For Lawyers, Accountants and Other Professionals
The Power of the Brand
Most people don’t understand why branding is important—it might be a personal brand (i.e., yourself) or a company brand you are trying to build—whatever it is, branding is important for one over-arching reason:
“People like to buy from people they like and trust,” Prof Bruce, Ottawa, Canada.
Or put another way: “Have you ever bought anything from someone you didn’t like or trust?” The answer is probably “No” or if it is “Yes” then you only did it once and never again.
You build your brand (or in the case of an individual, your reputation, which is your personal brand) because it engenders trust. Trust is the most important thing in business and probably in life. I can easily convince my students of this simply by asking them a question: “What if your girlfriend (or boyfriend) was fooling around behind your back, what kind of relationship would that be?” You can see their eyes go back and forth as they recall a situation they may have experienced—then they understand.
What a well respected brand creates is the opportunity to sell successfully. Here is how it works:
1. You work hard (for years) to establish a reputation for good work, high ethical standards and trustworthiness.
2. Trust creates an environment for you where clients will send you more and more of their work.
3. Trust creates an environment where your clients will refer other clients to you.
4. Trust gives you breathing room when you do make a mistake: people will cut you a lot of slack even then because they trust you.
5. Trust creates a personal brand for you individually, independent of your firm.
6. If you change firms, many of your clients will follow you because they trust you and have confidence in you.
7. Trust creates a brand and a brand creates a marketing opportunity and you can turn that market into sales or as my wife, Dawn likes to call it ‘IGA money’, money you can touch, feel and spend.
Here is the process in a diagrammatic format:
[Marketing Creates Trust in your Brand and Trust Powers Sales]
A good example of this process at work is the marketing that Clarica Life Insurance (now a Sunlife Financial member) did when they first came on the scene. For example, a man is seen in a restaurant waiting for someone to come out of one of the W/Cs because it isn’t clear to him which is the men’s and which is the women’s. The ID signs are ambiguous. When finally someone does exit, the person is so androgynous that the poor guy still can’t figure out which is which. Fortunately, a Clarica agent is waiting in the wings to clarify the situation. A whole series of television ads were done using this theme and a sense of humor and they made an impact on the marketplace. But why did Clarica invest tens of millions of dollars in a marketing campaign like that? It is instructive to find out why.
First, let me ask you another question. How many of you have wanted to get up off the couch after watching an insurance commercial and place a call to an insurance agent to buy some life insurance? Right. Zero.
There isn’t even a call-to-action at the end of these Clarica commercials; selling life insurance is not like the type of selling that Vince (aka Billy Mays) uses for ShamWow! products. “Call now. Operators are standing by to take your order at 1-800-555-5555 and if you call right now, we’ll give you an extra set for FREE!” doesn’t work for most products and services.
So why did Clarica run these commercials? If you look at the diagram above, Clarica was marketing by way of a marketing process to build their reputation and brand. A good reputation and solid brand created trust in Clarica in the minds of the public. So then, when a life insurance salesperson sits down with John and Sally Smith in their living room to sell them life insurance, John might say: “Oh, I have heard of you!” John and Sally already trust the salesperson before their first meeting ever takes place.
Right off the bat, they trust Clarica a heck of a lot more than they trust, say, a representative from the Pirate Insurance Company of Kinakuta (a fictional country featured in Neal Stephenson’s novel, Cryptonomicon). So if you are thinking about trusting the future of your family to either someone representing Clarica or the Pirate Insurance Company (who you have never heard of before and who hasn’t spent a ton of money creating their brand and a reputation), you are probably going to go with Clarica.
Note that Clarica doesn’t sell a thing through their marketing; they have established a separate sales process to do that (i.e., having thousands of life insurance agents out there, making meetings and actually doing the selling.) If you meet anyone whose biz card reads, say, ‘VP of Marketing and Sales’, say hello to someone who doesn’t have a clue as to what their job really is.
So a sale, any sale, actually gets completed because of trust: the client trusts you and, therefore, they are willing to buy from you. That’s the real secret to successful selling: creating trust. Again remember, people like to buy from people they like and trust.
