Being entrepreneurial is an approach rather than a work environment. You can be entrepreneurial in most any environment that you have a bit of control over.
The primary judging factor is whether you are continuously seeking to improve your approaches to obtaining and servicing clients. Are you regularly:

  • Looking both inside and outside the legal profession for innovative service delivery techniques?
  • Reviewing new technological solutions to work process pain points?
  • Testing new marketing approaches?
  • Monitoring that quality and quantity targets are met or exceeded?

However, your position puts more pressure on you to be innovative and entrepreneurial when you manage your own firm. Hopefully the information we provide below will help.

Regularly seeking small improvements in marketing results from existing channels will nearly always bring better results over the long term than continually chasing entirely new marketing channels.
Part of the reason for that outcome is that most marketing efforts take repetition and time to deliver clients. So you should focus on a few marketing channels at a time and have an active program of:

  • A/B testing of refinements to those channels
  • Tweaking your sales funnel
  • Tracking the origin of calls
  • Improving your content collection
  • Adding to your drip series
  • Polishing your intake process
  • Freshening your referral thank you’s

Once you believe that you have refined a well-functioning marketing channel nearly to perfection, select a promising new channel (perhaps one that is already working for others), put an original twist on it, and start testing and refining.
A disciplined program of steady improvement of working channels and periodic testing of new channels is the surest route to marketing success.

Long-term health of your firm, however low or high your growth goals, requires continual tweaking of your marketing efforts and streamlining of your work processes.
If you are not continuously improving, your failure to adapt will eventually impact your firm’s stability, team retention, and financial performance.
In addition to automating many of your marketing tasks, technology can materially reduce the labor required for many work processes. For example, versatile and intuitive customer relationship management software (CRM) can replace multiple, overlapping, and expensive programs which don’t communicate with each other. A modern CRM provides:

  • Calendar features, including online calendars with automatic invites to clients and prospects to make their own appointments.
  • Case and project management, allowing you to check at a glance on the work done on each matter and be notified when milestones are achieved.
  • Timeline monitoring, with chronological views of a case’s journey. Know from one screen if the case is progressing as it should.
  • Serve up a knowledge base to your clients, staff, and prospects. Routine questions can be answered on a self-serve basis, reducing staff and your time on the phone.
  • Collect feedback from current and past clients about service delivery and their satisfaction. Surface and resolve problems before they grow.
  • Pre-format replies to common client questions so your staff instead of you can respond to repetitive requests.
  • Auto-insert client name and information into frequently-generated documents.

The higher your rainmaking requirements, the more important it is for you to be innovative and entrepreneurial in your marketing and sales approaches. For example, do you (or someone in your firm):

  • Publish on your website or elsewhere helpful answers to common client questions?
  • Send prospects practical and detailed information upon contact? Subsequently?
  • Solicit online reviews?
  • Aggressively pursue local Google rankings for selected keywords?
  • Ghost-call your firm to check your intake practices?
  • Script your intake responses and monitor calls to ensure the scripts are followed?
  • Know who refers what business and personally thank the referrers in memorable fashion?
  • Make it easy for referral sources to provide your educational information to prospects?

Call software integrated with a CRM can provide such detailed and sophisticated tracking of call origin that every other method falls short in a comparison. Call software can:

  • Provide the complete path your caller followed – from search to web page to call
  • Monitor time on phone and number of calls by user
  • Allow you to listen to staff’s prior calls with one click
  • And by using VOIP, eliminate your traditional telephone bill

The most frequent growth bottleneck we see is insufficient lead flow. A related problem is poor conversion of existing lead flow. A different and higher-class hurdle, but still one that blocks growth, is a reluctance to add personnel … whether due to cost, lack of space, or prior bad experiences.
These impediments to growth can be addressed with technology-based solutions and a full embrace of that technology. Technology can:

  • Improve your Google rankings
  • Provide ready-to-use shock-and-awe packages and send them to prospects
  • Deliver already-written educational drip series to prospects not yet ready to sign
  • Nudge prospects to set appointments
  • Enable easy monitoring and improvement of your intake process
  • Keep your name top of mind with past clients
  • Obtain, organize, and publish a collection of entirely-positive online reviews

Recommendations specific to your situation can be obtained by setting a 15 or 30-minute appointment with our president, Michael Knutz.
You will not receive a sales presentation. Michael will review the information you provide beforehand, hear about your pain points, and offer solutions. Some of the improvements you can make yourself and some will require new technology.