A Haven For Straight Talk: <b>A Firm Foundation</b>

They work in a world others only glimpse. Their skills and knowledge are sharpened by years of practice, trial and error, observation and reflection. They speak a language we do not always understand. The stress and demands of their work are extreme, and yet, in the public eye, they often seem strangely calm and balanced. They navigate between success and failure, and one wrong move can mean disaster.

I'm speaking, of course, of surfers.

Not what you were expecting? Well, ask yourself this ' how many other professions could the above paragraph describe? Doctors? Teachers? Actors? Our minds are very good at filling in blanks. We jump to conclusions and round out an entire scene from just a few details.

An Elephant Isn't Just 'Not A Snake'

You know the parable. Three blind men are investigating an elephant for the first time. One feels its leg and declares, “Elephants are like trees.” One grabs the trunk and says, “No! Elephants are like snakes!” The third feels around and states, “No! They are like a smooth, ripe melon.” To which the first replies, “That's my bald head you're stroking, you moron!”

Anyway. How many times, in a marketing or administrative context, have you heard, “The practice of law is different” or, “It's not like other businesses,” or “It's a profession, not an industry”? My personal count is up to 206.

Yes. It is different. So is healthcare. So are hospitality, software development, dry goods, hair styling, recreational kayaking and tax preparation. All businesses are differently different. But when it comes to marketing legal services, many lawyers seem to believe that the lessons of 150 years of modern business history are irrelevant. Because the practice of law is somehow “fundamentally” unique. Take, for instance, advertising. If I may distill and paraphrase a few hundred hours of censure; “Advertising doesn't matter. People would never buy something as important as legal service based on ads. Cars, vacations, houses, presidential candidates, an unhealthy body-image, psychoactive drugs, music, social issues, religion, healthcare, charities and political programs, sure. But never legal service. And don't even mention that asinine 'brand' crap or I'll 'brand' the Nike swoosh on your forehead.”

Sound familiar? Don't get me wrong; you can't sell legal service the way you sell doughnuts or shoes. But after we get done talking about how different the business of law is, let me suggest that we look at the goals, measurement practices and process management issues that marketing addresses in other industries. I want to completely ignore marketing programs, deliverables, campaigns or activities for now. Discussions of specific actions often lead back into arguments about how law is different. So, for today, let's take a look at “foundational” marketing stuff.

Goals: I Want You To Want … Something

One of marketing's chief roles in many industries and businesses is to help define the top-level business goals of the organization. Why is marketing involved? Because marketing touches all the pieces of the puzzle. Some typical marketing/business goals that are common to almost any organization:

• Net profit ' what you've got after the money goes through the funnel.
• Customer satisfaction ' how likely your clients are to stick with you.
• Employee satisfaction ' how likely your people are to stick with you.
• Market share ' how much of the “pie” you get.
• Brand/category recognition ' how well people know you and what you do.

If you can honestly say that none of these issues is important to your firm, then by all means, ignore marketing. Just so we're clear, if you think none of those issues are appropriate goals for a law firm, you are wrong.

Measurement: On The Road To Somewhere

In their song, “Road to Nowhere,” David Byrne sings, “Well we know where we're going/but we don't know where we've been.” That is, in a nutshell, the perfect way to get to “nowhere.”

Just about every business in the world, though ' and every large company ' keeps careful track of their performance related to goals like those listed above and many others. They are the gauges by which you measure the health of your organization, both at any given point in time and over time.

Goals without measurements are like sports without scores. It may be fun to screw around with a bat and ball on the back lot with your buddies, but that doesn't cut it in the majors. Same holds true for businesses. If you aren't measuring progress towards goals on a regular basis, you will have no idea if anything you are doing is truly successful. And by “anything,” I mean “everything.”