Ethics and Branding
Let me start with ethics. There is nothing more important for you and your career than your reputation. When I was just starting out in business in 1982, a wealthy lawyer by the name of Kent Plumley (he made a lot of his money as an early stage investor in Mitel and later in Newbridge) told me: “Bruce, the number one thing you have to remember is: protect your reputation.”
I thought that was easy for Kent to say, given that he was sitting on millions. But as I grew older I realized he was right. Do you know why?
When I was starting out, one of the real estate lawyers who helped me also helped herself. We noticed that whenever we were closing on a property, another developer always seemed to be in the same area, sniffing around. It wasn’t long before we figured out there was a leak in the law office we were using at the time and, with the help of the senior partner, we set about trying to prove it. Unfortunately, it turned out to be the case. It was a devastating blow to the firm and the lawyer involved was summarily dismissed. She was never a significant player after that in the real estate business in Ottawa.
I don’t care what city you are in (a small city like Ottawa, a mega city like NYC or a city like Buenos Aires, the Paris of South America). Every city is controlled by a small number of business and political leaders. In Ottawa, the number of real movers in tech or real estate or any other major economic engine probably numbers no more than 600. In NYC, it’s more but probably not more than 2,500. So it’s a small number really.
What that means is that if you muck up your reputation, you probably have to move. Better to keep it in the first place, right?
‘Intricate’ Your Clients
You all know the one about the Ford Motor Car Accountant who sat on their BOD? At every BOD meeting, he kept pressing the Board to shutter factory after factory. That was his entire contribution to the debate on going at the time (circa the 1980s). Finally, one of the other Board members told him: “Imagine how much money Ford could save if we closed all of our plants?”
It’s thinking like this that has led the Big Three North American car producers to the edge of the abyss and it’s also why newly installed GM Chairman, Ed Whitacre has sacked just about every senior GM manager including their most recent CEO. Big Ed needs new people with new ideas who can turn GM around.
In today’s world, you need to do more for your clients than tell them the obvious. I can’t believe how many accountants add little value to their clients’ businesses. If he or she tells me that if next year you increase revenues by x% and reduce your costs by y%, you’ll make more money next year than you did this year. Gee, I had to pay $350 an hour to hear that? It reminds me of what one Manager said to his star player when the Atlanta Braves were perennial losers and the player came in to ask for a raise. The Manager said: “I reckon we could’ve finished last without you.”
If you want loyal clients, clients who send you work year in year out, you’ll have to better than this: you have to make yourself indispensable. As my friend, the late Elliot Richardson, former Attorney General of the United States, said when we were trying to Bring Back the Senators: “Bruce, first we’ll intricate the NHL. Then we’ll get the franchise.”
(In Elliot’s honour, I added his word to UrbanDictionary.com: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=intricate+)
How do you do this? One of the ways you intricate your clients is simply by the passage of time. If for example, it’s legal or accounting work you are doing for a client, the fact that you have their entire history is a huge advantage for you. If your client is buying real property, mortgaging it, doing a merger or acquisition, starting a new division, whatever, the fact that you have their files is very important.
But I can’t believe how many law firms and accounting firms don’t harness the data to make themselves indispensable*.
(* The data can be as simple as remembering and filing your clients’ clients and suppliers’ contact information. Recently, a client of mine complained to me that every time he need his lawyer’s assistant to do something for him, he needed to give the legal secretary the telephone numbers, fax numbers and email addresses over and over again. This is ridiculous. If you are going to be a ‘deal maker’ type of lawyer or accountant, then you need to be able to talk to the clients and suppliers of your client.
