It is December, which means we’re busy wrapping up client work that needs to be done by the year’s end. But it also means that we are planning for 2021. We have big plans. I hope some of them can involve seeing you in person, but even if not, we still need to figure out a way to meet our goals. Some of our goals are making our internal processes more efficient. If you know me, you know I love me some processes. Some of our goals are how we can better serve our existing clients. How can we listen to them and address their needs better? How can we make their “necessary evils” a little less evil? (Hello, Annual Reports! I’m looking at you.)
And, of course, some of our goals will address getting new clients. We have a new service that we will be rolling out next year, but first, we have to get those processes in place (I told you that I loved them). Some of those “new” clients might be people coming to us for help with starting a new company. Others are existing companies that are coming to us for the first time. And it is those new clients that are on my mind lately because we want to be sure those clients are the “right” clients – or, better put, we want to make sure we are the “right” attorneys for those clients. I am certain that a lot of you are in the same boat so I want to lay out my thoughts about this. Why? Because I hope those of you reading this will talk to me about your thoughts. Then I will steal all of your good ideas! I also hope some of my ideas are good so you can steal them right back.
First, we took a look at who are clients are currently because I have to tell you, we have some freaking awesome clients. They are amazing, and they give us feedback and directions on how to be better all the time. They have interesting work, and they pay. I want all of my new clients to be clones of them. Because birds of a feather flock together, I want them to refer their friends to us. So our first thing will be to be sure our current clients are happy with us so they want to refer us to others.
Second, we created a pie chart to see what industries we tend to serve (because you know if we like processes, we like data and charts). Likely to be the biggest non-surprise to anyone, our biggest sector is Food and Beverage. That is followed by technology and agricultural businesses. We love those types of work, and those clients. We want more of those. So if you know people in those worlds, let’s talk! We also have a growing slice of real estate work, which we decided is a good one to grow.
Third, now that we have our targets, how do we help them know that we can help them? We had a great discussion with Don Stanley about helping potential clients recognize themselves as being “one of ours” versus not. I’m totally fascinated by this approach. This takes a lot of knowledge about who you are so you can let others be able to figure out who you are. We’re trying some new things like that YouTube channel above, but we remain faithful to our blog as well. We enjoy curating information on LinkedIn and hope to hear your thoughts about this approach on that platform.
Finally, we are building our networks. Currently, it is a lot of video calls, but let’s keep our fingers crossed that we can soon meet for waffles again. In the meantime, we are looking at what networking groups make sense to spend time, money, and effort to attend, and which don’t. Our firm builds and distributes presentations and content with the intent to help – not only our own clients, but also our network and their clients. We do so because we like to help, but also because we simply enjoy hearing what fun things our connections (like you!) have going on. So please let us know what you’ve got going on, how we can support it, and why 2021 is going to be the year that we fill our pipelines with great clients.