In this episode, Steve Fretzin discusses:
Key Takeaways:
"Really thinking about developing your brand now is the right time. To just sit back, let this all blow over, and hope for the best is probably not the strongest play right now. You're going to want to get active with calling people, emailing people, content development, technology development - this is going to be a make or break for a lot of people." — Steve Fretzin
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Email: Steve@Fretzin.com
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Call Steve directly at 847-602-6911
Show notes by Podcastologist Chelsea Taylor-Sturkie
Audio production by Turnkey Podcast Productions. You're the expert. Your podcast will prove it.
Narrator 0:05
You're listening to be that lawyer, life changing strategies and resources for growing a successful law practice. Each episode, your host, author and lawyer coach Steve Fretzin will take a deeper dive, helping you grow your law practice in less time with greater results. Now, here's your host, Steve Fretzin!
Steve Fretzin 0:27
Well, hello, everyone, welcome to be that lawyer. My name is Steve Frederickson and today we're going to do something a little different. We're going to focus on the COVID-19. What do you do as an attorney to continue to grow your practice, maintain your practice, you know, deal with this situation from home. And we're definitely living through some kind of unprecedented and challenging time everybody's feeling it. And it's unchartered territory. So I'm just here to give you I don't know, maybe 15 minutes of some relief, or some information or some tips or ideas or suggestions about how to deal with this thing, from a business standpoint, as many of you are kind of dealing with, you know, alright, so just trying to maintain my clients, or how do I grow business during this time? Or how do I set myself up to grow business, I'm going to kind of give you a five constructive ways to continue to maintain and grow your practice. And, again, I don't think it's going to be exactly the traditional stuff I normally teach or talk about, but I think if you can pull a couple tips away from this session, then it'll be worth your while. Starting off, it's sort of step number one, I think, is really taking some time to evaluate your personal and business situation, really looking at what's changed from business standpoint, based on the practice area that you're in the area that you're in Chicago versus New York versus San Diego, looking at your situation, are you at a big firm a mid market? Are you a solo? And really thinking about, you know, what are the challenges that you're facing as it relates to keeping your business going and profitable, and also looking where the opportunities may be? Where do they exist, for example, one of my friends is in construction law. And you know, he's basically she's saying that it's, you know, kind of shutting down or slowing down quite a bit. But his wife is in estate planning. So he's really stepping up to help her maintain and build that estate planning practice, because right now is a great time to get people's estates in order, there's a lot of potential, you know, issue and death and uncertainty in the future. And estate planning might be, you know, the greatest way to kind of get organized with your personal life to make sure that if anything happens to you or your family, that you're protected litigation, there's going to be a lot of people suing a lot of people with insurance and health care, and, you know, employment issues and people not getting paid, it's going to be a free for all in litigation. So again, if you're in a full service firm, you may want to look at the cross marketing opportunities, you may want to look at, where your area may slow down, what areas are picking up that you could step in and really focus on. And also consider there may be some new offerings to your contacts, clients, prospects, etc. Because of the way things have changed, you know, maybe there's some new types of contracts that they need to get involved in, or some maybe, you know, some new technology that you could offer that would help to, you know, mitigate the issue and move things forward. So really just looking at the opportunities as they exist, for me just just talking out loud, you know, a lot of people maybe losing their legal jobs, and especially in big firms. And so, you know, you have to start your own practice and go solo. So I'm going to be putting out quite a bit of content on how to start your own practice and, and go solo and do it in a way that's going to be, you know, maybe a jumpstart versus, you know, going solo, and then just struggling for six months to a year before you figure it out. So these are the kinds of things that we need to be thinking about as we evaluate our personal and business situations and try to look to the future and how we can maintain and grow. Step number two, or the second thing is once you've sort of figured out step number one is maybe look at readjusting or rewriting or even starting to write a new business plan. And the general direction of this plan doesn't need to change off of what you may have heard me say in the past, I mean, look at adjusting what your objective is or was. So if your objective was, you know, at the beginning of the year to grow from 200,000 to 400,000 and new originations, you know, you may have to look at changing your objective, you know, maybe your objective is keeping all of your clients that you currently have, maybe it's learning a new practice area that you need to focus on because yours is slowing down or has or may stop. Look, it could be numbers, it could be maintenance, it could be looking at new directions, whatever the case is, write down an objective that you think you need to adjust for, for the rest of the year for the next six months. And that's a good starting point of looking at you know, making some changes Are alterations to your current plan? Once you have that objective in place, maybe look at defining some strategies of how you can achieve that objective. If it's new technology that you need to learn in order to