If, say, you are trying to get a real estate transaction closed for a client, you may need to talk to your client’s Banker, Surveyor, Environmental Consultant (for, say, a Phase 1 Environmental Assessment), Insurance Broker (for an insurance binder), Title Insurer, Mortgage Broker, Appraiser and a half dozen other suppliers to your client as well as your client’s client (perhaps the Seller, the Buyer or Investors). I can’t tell you how many lawyers just sit and wait to be told what to do instead of taking the initiative to contact on behalf of their client all the stakeholders involved in a closing. And then they or their legal assistants can’t find or remember their contact info including email addresses, web sites, fax numbers, telephone numbers (not just at work but cell numbers and even home numbers too), snail mail addresses, etc. Your clients will thank you and become more loyal to you if you relieve them of a lot of this burden and they won’t mind paying you and your staff extra because paying you to do these things let’s them concentrate on growing their businesses while you focus on getting deals completed for them. They won’t want to move to a new law firm or accounting firm for a lot of reasons, one of which is that they will need to train a whole new crew to become familiar with their business’ ecosystem.)
I tell my wife that in my consulting practice, my true J.O.B. description is that I am a file clerk. She laughs (thanks, Dawn) but it’s true. My clients are generally hopeless at keeping their files straight so they are always coming to me. Simple but true. You can do it too. I put a huge amount of effort into capturing data electronically; I must PDF a few thousand documents every year for clients and I can get their information much faster than they can. Information is power. (I also make sure I capture the data on multiple backups too BTW.)
Technology and You
I remember trying to convince my law firm way back in 1982 to buy a fax machine. They were recalcitrant in the extreme or, at least, that’s what I thought. “Why do we need a fax machine,” my lawyer said. “We have couriers!”
One of the most important aspects of providing your clients with the highest possible service level is raw speed. I tried for over a year to get them to invest in a bloody fax machine. Fax machines are a classic case of network effects: what is the value of owning the only fax machine in town? Not much. As more people adopt them, the value of my fax machine goes up: I have someone to talk to!
Speed is key. Fax machines allowed us to increase the speed with which we were able to do things in business in the 1980s. The Internet is capable of increasing the ‘speed limit’ in your city even more. (I’ll elaborate on this in a minute.)
I think that every city economy (which is really a city-state in the sense that, for most people these days, your economic well being is probably far more tied to how well your local economy is doing than the national or global economy) has a certain ‘speed limit’ intrinsic to it. It is the maximum speed at which a local economy can move which is limited by many local factors such as how fast your lawyer moves, how fast your local financial institutions react to your requests for financing, how fast your customers make up their minds, how fast your suppliers can move, etc.
My perception is that business moves a lot faster in Hong Kong, NYC and Singapore than it does in Toronto, Calgary or Sydney. And Toronto, Calgary and Sydney move a lot faster than folks tend to in places like Ottawa and Vancouver say. Anything that increases speed in your city-state will increase overall productivity and increase overall financial well being there. The reverse is, unfortunately, also true.
The investment we all made in computers and, especially, personal computers didn’t really pay off until we added a communication aspect to them: email, the browser and today social networking. Email is a push technology while the browser and social networking are pull technologies. The so-called killer app on the Internet in the 1990s wasn’t email or pornography or video on demand or any of the things that you may have thought it was: it was the browser. Today, it’s social networks—sites like Twitter that allow you to follow and be followed by hundreds or thousands of people in your business ecosystem and to communicate with them effectively in seconds by pulling them to you instead of pushing yourself on them…
Mark Andreeson’s invention of the Mosaic Browser (which later became Netscape) really was the key invention for sharing (communicating) information on the Internet in its early days. Think about your own use of the Internet in its infancy: how many times are you using Google for research, how many times are you checking out websites for information? It is a far more important use than email.
Facebook, Twitter and WordPress are the harbinger of new ways to organize our business communities and professional communities online.
(You can follow me on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/ProfBruce or read my blog at: http://www.eqjournal.org/.)
Selling Your Services
The THREE TOP THINGS in entrepreneurship are SALES, SALES, SALES. It doesn’t matter if you are a professional and an expert—you still need to be able to sell because you are also an entrepreneur even if you don’t call yourself that.
