To protect your firm or practice from the impact of COVID-19 there are three critical areas you need to focus on right now.
Step 1: Protect
You need to protect your finances (particularly cash flow), your team (physically and mentally), and your existing client base (for your future pipeline of work).
Step 2: Personal Leadership
How you show up as a leader directly impacts the future of your firm or practice, because it impacts your team (their morale, quality of work, and future retention) and your clients (they need to be confident that you can help them through their own virus-related challenges).
Step 3: Pivoting
Once protection and personal leadership are in place, it’s time to look at how you need to pivot (i.e. change direction) to be ‘relevant’ to what’s going on right now. Pivoting doesn’t have to mean drastic steps like switching to another practice area or changing the type of clients you work with. Instead, it’s about making smaller changes to three key areas:
The way you attract new inquiries
The marketing you were using a few weeks ago is unlikely to be the right marketing now. So you might decide to just stop any marketing. But that’s a mistake – clients still need your help and if they don’t know that you can help them, they will go to someone else who is making it clear they can. So it’s important to change your marketing messages immediately to have the right ‘context’ and the right ‘value’ approach of ‘give before you ask’.
How you convert inquiries into clients
In many cases, it’s going to be harder to persuade clients to part with their money. So it’s more important than ever to have the right skills and the right process to help clients see the value of your services and why they should say ‘yes’ to get your help. Now could be a good time to be learning new skills and developing new processes that will not only help your conversion now but mean you have an even higher conversion success rate once the crisis subsides.
Your ability to maximize the most important assets you have in your firm or practice: your team, your time, and your existing clients
This directly impacts your profitability. Making sure that you and your team can deliver services efficiently, remotely, and in a way that keeps your clients’ confidence, is critical. You also need to look at how could you be doing more for existing or past clients. Now there is a unique opportunity to deepen your relationships with existing clients and to really become the ‘trusted advisor’, which will bring you increased loyalty and instructions in the future.
Take action
In an online planning session recently, I showed over 70 lawyers how to identify what should go into their own ‘Protect and Pivot’ plan. If you’d like help with that too, you can access the recording HERE.
ACCESS NOW
And if you’d like more in-depth help on creating AND implementing your ‘Pivot’ plan (so you can protect what you already have and pivot your ‘attract’, ‘convert’, and ‘maximize’ for the future) I’m going to work with a small group of lawyers to implement the strategies you need to protect your business from the current situation (and the economic consequences that will follow) and ensure you’re in the best position possible for strong growth once the crisis subsides. That means we’ll diagnose what your firm or practice needs to not only ‘survive’ in the coming months but to be ready to ‘thrive’ once the current situation resolves itself, boost your personal leadership, and then implement the ‘pivot’ strategies your firm needs to be able to attract and convert your ideal clients and maximize your team, time and existing clients. If you’d like more details then contact me quoting “90 days” in the subject line and I’ll be in touch directly.
