Business plan tips and formats

If you already have a solid business plan, please don’t read this week’s post.  Use the time you save to follow up with clients and prospects.  When it comes to legal marketing, every second counts.

For everyone else, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:  If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll never get there.  Efficient business development must start from a plan.   

Plans can be short or they can be long, but all should target a particular group of potential clients, and list tasks that will help to build relationships with them, and to get new business.  Many lawyers seem to have trouble developing plans that make the best use of their limited marketing time, so I recently participated in a panel on this topic with Betsy Huntley, Director of Marketing at Choate, Hall & Stewart; Philip Austin, Director of Client Service at Nixon Peabody; and Allison Nussbaum, Manager of Business Development at Goodwin Procter.  Our session was called “How to help lawyers develop better business plans, and assure follow-up” at the 2007 New England Regional Conference of the Legal Marketing Association.   

To prepare for the panel, we compiled a few sample business plan formats to hand out at the presentation.  If you are looking for new ideas on how to organize your business plan, Download business_plan_handouts.doc to review five business plan formats and tips for success.

Betsy Huntley began the panel by summarizing her observations from over 20 years of experience leading law firm marketing programs at a large, multi-office law firm, an IP boutique and several mid-size general firms.  At every one of these firms, getting lawyers to commit to business plans was an important step in success.  She talked about the power of written goals and cited research showing that the link between written plans and success goes far beyond legal marketing.  One classic psychological study measured personality in college, and then followed people over several decades to see what traits were related to later success.  At graduation, only 3% had written goals for their lives.  A few decades later, the net worth of this select subgroup exceeded the total networth of the other 97%.  Planning pays.

Next to speak was Philip Austin.  Like many legal business developers, he started his career working in sales at a large accounting firm.  Philip noted that when he first switched to law firms, he was surprised that having a written plan wasn’t universally accepted.  “If you think about it, it’s a bit absurd.  How can you run a multi-million dollar business without a plan?”  These days, Philip tells younger partners to think of their practice as an early stage, venture-backed company.  “Think of the senior partners as backers who are investing in your success and your future.  You need to make an argument for the next round of financing.  The business plan is your case to your investors, and your roadmap to success.”

Then Allison Nussbaum talked about her biggest challenge as the primary business development person at a firm with over 800 lawyers:  getting lawyers down to the tactical level.  Many lawyers seem more comfortable with big picture strategies than they are with day to day tactics.  She also talked about the three most common tactics:  cross-selling to other partners, cross-selling directly to clients, and “shaking the trees” in your personal network.

Allison’s emphasis on tactics was a perfect transition to my talk about the format of a one page action plan designed to answer the critical question “What should I do today to increase new business?”  I talked about my recent article in the Journal of the Legal Marketing Association, arguing that the most critical factor in legal selling is time, and about lawyers’ need to prioritize relentlessly to get the maximum results from the time they do have.  Finally, I talked about the importance of measuring results since, as management guru Tom Peters put it in a classic article: What gets measured gets done.

The rest of the session was devoted to discussions with the audience about what works, and what doesn’t.

From my perspective, one of the most interesting results of this session was what happened afterward.  The four of us were chatting about how much we had learned from talking to each other to prepare for the panel, and someone said:  “We should organize regular meetings like this.”  Organizing is my favorite activity, so I volunteered.  The end result was that we formed a new invitation-only, discussion group called the Boston Roundtable on Legal Business Development for the largest firms in Boston.  While there is no shortage of legal marketing groups, as the legal profession has grown it has gotten harder for senior business development managers to find a local forum to discuss critical issues with their peers.  Our first meeting will be held at Choate on February 6 to discuss “How to Track Business Development Opportunities, Activities, and Results.”  In a few weeks, I’ll tell you how it went.