accomplish the objective, well, then you need to set up strategies to do that. If you're saying, you know what, right now, it's a great time to do some brand building, which I'm going to get into in a minute or so, you know, maybe look at it, what do you need to do to start building your brand? Is it focusing on cross marketing? Is it focusing on client retention, obviously, face to face and networking is is slim, is it something where you need to bring in a zoom meeting like I do, and really focus on trying to get some networking together, maybe there's some zoom meeting, networking that can be done with existing groups, you've got a bunch of strategic partners, you're in estate planning, and you know, wealth managers, and you know, accountants and everything. And maybe you want to get three or four of them on a zoom meeting and hold some group powwow sessions on how to do business. Okay. So these are the kinds of strategies and then obviously, tactics, the actionable things that you need to do. And always talk about tactics, much like a story, there should be a beginning, a middle and an end, or, in this case, there should be some planning steps, there should be some execution steps. And obviously, some follow up steps. So whatever your objective is, look at the strategies as the ways to accomplish the objective. And then the tactics, kind of explain how you're going to do the strategies accomplish the strategy. So it's basically, you know, working from micro to macro. And so hopefully, again, if you're, if you're concerned or worried about a plan, or putting a new plan in place, you know, you can certainly email me or call me, if you have any questions, I'm happy to, you know, take some time to maybe give you a 1520 minute consultation, I do that, that's no issue for me, I'm happy to do it. The third thing that you may want to consider is developing your personal brand, or your firm during a crisis, this may be the right time to step up and develop some unique content, it might be an opportunity to conduct surveys, people are available, interview people of influence, get the take on on a particular subject, you know, if you're in family law, you can, you know, do some surveying or some some conducting or, you know, develop some branding around that, you know, if you're feeling like now is, you know, people are trapped together, and they've got to deal with, with being alone with their families that, you know, if there's an issue there, you know, maybe share some, some content or write some content unique to that. So think about your practice area, think about the issues and the needs of the people that are in that area, and develop some unique content. Think about writing for publication, if you've never had the time to write because you've been a busy lawyer. Well, now's the time to write, start thinking about publications where your audience may be, consider starting a blog thinking about social media posting. Now, I'm hearing from people well, I don't want to post on social media, because there's so much so much activity, my information will just get lost it Yeah. Is it is it true, yes. But at the same time, there's never been more people looking at social media and spending time on LinkedIn. So this may be the right opportunity. If you have good quality content, and you understand the basics of how to use social media, which I'm going to talk about in a few minutes. That may be something to do and then of course, hosting webinars, you know, now's a great time, you've got a captive audience, people are at home, they're kind of desperate for for anything. I mean, people are hungry for content. I just downloaded a book on my Kindle of book that I read many years ago that I just haven't really, you know, wanted to reread. So I'm now I'm rereading books. That's how desperate I'm here for things to do. It's a great book, by the way, but anyway, and then thinking about specialization, thinking about, you know, maybe even specializing on a special area. So if that makes sense. But the idea that you're already an estate planner, maybe there's an area of estate planning that you could step up and specialize in, right? So it's, it's taking your content deeper and taking your brand deeper, there's things that may be necessary right now that were necessary two months ago, maybe dive into that and look at that from another angle. So really thinking about you're developing your brand, now is the right time, I think, to just sit back and just let this all blow over and hope for the best. Probably not the strongest play right now. You're going to want to get active with calling people emailing people content development, technology development, you know, this is going to be a make or break for a lot of people, you know, 3 million people, you know, going for unemployment. What's this week going to look like? What's next week gonna look like? You know, you're either relevant or you're not. So I would highly recommend Step three, developing your personal brand firm during a crisis. Yeah, do it. Okay. Another since we mentioned social media. Another thing that I really like to recommend is thinking about LinkedIn, Facebook, certainly but LinkedIn, great time to update your profile. Great time to update your summary your title. How do you want be perceived your background get a better picture up, you know, customize your URL, there's a button for that. Anything you can do to just start getting really aggressive with being professional and being seen, that's your online profile that might be more important than your website right now. So definitely update your profile. Look at growing your base. Right now I'm in the process of inviting, I don't know, 15 to 25 attorneys into my LinkedIn every day. And I've been doing this for months. But it's a great way to build your base. I'm not saying this for everybody. But even if you just invited three or four people a day that were relevant to your business, prospective clients, strategic partners, existing clients, people that are relevant to you, that's going to be a great way to to spend your time right now to build your base of contacts, people that could eventually