If you want to make a sale, here is my list is how you communicate (in descending order of priority):
1. Face to face meetings are ALWAYS preferred.
2. By phone.
3. By social network and blog.
4. By Browser.
5. By Fax.
6. By IM.
7. By Snail Mail.
8. By Email.
Notice how social network, blog and Browser rank third and fourth, respectively on my list. I know that many professionals think of their online presence as nothing more than a glorified brochure—a static document that rarely gets changed. Well, think about that for a minute: your website is narrowcasting 24/7 to your audience the same thing over and over. It’s like every channel on your TV broadcasting reruns of I love Lucy; no, it’s worse than that. It’s like every channel broadcasting the same episode of I love Lucy all the time.
So maybe you think that what I am getting at is you should tell your office managers to get with the program and change the background colour of the home page every once in a while? Nope. What you need to think about is that your firm’s website is a method of two-way communication. Clients can come to your website to find things out but they can also come there to contribute too. This is called reversing out the work* and is a huge part of what the Internet revolution is all about. It’s a huge boon to productivity and to speed too. Let me give you an example.
(* For more detail about how to get custom outputs from standard inputs, you can go to: http://www.dramatispersonae.org/CustomeOutputsFromStandardInputs.htm. This is by far one of the most important changes that the Internet has brought to our global economy. For the first time in history, it is possible to give customers customized products using standard parts. It’s sometimes called ‘mass customization’. It’s what made Michael Dell billions of dollars.)
Let’s say you are a lawyer working for a large homebuilder in Tampa; you know your client is likely to sell 800 homes next year. The way the system works now, their sales people sit down with homebuyers (for many hours) and fill in paper APSs (Agreements of Purchase and Sale). These APSs are submitted to head office where they are signed and a copy is returned to the sales office for transmission to the happy couple; one copy goes to their lawyer, one copy comes to you (the homebuilder’s lawyer) and one stays in head office for later transmission through to the accounting department and later to their auditors.
Of course, homebuyers will want a few changes to their Agreement after they have thought up a dozen or more changes in their house plans and finishes, so there has to be another process to capture those COs (Change Orders) and make sure they get paid for as well.
But what if we had a different process that went something like this? The homebuyer goes to the homebuilder’s website. They can ‘build’ their own home online: select a lot, add finishes, change the design a bit, whatever and they can also see what all this will cost them. If it’s too much, they can take out some of the options themselves. When they’re ready to buy, the APS reflects the work they have done and is automatically submitted to their lawyer, to you and your client, the homebuilder.
Much of the work has now been reversed out to your client’s clients. Your client’s clients actually like interacting with the homebuilder’s website. And this saves an incredible amount of time for the builder’s salespeople.
The retail customer is a special breed: they are huge time wasters. Even if the salespeople had to spend an hour showing each set of clients how to use the homebuilder’s website (to makes use of the online construction engine and price calculator), they could easily save ten or more hours of fussing with customers as they try to decide on their flooring, carpeting, cabinetry, vanity, lighting, counter top or plumbing packages.
Now you may ask why should you care? You’re only providing legal services. But you know what I said above about ‘intrication’, if you are part of your client’s processes and eco system, then you are much more valuable to them and very hard to dislodge.
Also, capturing your APSs online will hugely speed up the sales process and your closings too. Speed goes up, productivity goes up and your income does too.
Now I had a devil of a time trying to convince my brother, Peter (a lawyer in Victoria) to even buy a computer. He has since discovered email and that’s good but as you have probably gathered here, I believe that this is a lesser benefit of what the Internet actually can actually deliver. It doesn’t worry me or disappoint me that the Internet revolution is so slow. It took decades for electrification to reach pretty much every corner of the economy to the point at which I am sure that you can not contemplate operating a modern economy without it. I know that the Internet is not even close to reaching its full impact on us. That is still a few decades away*.
(* If you are interested in getting some idea of what the Internet will do, read Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. When you read it, remember it was written in 1989 to 1991 before the browser, social networking and blogging. It is that much more impressive because of when it was written. Ignore the story. It’s the actual uses that the main character puts the Internet to that are of interest. Stephenson calls the Internet the ‘Metaverse’, a better term I think than cyberspace. It’s a whole other essay to tell you what the productivity implications are of the Metaverse but suffice it to say it will dwarf what we are doing today. A lot of research is going on to turn the Internet into ‘stereo space’ but you’ll have to read the book or wait for another essay to get more info on it.)
