Attorney Marketing Blog

Thanks to fantastic book recommendations from my mentor, Ben Glass (also the founder of Great Legal Marketing), I dug more and more in to the world of mindset and how it relates to smart marketing when I started out in the world of Great Legal Marketing. Of course, I still continue my personal development today. As a matter of fact, one of the most valuable things I do with my time in general is work on myself – mentally and physically.

A lot of it comes back to the point of being the person who is always doing something 10% harder than anyone else (or something to that effect). Being the occasional numbers nerd that I am, I decided to break down some profit and productivity data points that could change your year and, ultimately, your life. These are not dramatic steps. These are examples off the payoff of smaller steps. The difference is made by being smart and brave enough to shed your status quo.

• 15 minutes per day, every day, is equal to 1 full percentage point of your year (with roughly 33 percent of your year already devoted to sleep). If you make your 15 minutes really count, you are working 1 percent harder than everyone around you. Imagine if you make that a full hour, or even four hours. The numbers add up.

• What if you raise your fees by just 10 percent? Let’s say you have a $400 fee with a weekly caseload average of five cases ($104,000 per year). If you raise your fee to $440, you could make an additional $10,400 over the course of the year. What would you do with that extra cash?

• How about closing rates? Here are the numbers we’ll use: 50 cases per year fitting your ideal client profile, with 25 of them actually signing with your firm, and each case being worth $15,000 on average. Improving your signing percentage from 50 to just 55 would be worth over $30,000 to your firm – that’s more than enough to hire someone whose primary job it is to just get them to sign on the dotted line, further improving that number!

• If you double your fees and retain at least 51 percent of your caseload, you are making more money – plus you’re dealing with significantly fewer cases, setting you up to spend more time with your marketing. And you likely lower your overhead, leading to greater overall profit gain!

• It should take you 15 minutes per day to write an article for your website, which becomes five posts per workweek, or 260 posts over the course of the year. If each blog post gets just 10 views (being very conservative on that one), you have increased your yearly traffic by 2,600 visits. If you convert a mere 0.5 percent of those visitors in to informational opt-ins, that is 13 opt-ins. How much is it worth to you to have just one or two of those people turn in to clients? I’ll bet it is worth that 1 percent (15 minutes per day is 1 percent of your year) talked about above – especially if a member of your staff is handling that duty. This idea applies across the board for your marketing efforts. Break everything down into data points, so you can figure out where the profit lies.

Can you imagine how valuable the concepts above are when compounded over a number of years? Here’s the catch: if you don’t make those changes now, they can’t pay off in the future.

By the way, here’s a list of recommended resources for you in trying to manage your life by the numbers a little bit better…

• No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs by Dan Kennedy (one of the earliest Dan Kennedy books I ever read which still has an impact on my day-to-day thinking about productivity)

• The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson (no other work has so significantly altered my ability to do the little things the right way, adding up to a huge impact in the long run)

• When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing  by Daniel Pink (warning: this book may shatter your existing beliefs about how to time out your life to be more productive)

Charley Mann

Charley is the Chief Marketing Officer at Great Legal Marketing and believes in results, Results, RESULTS!

Most attorneys start their firms assuming that being a really, really good attorney should, in and of itself, be a marketing advantage. Those attorneys believe that joining a whole bunch of committees and putting their name in lawyer directories is “marketing,” and they never bother to ask if there is a better way.

Attorneys are catching on, however, and those who succeed learn to leverage their current resources to create effective (and ethical) marketing. What they discover isn’t a magic pill or silver bullet but a different approach to marketing that your competitors haven’t considered.

If you want a peek at what successful attorneys use to market their practice, the HERO Starter Kit is your logical next step.

We’ve put together a FREE (and potentially life-changing) kit for solo and small firm attorneys that will show you a better way to reach potential clients and get them excited to call your firm. Request your HERO Starter Kit from Great Legal Marketing!

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