The Most Important Question Ever?
I have one client at the moment who is just making me smile and smile every single time I speak with him because his firm just keeps going from strength to strength.
After I spoke with him recently, I was thinking about his success and what he is doing that is making everything go so well for him, then it struck me.
It isn’t that he is managing to do 10 times as much marketing as he was before, it is just that he is now only doing the things that make the difference.
That sentence is worth reading again. It is crucial. It should jump off the page at you and make you want to read it again. Please, indulge me, because this is important to you; read it one more time:
It isn’t that he is managing to do 10 times as much marketing as he was before, it is just that he is only doing the things that make the difference.
So my question for you is this:
Are you spending your time doing only the things that will make the difference to your firm?
Think for a moment about the tasks you have undertaken in the last week.
Which of them did you do that have made an impact on your firm’s performance?
More importantly, perhaps, which tasks did you undertake that have contributed absolutely nothing to the growth of your law firm?
You should all have heard of Pareto’s law at one time or another.
This is the law that states that 20% of your efforts produce 80% of your results. For example, often in larger law firms 80% of the bills are produced by 20% of the staff. Or 20%of your marketing spend produces 80% of your firm’s instructions.
It is a pretty universal law and it works. I have seen it in action on far too many occasions to think that it is just a trite saying. No. It is a saying that bears fruit.
So my friend above is spending his time doing the things that matter. He is putting his efforts into the 20% of his marketing activities that will produce 80% of the results for his firm, and working hard to improve each of them.
Are you doing this?
Please, don’t waste your valuable time working on matters that are just not giving you results.
Analyse each of your marketing activities and see which are producing results. Spend more time doing those things, then stop spending time on the matters that are simply eating up your time and energy and not producing any meaningful results for you.
This will make a world of difference.
If you are unsure which matters are producing results for you, the Extreme Close Up this month is an essential read for you.
Whenever I speak with a law firm, or start working more closely with a law firm, as in my Fast Track To More Clients Programme, I always find tasks which are being undertaken which either should not be carried out by the firm’s major decision maker or by anyone at all for that matter.
They are often the 80% tasks that will never produce any meaningful results. These are the ‘C’ tasks which you could keep on your ‘todo’ list for days, weeks or months, and whether you do them or not will make absolutely no difference to the success of your law firm.
These are the matters that you leave on your list just before you go on holiday knowing that doing them or not doing them will not make a jot of difference, so you leave them there for when you return. You make that holiday list, don’t you? I thought you did. Me too.
So, with that in mind, my question for you then is are you doing some of these ‘C’ things?
Let’s find out shall we? I have an exercise for you. It is simple, but really important. I know you might feel reluctant to do this, but I urge you to try. It will only take a few minutes a day for the next five days. Can you spare me say 15 minutes over the course of the next 5 days?
I really hope so.
Print out the A4 checklist on the next page (one for each of the 5 days) and list on it everything that you undertake that takes more than a few of your valuable minutes each day. If you find yourself doing a small task regularly that alone takes seconds but you do it several times each day, add this to your list.
At the end of each day mark in the right hand column whether each task was:
- ‘A’ – vitally important in terms of making your firm more successful and could only be undertaken by you; or
- ‘B’ – important, but can easily be undertaken by someone else; or
- ‘C’ – a task which if never completed would not harm your firm and so should be ignored in future.
Now, at this point I need you to be honest with yourself. I am not going to see these results but you are. I know from experience that each of us who runs their own business suffers a bit (a lot maybe) from the “Only I can do this” syndrome.
We believe that some tasks can only be undertaken by us.
During this exercise, you need to think very carefully about the items that you put an ‘A’ next to. Doing this exercise and being completely honest about your ‘A’ and ‘B’ matters can free up a lot of time for you to then focus on the really important matters that can see your firm grow quickly and consistently.
If you can do this task, once you complete the exercise several things will happen.
1) You will realise which of the marketing things that you are doing are actually producing some results;
2) You will realise that you undertake a lot of trivial tasks which take up a lot of time that could be outsourced or delegated; and
3) You will stop doing the C tasks completely.
This is actually an exercise that once you see the value of it you should do every single working day of your life. It makes you constantly check in with yourself that you are doing only the things that will make a difference to the success of your law firm. Perhaps, more importantly, it frees up a lot more time for you to spend even more time on these valuable tasks, meaning you achieve even better results even more quickly.
You will super charge your marketing and achieve the results that you have been looking for for too long now.