Peter likes email today, but it has its limitations: notably the spam problem as well as the fact that email can not clearly convey either the importance of a subject or the nuances that are so important in human communications. Another problem is that it is a push technology. One of my clients, a CEO of a major corporation, told me that while he used email to communicate company policy to his employees and to spread the company’s message and culture, an important part of creating a team out of all the diverse characters at any firm, fewer than 15% of his colleagues even bothered to pen his emails.
That is how many actually open his emails on average. We don’t know how many of them actually read it. When an email is more than a few paragraphs practically everyone prints them out* if they are going to read them at all.
(* That’s why email newsletters are often quite useless. Sure they’re practically ‘free’ to distribute but you get what you pay for. Readership is very low. No one has the time to read them and, if they do, they will want to first print them in order to read them. Starting a newsletter to keep in touch with your clients can take a lot of effort. Is it going to be read? Many firms still find that if they want clients to read their newsletters, they still have to snail mail them.)
What we did for our CEO client instead is we created a personal website (PWS) for him on their Intranet where he could post his thoughts and his employees could browse them when they had time, when they needed information on company policies, directives and direction. We taught him a few basics in less than an hour: like how to post something to his PWS, how to add an image or graph and a few other simple development skills.
He can get up at 3 am and post important notices on his PWS: this is pull technology. The next day he can alert the people who need to know by phone or in F2F meetings that the info they need is there. This works much better and is a far more productive use of both the CEO’s time and his employees’ too.
Of course, today, CEOs, COOs and others can use online tools for free that are self taught in a few minutes of effort.
Notice how this is disintermediating the techies. Our CEO client learned basic web development skills (in less than an hour). All of my students are required to learn basic web skills and I encourage you to do it too. If I can learn how to do this in my 40s and 50s, by golly, you can too.
This is heresy to most IT departments plus marketing and office managers as well as compliance officers aren’t going to like it either. They like controlling the firm’s website and messaging; they don’t want you to have access to your little piece of it. Too bad and tough luck, I say. The productivity gains for you, the higher revenues you will generate and the better service levels you will offer your clients outweigh their concerns about every corner of the website having the same look and feel and avoiding any possible increase in liability.
Intra-company email can be an even bigger time waster with all its unnecessary cc and bcc emails than outside spam is. In one tech firm I advise, we introduced a no cc or bcc policy—if you needed to send a cc to someone, you had to go into your sent files and forward it directly to the third party with an explanation as to why they need to see this email. The resulting reduction in intra-company email was formidable.
Let me give you another (and last) example to try to drive home this point. I am a consultant to a real estate company active in industrial leasing. I maintain a lease agreement for them which is stored on the server side of our IT infrastructure. What that means is that it isn’t stored on my PC’s hard drive. The client, the client’s clients and the client’s legal firm can all get access to the server (just to the little piece of it that stores their data). This means that if their lawyer needs to make a change to their standard lease agreement, she can get at it in only one place: our server. She updates it and saves it, to the server. This is known as source control; there is only one copy of the document but everyone can share it and you know that you are always working with the latest version.
This is hugely different from passing around lease documents (or any legal document or accounting record for that matter) by email for people to use or to comment on or to redraft or update. You are never sure if you have the most up to date copy and you might be adding your changes to an older version of the document. So you can end up with a dozen different documents, none of which contains all the necessary changes. This is very inefficient and opens up the law firm or accounting firm to unnecessary liability if their clients are using defective documents.
You have all experienced this problem. The answer is working on what is called server-side documentation. For my client and his salespeople, they know that if they download the document using a browser* (or for the somewhat more technologically sophisticated, using FTP (File Transfer Protocol) software), they are always using the right lease agreement.
(* They can use a Browser since we land them on a secure page that requires them to use their personal password that generate for them.)
