It’s a good time to pause and assess what you’ve done over the past six months to see what’s working at your law firm and what’s not.
How do you know if you’re going about your life and law firm the right way? By measuring your progress.
Here are the 7 most important things to measure while you’re scaling your law firm:
1. Leads: how many new client leads go you obtain each month? Remember, a lead is a potential client you’ve had contact with. Leads can be people who have signed up for your email newsletter, consultation booked, webinar registrants, event attendees, etc. To scale your law firm, you need an increasing number of leads each month.
2. New clients: how many new paying clients do you obtain each month? To scale your law firm, you need an increasing number of new clients each month.
3. Ideal clients vs non-ideal clients: each month, count up how many clients you’re working for in total, and then work out how many are ideal clients. To scale your law firm, you need the ratio of ideal clients vs non-ideal clients to be increasing in favour of your ideal clients.
4. Days in your strengths: how many days each month do you spend working in your strengths? If you’re not sure of your strengths, take this Strengths Finders assessment to find out. To scale your law firm, you need to be working in your strengths (rather than what you’re skilled at) at least 80% of the time.
5. Free days: how many days each month do you not check email, not think about work, not read about work, etc? This number is typically pretty low for most lawyers when they start measuring this. But as you scale your law firm, you will see it increase over time.
6. Revenue: how much money do you invoice to clients each month? To scale your law firm, you need to see your revenue growing month on month.
7. Profit: how much profit is left over each month after you’ve paid your law firm’s expenses and your salary (and business partners’ salaries) but before paying tax? Note: if you pay yourself drawings rather than an employee salary then you won’t deduct your drawings in your profit calculation. To scale your law firm, you need to see your profit increasing over time. And if your firm isn’t paying you a salary, talk to your accountant about the benefits of this – when I started paying myself a salary at my law firm it changed my money mindset and I was able to scale my law firm faster.
So here’s my question: what do you keep track of?
If you don’t measure anything other than revenue and profit, that’s the lesson right there.
The beginning of Q3 is the time to redouble your efforts, commit to your revenue plan and goals, and not allow yourself to become discouraged. Take the lessons from this first half of the year and understand that scaling is about growth that can be managed—which means as you grow your revenue, you must also leverage your IP and grow your team and your systems.
In our Scale Up programme we use these 7 dials above to help entrepreneurial lawyers scale their law firms from 6 figures in revenue to 7 figures.
Let’s make a clear plan for the future so you can bring in the remainder of your 2019 revenue goal and fill your third and fourth quarters with deliberate wins. Don’t wing it!
