I Don’t Have Time To Market My Legal Services?

Nick Jervis' Law FIrm Marketing PlanThis is a statement I often hear from solicitors who are running a practice or a team. How do I find the time to market my business? Well, the very simple and stark answer is that nowadays you absolutely MUST find the time to market your legal services. The legal world has changed, it is far more competitive than it ever has been, and what’s more it is only going to get more and more so with new entrants steaming into the legal services market place. As I often say, if you keep doing what you have always done you will no longer get the same results, you will now see rapidly diminishing results.

If you have never consistently found time for marketing you will have seen your business go through the ‘peaks and troughs’ model repeatedly. One month you might be too busy to do any marketing so you concentrate on servicing your existing clients, but then you find the next month because you have not been doing any marketing and do not have any systems in place you suddenly do not have enough work. I can see you nodding your head right now.

The trouble with this is that it is a horrible way to run a business. It leaves you sometimes awake at night wandering how you are going to pay the overheads next month with no work coming in. It leaves you struggling to think of new methods of generating new client instructions. It also leaves you completely open to those snake oil salesmen selling you this super new-fangled method of marketing that is only available for one firm of solicitors in your town but if you don’t buy it now it will go to your nearest competitor (oh, and the price is nearly always around £1,000 and THESE THINGS NEVER PRODUCE A RETURN ON INVESTMENT).

You see I know all of these things because I have been marketing law firms for over 21 years now and I understand all of the challenges and frustrations faced by you.

However, you can make your life an awful lot more straightforward, enjoyable and less stressful. The answer is to put in place systems which automate your marketing processes. This absolutely means that you must have a marketing database, but don’t panic, there is simple software that makes this really, really easy for you. It also means that you must use ‘marketing leverage’ repeatedly and relentlessly too, so that whenever you undertake any marketing activity you use the materials or information created as many times as possible to provide you with the maximum chances of success for your efforts.

The legal services world has changed and you must change with it, or you will face serious problems, but you do not have to. Here is a comment I received from a solicitor recently who has been taking my advice and following the systems I have prepared for my Marketing4Solicitors members:

“Early in the year I spent a large number of hours putting together a website following as closely as possible your recommendations. Since it went live in March I’ve produced an average of about £1,000 per week of new business directly from Google Adwords which for a sole practitioner is an enourmous boost for my turnover.

I’m being cautious at the moment but if the current rate of new instructions is maintained over the next few months then I’ll look to expand to enable me to devote more time to strategic work which I so enjoy doing.

Even though I’ve only applied some of your recommendations (so far), I’ve already seen dramatic results. Thank you for all your guidance.”

Commercial Solicitor

You need to find time to market your system, but you can be clever with your time and put in place automatic systems to bring you new leads every single month, not just on a one off basis. If you do this, as Louis Armstrong once sang, You will have all the time in the world …. well, almost.

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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!

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