Now you can see how efficient this can be and you can see how I have intricated myself into my clients affairs (I control their documentation: information is power.) So build a PWS, use social networking tools and use them for more than just a nice brochure or puff piece about yourself.
Deal Maker or Deal Breaker?
The passage of time and being good at keeping files only gets you so far. You need to be a deal maker rather than a deal breaker to really become a permanent part of your clients’ ecosystem.
As an Accountant, it is much easier to simply be a bean counter; do the double entry bookkeeping and leave it at that. But anyone can be good at that and therefore you can be replaced pretty quickly if someone else will do it a bit cheaper.
One accounting firm that I know, intricates their clients by providing their management and ownership with what I call Personal CFOs; that is, they know, how busy these people are so they have bookkeepers visit them in their offices or in their homes to do personal bill paying, make personal deposits and generally handle personal financial affairs. These bookkeepers tie into their tax practice: so that personal tax returns are a breeze. And because they are doing the personal work, they can provide advice on tax strategies for the business too. As my father, the later Professor O. J. Firestone once told me: “Son, be proud to pay your taxes in a great country like Canada. But don’t pay more than you have to.”
One young lawyer I worked with in my early days, Bill (not his real name) was a funny, profane, charismatic guy who was a terrific deal maker. He had so much charm that he could get away with saying practically anything. I remember at one meeting we had with a fantastically wealthy home builder, Ian (not his real name either), Bill said: “Now Ian, I know you want to pay $6 million and Bruce wants to sell for seven. There’s no f’ing way Bruce is going to sell at your price and no f’ing way you’re going pay his price so let’s stop frigging around and cut the crap and you both agree to six and a half and let’s go get a glass of wine right f’ing now.”
I couldn’t believe it but Ian, who was a real gentleman, burst out laughing and we made the deal. Not I am not suggesting that you brush up on your slang but I can tell you without a doubt that the vast majority of accountants and lawyers that I have known are deal breakers not deal makers. You want more clients, better clients, more interesting work? Then be the latter type of professional, OK? Find ways to make things happen for your clients.
Quick what do Gary Bettman and Bob Goodenow have in common? They are both lawyers. Together, they led the NHL and NHLPA into the abyss during the NHL’s 2004-2005 lockout of their players. Why would you send two lawyers into a room by themselves to work out or negotiate anything?
Lawyers are trained to state the case for their client in a forceful and convincing manner. No doubt Gary and Bob do this supremely well. They are both super bright, talented guys but I wouldn’t call either of them deal makers. They needed to have players and owners in the room without which, nothing was going to happen.
It takes years to unlearn what your schooling and profession have taught you. But if you want to become indispensable to your clients, you need to do this.
Billing your Clients
Clients hate the feeling of being nickel and dimed.
I can remember the day that Ted Beament completed a large and complex negotiation for my family. It was a long time ago now—1972 and the final agreement had been reached to gift the Firestone Family Group of Seven Art Collection to the people of Ontario. The Ontario Heritage Foundation took ownership and control of the Collection and the family home in Rockcliffe Park (which was then used as a museum to hold the Art).
Mr. Beament, a former Captain in the Canadian Armed Forces and a WWII hero, had returned to Ottawa after the War to create his own legal practice. He was successful; his reputation for integrity and competence was exemplary.
Ted had two bills that day for my father, Professor O. J. Firestone. “Jack,” he said. “I have two bills for you. The first one totals $ _______ which is for our time and disbursements in this matter. The second one is for $ _______ more. Now if you don’t want to pay the second one, I’ll tear it up right now. But in the past, you know that sometimes I have adjusted our firm’s billings down because the results for you weren’t worth paying those kinds of fees for and I didn’t think it was fair for you to pay them. But in this matter, I feel that the results have been extraordinary for you and your family and I think our services are worth more to you than just our time on this.”
My father picked up the second invoice and said: “Ted, you’re right.”
