Learning From The Apprentice

I am still fuming after watching The Apprentice last week. If you have managed to miss the format, each week budding entrepreneurs are put into one of two teams and given a task to perform, usually selling something to retailers or the public. This week one of the candidates Melissa was constantly explaining how she was the best pitcher of products and that no one else should be allowed to pitch. She pitched twice, and each time showed she was completely and utterly useless at pitching because she lacked the most important sales skill known to man; ‘listening’. She would pitch her product to a major retailer and when they raised any issue with the product or her pitch she would disagree with them in a confrontational way and lose any chance of remedying the situation.

It came to the part where Lord Alan Sugar has to decide which of three people short-listed for the chop from the losing team should be ‘fired’ (or not hired technically but that is another point) and she continued to say how fantastic she was at pitching. I was worried at this point that she would probably get away with it and be kept on the show; because it is a TV Show often ‘annoying or poor performers’ remain in contention because they wind up the viewers and create more press columns. However, despite her belief that she was the best sales person in the world she was duly fired. Then she continued to annoy me even more. When getting up to leave the boardroom after she was fired, rather than accepting defeat graciously she snarled “Thanks for getting me fired” to the two other candidates who were potentially up for the chop. Then when they left she refused to shake their hands and snarled again at them to get out of her sight. Finally, her parting shot in the London Taxi as she left the show was to say clearly their had been a ‘vendetta’ against her.

What riles me so much about this is that we could all see she was useless at pitching. All of the judges told her, all of her competitors told her, yet she believed they were all out to get her. She sums up my Golden Rule Of Marketing4Solicitors number 3 – “It’s All Your Fault”. As a solicitor, businessman or woman, if you cannot get past this point and like Melissa you blame everything that goes wrong in your life or your business on everyone else except the only person who can change anything, i.e. YOU, you will never achieve the success you might enjoy if you embrace this rule. It was clearly Melissa’s fault that she was fired, yet she persisted to blame everyone around her. Until she learns this Golden Rule, I think she will struggle not only in business but in life. Don’t be like Melissa, embrace this rule now and you give yourself the power to change everything you do not like about your legal practice right now!

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Law Firm Marketing

Case Study

From biggest fee earner to no fee earning whilst doubling turnover

I’d been looking for somebody to help me with marketing for a while, and I came across Nick on Google.

That was three years ago, and in that time it’s fair to say that he’s had a massive impact on my business, and my life as a result.

In the early days, my goal was simple and specific: increase the turnover of the business so that I could take more money out of the business.

I had an amount in mind, and I expected it to take years to get there, but when I achieved it in just six months, it began to dawn on me that this guy really knew what he was talking about.

As a result of that early success, and with Nick’s help, I realised that my expectations were too low, and what I could actually achieve, with the right thinking and guidance, was far beyond what I’d ever imagined.

What Nick saw – and what he made me see – was that my business had fantastic potential, but to realise that potential, things needed to change.

Even before Nick got involved, we were getting a decent volume of leads, but it was what was happening to the leads that was the problem.

We weren’t tracking them, there was no process in place and to top it all off, we didn’t have a clear pricing structure, which meant that we were nowhere near as profitable as we could be.

And that’s where Nick came into his own. He built us a bespoke lead generation and sales process, and the results were staggering.

We pretty much doubled our turnover, allowing me to build a four-person sales and marketing team that gets us more leads and more sales.

Of course, Nick’s Google Adwords expertise has been a key part of our growth, and today it’s a hugely profitable marketing pillar for us.

But regardless of the medias or mechanisms we’ve used to grow over the last three years, it’s been Nick’s rock solid marketing plan that underpins it all.

He’s stopped me trying this and that, and got me to focus on the things that’ll have the biggest impact on the business.

And I think there’s a lot more to come – we still haven’t implemented everything that Nick has given us to do, and when we do, I reckon we’ve got around another £250,000 of revenue per year to add to our figures.

And it’s not just the business that’s seen a transformation – it’s been a personal transformation too.

When Nick first got involved, I was the biggest fee earner, and consequently I was reluctant to stop getting involved in cases.

Nick eventually made me see that if I was serious about growing this business, that needed to change and as time has gone on I’ve taken on less and less work – now I don’t do any of it.

And I only wish I’d done it earlier, because the result has been me having more time to build the business, and spending time with the people that are important to me.

Not only that, but the business is stronger, because it’s much less dependent on me.

Nick was right about that one, as he has been about pretty much everything else – it pains me to say it, but it’s true!