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When business gets slow, it’s easy to sink into that lethargic, stuck in place, tired feeling. There’s a solution to that problem and it’s going to take you making a commitment to yourself to do something. It takes action. Do one thing, the next thing, and another thing, and you’re off and running. But, it’s scary. Putting our heads in the sand feels warm, snug, safe, secure and comfortable. Fear is paralyzing. We avoid action when we feel fear. It’s tempting to go back to bed.

I’ve experimented with all kinds of efficiency tips and tricks over the years. Here are the ones that work for me. They won’t work for everybody, but they work for me and the way my days are structured, and you might find them helpful as well.

Too many of us spend too much time studying the problem and procrastinating when it comes to implementing solutions. When the default approach is to simply add the problem to the task list for later consideration then your life and your business are mired in the muck.

Working remotely has become the norm over the last several months. But what about working really remotely – foreign country remotely? I’ve been doing it for years, and COVID has changed the landscape in terms of both the practicality and ethics of moving from place to place. Is working remotely (not just from home) still a viable option?

Back in the day, like six months ago, holiday events were a dime a dozen. You couldn’t stand out from the crowd if you tried. Holiday parties were all pretty much the same. Not anymore.

Every firm needs a system for updating their systems. In a perfect world, system updating will happen spontaneously. The team is using the systems documentation to get the work done so they notice when things need adjusting due to a change. They pull up the documentation and update the text, or audio, or video. Just like that – things are back in working order.

It’s entirely reasonable that a business built for one person breaks when it gets to three. It’s even more reasonable that a business built for three people breaks when it gets to ten. It’s obvious that it’s going to happen once someone points it out. It’s just tough to see it when it’s your life and you’re just trying to survive the day.

Maybe there was a time when hanging an “Attorney at Law” sign above your courthouse-adjacent office door worked to get clients. But, if there was such a time and place I missed it. I started practicing law a long time ago and even then we were beyond the hanging out a shingle days of yore. You need to take action if you want people to start looking for you, and no matter what you do to create awareness, it’ll be more effective if you target your efforts at a small group of people. That’s true because it takes a while for people to notice and remember you. They need more than one interaction. You’re going to have to hammer your existence home by repeatedly interacting with the same group of humans.

If you’re saying things in your marketing that another firm could say, you might as well not bother. Those things are invisible. Your pages filled with “excellent, experienced, and affordable” are blank to the reader. You might as well leave in the “lorem ipsum” text and stock photos that came with the theme. In fact, you might as well just leave in the fake address and “Business name here” in the title bar. There’s no there there. They say nothing. They are erased in the minds of prospective clients.

Maybe I’m just paranoid because I travel constantly. I worry about our technology and data getting lost or stolen. I’ve spent considerable time thinking through what would happen if we left our things in a taxi or circumstances resulted in our losing our devices.

These publications aren’t a scam. I don’t think they lie to us or cheat us – they just prey on our egos. They’re transparent about what they’re doing, how they’re doing it, and who they’re doing it too. Super Lawyers is part of Thomson Reuters so I’m sure they’ve got great lawyers keeping them out scam territory and firmly in the poking lawyer egos into pulling out credit card territory. They take your money and they massage your ego. I like a good ego massage. It’s like flying business class. The flight attendant knows my name, offers me slippers, and gives me hot nuts. What’s not to like?

There are plenty of things partners can do together. They can each contribute to the hiring process providing candidate insight and observations. Some partners are better at supervising the accounting. Some are great with technology. Everyone should contribute, but the decision-maker should decide. Contributing is different than deciding.

The law practice of your dreams is a realistic option. Look around and you’ll see that some already have it. It’s your turn if you’ll step up and take it. There’s room for more than one law firm just like the one you want to build. There’s no reason it can’t happen fast – if you take action, set the right pace, and contribute a sufficient amount of energy.

The temptation is to do all the marketing. There are so many options that we risk doing things pushed sales reps and skipping the essentials. Cover the essentials first. Today lets talk about the bare minimum. These are the things every firm should do. Use these to stand out from the crowd. Differentiate yourself. Be unique. Be a little weird. Tell your story and, more importantly, demonstrate understanding and empathy for your prospective client with the words you use with each of these tactics. Getting known requires standing out from the crowd. Being liked requires being human with normal flaws, struggles, and shortcomings. Being trusted requires listening like it matters. Your marketing gives you a chance to connect with the right people, offer the right kind of help, and build the law firm you’ve always wanted to build. Make sure you’ve got these essentials covered. Convertkit is one of the tools I’ve used to make millions of dollars. I used it in the law firm, and I’ve used it to build Rosen Institute. In fact, email marketing is the primary tool we use for Rosen Institute.

Your vision for the practice is important. Arguably, it’s the most important thing you can spend time getting right. But few of us do. The worst part isn’t that we don’t sit down and outline a vision for the business and the lifestyle that we want, but that we often come up with a new vision too often, and as we flit from idea to idea, and shiny object to shiny object, we aren’t taking the small incremental steps to get what we really want. Rosen Institute VisionQuest 2021 is a month-long program where I’ll ask you the questions you don’t want to be asked, and demand the time you’ve been reluctant to spend, so that at the end, you will have a vision for your practice and your life, as well as a clear roadmap of the steps required to achieve it and the support to get your team on board and make it happen. Join me for VisionQuest2021 Listen in Browser | Download MP3 | Subscribe in iTunes

I meet so many lawyers looking for the new, new thing. Sometimes it’s a practice area change or turning their practice into a membership site or a workshop or going virtual. Sometimes it’s a technology change. Systematically managing your practice, aggressively pursuing new clients, using great technology, and implementing modern financial approaches is sensible. Changing these things with frequency is not sensible. Don’t stop being curious, don’t stop reading, don’t stop talking to people about significant innovations – but, stick to your vision. Make it real. Go faster if you need to get on to the next thing, but make this thing happen first. There’s plenty of time for your big idea to be part of the next vision you create.

It’s not the big things that turn the vision into reality. It’s the little things. It’s the daily, weekly, monthly things we do that matter. Joining the gym feels like big progress. But, real progress is going for a vigorous walk each morning for fifty years. Buying practice management software feels like big progress. But, real progress comes from a weekly management meeting with your team. We’re pretty good at ignoring the things we already know in order to try something different.

Lawyer marketing is a self-love fest. We’re all beyond amazing when we look at our websites, advertisements, and business cards. We emphasize what we perceive as a positive and we don’t even mention anything we think might be seen as a negative. Marketing is about putting our best foot forward so we want to demonstrate our credibility and trustworthiness. We believe that we need to puff ourselves up, appear strong, invulnerable, and demonstrate our mastery of the universe. But think of a time when someone came to you with an admission of a problem. You listen harder, you lean in, you quickly move into helper mode. That’s true whether it’s a client or a friend. We pay attention, we’re open to hearing what’s being said, and we’re automatically more interested.

I plead guilty to being a delegation fanatic. Some say I’m lazy. I claim that I’m leveraging myself into greater efficiency. I hand things off to employees, delegate to anyone I can find, and outsource work to countries most of us can’t find on a map. But as much as I love letting go of tasks, projects, and responsibilities so that I can skinny-dip in a lake in Guatemala, there is one thing I’d never let go. All of my delegating and outsourcing would come to an end if I let go of this one thing because it’s the key driver or all of our success.

When you need advice, you should, of course, ask the person most qualified to give you advice. But instead, we ask someone with barely any experience. We ask the associate in the next office or the friend from law school who’s always willing to share an uninformed opinion, or the courier who doesn’t really have a clue. Why?