I have been speaking with some really savvy solicitors recently on my application calls to join my 90 Day Steady Stream Of New Clients Marketing Action Plan Programme.

Many of them have already been doing incredibly well, winning lots of new business and making good profits. Yet they do not want to rest on their laurels. For different reasons they realise that their position is too precarious, and that a change in the law, or a change in competitors or any number of reasons might make their currently very stable business suddenly a lot less stable.

They might realise that they are relying on too few different marketing sources to generate their new instructions, falling fowl of my Profit FlowCast model (more below), or they might realise that they are relying on just one major type of legal service and that this is a risky strategy too, so they need to branch out and include related services.

Whatever the reason, they are not prepared to let this position continue and so they have decided to take positive action.

It is this ‘realisation’ that means they will always have a successful business, and that they will always be profitable.

I meet and speak with hundreds of solicitors every year, and when I ask them how they win their new client instructions without exception they are usually heavily reliant on only one source of new instructions, often to the tune of 60 to 80% of their incoming instructions.

Most of them do not see this over reliance as a problem or just become complacent to it. When I express concern about this situation they are not troubled. It might be that they believe the method of referral is secure, or that they cannot see changes in the market place which will make this situation untenable in the future. This is such a dangerous position, so I try and warn them that they must change it. Whether they ask me to help them is neither here nor there, I need them to understand that this is not a good way to run a business. I have seen this over reliance cripple law firms time and time again, so I try and prevent it happening for these firms.

Another important point to consider is that not only is this not a good way to run a business, perhaps more importantly for many of you out there it is also not a good way to try and sell a business either. Whatever your retirement plans are and however far away they are, if you have many different marketing methods generating new client instructions for your law firm I can guarantee that you will gain a much higher multiplier on the sale of your practice than if you are heavy reliant on one method.

Building multiple marketing tactics which regularly deliver new clients to your door is the right and only sensible thing to do when it comes to marketing your practice. You need to move from the most common Profit FlowCast model which I usually see (below) with only one or two sources of new instructions:

To this Profit FlowCast model which shows many different methods generating new client instructions for a practice:

One of the things I will be doing on my 90 Day Programme with these solicitors is to put in place new marketing methods for generating new instructions, and then perhaps more importantly, automating these methods so that they work with or without input from the solicitor.

It is only once you have five or six marketing methods which regularly produce new instructions for your law firm that you can sit back and relax a little.

Author: Nick Jervis