Customer Churn and Horsepower
I tell my students, that it takes years to create a great business. Sir Terrence Matthews (founder of Mitel, Newbridge, March Networks and many other firms) told me it takes at least 7 to 12 years to build a great business. If it takes Terry 7 to 12 years, it’s probably going to take you and me longer. I also tell them that if you want to learn how to get rich quick, you can leave now. I don’t know how to get rich quick and I am pretty sure that you have better odds of getting rich quick by buying lottery tickets than you do in professional practice or business.
You can’t plan on winning the lottery but you can plan to get rich, slowly. Build your practice one client at a time. Even mighty IBM starts off every year at $0. They don’t suddenly go out and sell 85 billion dollars worth of stuff on day 1 of their new fiscal year: they build their business one customer at a time just like you do.
If you have great clients, even if the number of them is small, and you keep them happy, your practice will grow. There is practically nothing worse for a business than customer churn. Churn is very expensive: it takes time, effort and money to attract clients in the first place and to replace them if they leave. The customer that comes in the door and needs a tax return for herself and her spouse isn’t a $1,500 customer. If they stay with you for ten years and all they do with you are personal tax returns, they are a $15,000 client. But if they bring you their business audit and other work and referrals too, they represent a lot more than that.
As your clients develop their careers, they can bring you along for the ride. One of the things that I look for especially in legal work is horsepower. When we were closing the purchase of an expansion franchise with the NHL in December 1991, I remember stopping counting the number of lawyers working on the transaction in Ottawa, Toronto and NYC when I got to 35. As your clients’ businesses grow so do their demands and you need to be able to grow with them.
Timeliness is another one of those crucial elements: you just can’t be late. Whether you are preparing tax returns, closing a transaction, conveying real property, whatever, don’t be late, ever.
A client of mine just fired his law firm of 15 years because they were chronically late. The partner in charge always had a number of good reasons why they were late. But so what? He got fired anyway.
Here is a comment from Dan Warren, CA, who has built a very successful accounting practice by paying attention to quality, reputation, service and also being a part of the solution for his clients instead of being part of the problem:
“I tell our people that if they focus on the quality of their work, have frank and honest communication with their client and (as you say) try to make themselves indispensable, they will be successful.
I have found that as some professionals age, they act as if they are more important than their clients. While they did not start out being arrogant, some seem to develop that attitude. This is the starting of the end in my view. A good dose of humility now and again keeps professionals grounded and focused.
One attribute that is worth mentioning again is responsiveness. I think it is very important for a professional to get back to their clients on a timely basis. Clients notice this and appreciate it. Now it is not always easy to do. I started this email to you this morning and had to run out to a one hour meeting. During that time, I have received 15 emails and 4 phone messages. As already noted, it is a challenge to manage one’s communications, but it is necessary. Being responsive I think is a key attribute.
My final thought deals with providing your client with something more than just the core service—a legal agreement or a financial statement. This is often hard for a young professional to come to grips with. They may feel that they do not have enough experience or that the client may dismiss their ideas. That is a risk that one has to take but in the end; I have found that clients recognize that you are trying to go beyond the core service and give you credit for that.”
Now if you want to have a good meeting with your Banker every year, you need to remember one thing: make a profit. Do you think your Banker wants to hear how many cold calls you made, how many presentations you made, how hard you worked, how much effort you put into business development? No, they really don’t care about any of that. They just want to hear that you got results.
You need to manage your clients, not the other way round. You need to worry about their businesses as if they were your own. You need to push your client so that they are not a roadblock to their own (and your) success.
I have always liked Sigourney Weaver’s character, Ellen Ripley, in the Alien film series. She was the first woman I ever saw in any film that didn’t scream and wait for some hero to come rescue her. She took charge. She adapted well to very rapid changes in her environment. No matter what bad news came her way, she coped. She didn’t sit around trying to figure out who to blame. She just figured out how to survive.
I don’t care whose ‘fault’ it is, just get it done. That’s what your clients really want from you.
Prof Bruce
Copyright. Professor Bruce M. Firestone, Founder, Ottawa Senators, Entrepreneur-in-Residence, Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa, Executive Director, Exploriem.org, Ottawa, Canada.
