall into the trap of preferring to be right even if it’s based in delusion, or results in them, or their loved ones, becoming miserable. (Somewhere in your town there is a row of graves at the cemetery, called smartypants lane, filled with people who were buried at poorly attended funerals, whose headstones say “Well, at least I was right.”)
And on setting priorities, intelligence, and wisdom:
At any moment on any project there are an infinite number of levels of problem solving. Part of being a truly smart person is to know which level is the right one at a given time. For example, if you are skidding out of control at 95mph in your broken down Winnebago on an ice covered interstate, when a semi-truck filled with both poorly packaged fireworks and loosely bundled spark plugs slams on its brakes, it’s not the right time to discuss with your passengers where y’all would like to stop for dinner. But as ridiculous as this scenario sounds, it happens all the time. People worry about the wrong thing at the wrong time and apply their intelligence in ways that doesn’t serve the greater good of whatever they’re trying to achieve. Some call this difference in skill wisdom, in that the wise know what to be thinking about, where as the merely intelligent only know how to think. (The de-emphasis of wisdom is an east vs. west dichotomy: eastern philosophy heavily emphasizes deeper wisdom, where as the post enlightenment west, and perhaps particularly America, heavily emphasizes the intellectual flourishes of intelligence).
And this, on communal thinking and why attorneys still bill by the hour (sort of):
Just because everyone in the room is smart doesn’t mean that collectively they will arrive at smart ideas. The power of peer pressure is that it works on our psychology, not our intellect. As social animals we are heavily influenced by how the people around us behave, and the quality of our own internal decision making varies widely depending on the environment we currently are in. (e.g. Try to write a haiku poem while standing in an elevator with 15 opera singers screaming 15 different operas, in 15 different languages, in falsetto, directly at you vs. sitting on a bench in a quiet stretch of open woods).
That said, the more homogeneous a group of people are in their thinking, the narrower the range of ideas that the group will openly consider. The more open minded, creative, and courageous a group is, the wider the pool of ideas they’ll be capable of exploring.
If you break it, it may ultimately pay for itself.
Christopher Carfi shares an interesting Warren Buffett quote in this post titled, In Search of Failure:
"I often felt there might be more to be gained by studying business failures than business successes. In my business, we try to study where people go astray, and why things don't work...Albert Einstein said 'Invert, always invert, in mathematics and physics,' and it's a very good idea in business, too. Start out with failure, and then engineer its removal." - Warren Buffett
So, seek out what is broken, figure out why it broke, and go fix it. Excellent advice.
Ten Law Firms that Wouldn't Hire Me Out of Law School
One of the perks of being a member of the Law.com Blog Network is that I get to share with you this sneak peak of the Am Law 100. After the jump, you can order an electronic spreadsheet or subscribe to American Lawyer to see the other 90 firms that wouldn’t have hired me either.