Sometimes we make things much harder than they need to be. I know I do, and from working with hundreds of solicitors over the course of the last 16 years, I know that they do too.
For example, often solicitors take on way too much responsibility from their staff, causing a log jam with them stuck firmly in the middle of it.
I remember a management training session when I was still a practising solicitor which was all about 
delegation. It said that we all have certain tasks that we need to complete to achieve our role, but that if you are in a management position you can also find that you end up picking up some of your teams’ tasks too.
One of your team members might enter your room and ask you a question. You might be busy so not appreciate the interruption. What happens is that you end up saying “OK leave it with me I will take care of it later.” Oops. You have just added to your list of tasks.
He said that what we needed to visualise when anyone entered our offices was that they had a few monkeys on their back (their tasks). The objective of each team member, whether consciously or sub consciously, was to get rid of at least one monkey and put it onto your back during that meeting.
We had to become incredibly firm at not accepting anyone else’s monkey if we wanted to fulfil our role to its maximum potential and also to make our team work more efficiently in the future.
In the moments that our team come in trying to divulge one of their monkeys, rather than say leave it with me, we had to give them just one small step to take to progress the matter to the next level, then send them away to do it. This way we wouldn’t take on the monkey adding to our already full work load and they would learn the next step in the process so that the next time the same situation happened they would be able to take action without our input.
I always remember this story because I see so many of my clients taking on their staff monkeys and never completing their own, usually far more important, tasks. This leads to a severe blockage in the growth of their law firm. It makes life so very much harder for them and this impacts on my ability to help them to grow quickly.
Beware of monkeys and you can dramatically improve your effectiveness.
So, another way that we can all make our business life harder is to fail to be aware of or use tools to help us. Last week I asked you to listen to those intriguing client questions to give you some great ideas for articles for your website?
If you can keep listening and keep coming up with those ideas, you can write some great content (or pay someone to write it for you if you are into leveraging your marketing (and you should be)) to deliver more prospects to you.
However, there is a little-known tool that can also provide you with a virtually limitless supply of article ideas to attract more of your perfect clients to your website.
This tool is Google, sometimes referred to as the largest search engine on the planet, but I like to think of it more as the infinity pool of article ideas.
Using a small part of it that most people don’t notice, it can really help you.
All you need to do to see this tool in action is to head to Google and type in one of the questions that you have heard repeatedly from your clients recently.
For example, if you are a business solicitor that might be “Do I need a solicitor to draft my staff contracts?” or a personal injury solicitor might search on “How much compensation will I receive for a fractured back?”.
Once you have carried out your search, you need to scroll down past all of the usual search results to the very bottom of the page where you will find a heading “Searches related to How much compensation will I receive for a fractured back?”or “Searches related to Do I need a solicitor to draft my staff contracts?” Beneath this heading you will find searches related to your original search term, which I like to call “article ideas”.
This is a very useful tool.
You can see an image of these search results here:
You are now using Google’s huge knowledge of what your clients are typing into Google to prepare an infinite list of article titles. Nice work!
Now you need never be stuck finding article title ideas to grow the number of visitors to your website each month and the number of enquiries for your services.
Next time I am going to talk about why the length of each of your articles determines whether it has any prospect of delivering new clients to you.