Harvesting the fruits of your labour

Growing your practice in five simple steps.

By Allison Wolf

Think of your professional practice as a garden, and business development as the way to make it flourish. Gardening is a useful metaphor because, like a garden, growing a practice takes time and patience. You don’t plant a garden and expect to harvest the fruit and vegetables the next week. You know to expect periods of intense activity mixed with periods of light maintenance. The same goes for business development.

The business development cycle moves through five steps: planning, cultivating, developing, presenting and assuring. At any one time you might be investing in multiple parts of the cycle — cultivating new clients, focusing on an emerging opportunity with a new client, and caring for your relationship with an existing client.

Here’s my gardening guide to making the choices and investments that will best suit you and your practice in five simple steps.

Step 1: Planning

Planning involves setting your goals and determining your best actions. Picture yourself standing on your plot of land imagining the garden you are going to create. Where is the ground fertile? Where is the sunlight? What kind of plants do you want to grow?

Similarly, the best start for your business development efforts is a clear sense of the practice you want to develop. Here are some questions to help you map out your goals:

• Who are my preferred clients?
• What is my preferred work?
• What do I want my fees to be?
• What are my strengths and interests?

It is important to determine what opportunities are already out there that will help move you toward your goals. The best plans maximize your strengths and are enjoyable to carry out.

Step 2: Cultivating

Cultivating is all about how you raise your profile, expand your network of contacts and begin to establish trusting relationships with the people who could one day become your clients or referral sources. I think of this as tilling the soil and planting the seeds.

Here are some strategic planning questions to help with cultivation efforts:

• What kind of profile-raising activity am I going to enjoy that will get me in contact with my preferred client base?
• What events are my clients attending?
• What are they reading?
• What associations are they members of?
• Where do I need to be to connect with them?

By exploring questions like these you can begin to map out your own plan for cultivation. Always remember that business development ultimately comes down to person-to-person contact.

The place where I most often see cultivation efforts fail is in the follow-up. Always ask the question: what can I do to ensure that the door is open for the next meeting? One way is to provide a valuable resource that they will want to keep that has your name and contact information on it. Newsletters and blogs are also a great way to establish a continuing connection.

Step 3: Discovery

You enter the discovery stage when your cultivating efforts have succeeded, and some of your contacts have grown into potential prospects for new business. I liken this step to watering and fertilizing the emerging shoots and saplings in your garden.

This stage is about one thing only: discovering all that you can about the potential opportunity for business you see emerging.

In the discovery stage it is crucial to schedule time with your prospect to listen and learn all you can about their needs, their motivations (what is most important to them) and any issues or challenges you or your firm can address.

Step 4: Presenting

Presenting is when it is time to ask for the business. You have listened, learned, established trust, and are ready to present your services. It’s like picking the apple off the low-hanging bough.

When you have invested time in discovering all you can about a prospect’s situation, presenting is easy and natural because you already know you can provide them with a solution tailored to their exact needs.

Some lawyers report that because they develop such strong relationships with their contacts, they find it difficult to ask for their business. It’s important to keep in mind that clients are also business-minded. If you don’t ask, you don’t get. It can be as simple as that.

Step 5: Assuring

Assuring is about the continuing care and maintenance of your garden. For any lawyer with an established practice it is wise to place a good deal of attention on the assuring stage of business development — making sure that the client feels that they made a good decision and are pleased to be working with you.

You invest non-billable time in strengthening these important relationships. You visit their office off the clock. You provide proactive legal advice and alerts. You might consider client service check-ins periodically to ensure that your work is meeting and exceeding expectations.

A flourishing practice

Like a gardener with a well-established patch of land, you weed, water, and tend to it with care and attention so that it continues to flourish and grow. The key is to have a plan and to keep it moving forward bit by bit each week. One day you will step back and be amazed by the practice you have grown.

Allison Wolf, President of Shift Works Strategic, is a Certified Executive Coach who works exclusively with legal professionals on practice management and development. Visit her blog: http://www.thelawyercoach.com

 

















– Published in the July/August 2011 issue of the CBA's National magazine.