get your newsletter, see your social media posts, the bigger the base you have of relevant people, the more applicable your social media posts will be. Number three is, you know, be social, it's social media for a reason. So the idea that you could be again, posting content, commenting on other people's content, sharing people's content, it's a great way to build relationships with people that are like minded to yourself. And so again, getting active with it, I've moved from doing three social media posts a week to doing five, they're not self promoting, okay, so I've seen a lot of people self promoting, not a great time, okay, this is this is a crisis, this is a time to be helpful. This is a time to offer advice. This is the time to, you know, offer help, now's a great time to educate. And so so that's how you're going to build your brand, not by saying, hey, look how great I am, I just won this award. So I'd really focus on that. And then lastly, try to find some new contacts, people are pretty desperate for new relationships and new stuff. And so an invitation from you to join them on LinkedIn. And it's someone relevant to you. Again, it could be surfing through your contacts, contacts, that could be looking for prospects connecting with clients, it could be looking at companies that you've always wanted to get into. And again, I'm not saying to hard press sell anybody certainly don't do that. But you can connect with new people offer advice, offer value offer to be helpful, and be a resource. That's really the focus right now. And again, it's a good time to build your brand and be useful. So that would be Step four, would be leveraging LinkedIn, and really trying to develop some new high level connections. And I'm going to kind of wrap things up with building client loyalty, really thinking about checking in on your clients checking in on your existing and maybe past strategic partners, people that have referred you, how's it going? How are they doing with their family? How's business? What can you do to help, also, it may be a good time to check in with past prospects, I'm going to be doing this mostly next week. But just the people that have that have been interested in my services in the past, and they just lost their job, or they're just really worried about what to do. Because they, they they sought me out to hire me, they didn't hire me, Okay, no problem. But now maybe things are even worse. And so it might be the right time to reach out to people. And again, I'm not hard selling anybody, I'm just trying to be a resource. And if it's time to engage, it's time to engage, but I'm not, you know, going to, you know, be aggressive with anything. Certainly that's not my style. And it's not what I teach. An example of from this is, you know, for example, in family law, you've got, you know, couples that are together, and they were having a real rough time a year ago, well, now they're stuck in a house together, how's that going? Probably not so well. So, you know, maybe reaching out to past prospects, you know, Family Law, personal injury, you know, really anybody anything like that is going to be maybe a good timing to check in on people, you can certainly do it in another way offering value. As I mentioned before, you know, sending out articles providing free advice, make connections for other people also offer to help them personally, maybe you can find that they're volunteering somewhere, and you can help by volunteering as well. So things are tough all over. And I think it's a great time to really build some relationships during a crisis, it's a kind of a good time to do that. And the last thing I'll kind of mention is, you know, really try to stay healthy, you're at home, you might want to consider setting up short, you know, meetings during the day, instead of longer meetings. You know, break up things between your family and your work time, focus on taking walks and staying fit. I know, my wife is a fitness instructor half the time when she's not teaching high school. And she is, I mean, she's doing a new class every day, a fitness class every day, just through zoom meeting, she's taking these classes. And again, it's really important for her and for others to stay fit. I'm going to be trying to pick up a tennis game soon. I know that's that's somewhat questionable, but I think far enough apart if they keep the Nets up on the courts, I'll get some Tennyson you know, maybe twice a week if possible. And again, really focus on the balance between Family and working and, and staying fit and eating healthy. And yeah, have a drink, but also, you know, get that balance. And so, you know, I'm going to wrap things up there and just say, you know, look, I hope that everybody got, you know, one or two, three ideas from this podcast we're all dealing with sort of unprecedented are really unprecedented territory. And I think we really have to leverage the resources that are in front of us. Anyone on this that's listening to my podcast would like a free copy of one of my three books, go on Amazon, review the different options, just email me at Steve at Fred's and calm, I'll send you a free copy. That's no problem. If you want to buy the hardcover because you'd like to write in the books, you know, they're what 1520 bucks, I think it's a good time to make a very small investment like that. Pay help pay for my son's 529 by the way. Anyway, listen, everybody, focus, stay healthy, stay positive. We'll get through this together. And I want to thank you for being a listener. Please feel free to share my podcast be that lawyer with your friends and other lawyers that you know, and hopefully enjoy today's show and that you're one step closer to being that lawyer confident organized in a skill Rainmaker. Take care of everybody.
Narrator 16:16
Thanks for listening to be that lawyer, life changing strategies and resources for growing a successful law practice. Visit Steve's website fretzin.com. For additional information, and to stay up to date on the latest legal business development and marketing trends. For more information and important links about today's episode, check out today's show notes.