We see countless examples in the legal industry of firms that “do something” that gets in the news ' new offices, new advertising campaign, new mergers, new partners, new clients ' only to learn later that the effort was a spectacular failure. My strong sense is that many of these activities took place without a measurement system to both define the bounds of success and failure, and direct efforts over time to maximize results. Here's a riddle I love that illustrates this tendency:

Q: What's the quickest way to make your $75 million-a-year firm into a $100 million-a-year firm?

A: Merge with another $75 million-a-year firm.

That's an exaggeration … perhaps … but you get the picture. Each of the goals mentioned above has multiple associated measurements. Profit, for example, can be measured firm wide, by office, industry, practice group, client, matter, activity and attorney. I'm consistently amazed that a profession that measures its work in 10ths-of-an-hour increments isn't more concerned about which of those increments are most profitable. The old saw about “80% of the business comes from 20% of the clients” is often a misleading understatement. In some cases, 90% of a firm's profit may come from as little as 5% of its matters.

If you don't know how your firm fares in the above areas, get cracking on a measurement program ASAP. Without good measurements, you're shooting arrows in the dark. Not only can't you tell if you're on target, but you may be shooting yourself without knowing it.

Process Management: Getting Better All The Time

Quality management defines two types of progress; breakthrough and kaizen. Breakthroughs occur when something extraordinary happens – like when 3M accidentally invented Post-It Notes. Breakthroughs are almost impossible to engineer and can never be anticipated. Kaizen (continuous) improvements, though, can happen all the time.

The basic idea is to set in place cyclical, self-reinforcing processes and then refine them over and over. Like the “Circle of Life” in “The Lion King,” good marketing processes feed themselves over time. The cycle usually looks something like this:

• State an objective or goal
• Measure your current position in that area
• Define a program intended to increase performance to that goal
• Implement the program
• Measure the success of the program
• Repeat

That's a highly simplified version of a process blueprint, but it touches on all the required elements of a successful marketing program: goals, measurements, planning, execution, repetition. Good marketing departments will often have dozens of processes running at any given time.

Every major marketing activity needs a process plan or it will suffer from chaotic degeneration. For example, if you host a seminar and just invite a bunch of people, give some talks and sweep up afterwards, you're not getting any ongoing knowledge about how well ' or even what ' the program provided your firm, the attendees or the participants. You need to have a structured process for all your seminars so that each one is better, more efficient and more productive. Without a good process, your activities may actually be getting worse over time. Which is, I hope we can agree, a bad thing.

Working Hard, But Hardly Working

Lawyers are some of the hardest-working people I know. Long hours, lots of travel, high demands, loads of stress. To say that lawyers can't handle hard work is nonsense. But though they are working hard, much of their marketing is hardly working. Why? Because instead of starting with the basics ' the foundations of marketing ' firms jump in and do “marketing stuff” without relating it to their core business issues. Start your marketing by defining goals, creating measurement systems and developing coherent processes. Once those are in place, your future marketing programs will begin to make sense.  

They work in a world others only glimpse. Their skills and knowledge are sharpened by years of practice, trial and error, observation and reflection. They speak a language we do not always understand. The stress and demands of their work are extreme, and yet, in the public eye, they often seem strangely calm and balanced. They navigate between success and failure, and one wrong move can mean disaster.

I'm speaking, of course, of surfers.

Not what you were expecting? Well, ask yourself this ' how many other professions could the above paragraph describe? Doctors? Teachers? Actors? Our minds are very good at filling in blanks. We jump to conclusions and round out an entire scene from just a few details.

An Elephant Isn't Just 'Not A Snake'

You know the parable. Three blind men are investigating an elephant for the first time. One feels its leg and declares, “Elephants are like trees.” One grabs the trunk and says, “No! Elephants are like snakes!” The third feels around and states, “No! They are like a smooth, ripe melon.” To which the first replies, “That's my bald head you're stroking, you moron!”

Anyway. How many times, in a marketing or administrative context, have you heard, “The practice of law is different” or, “It's not like other businesses,” or “It's a profession, not an industry”? My personal count is up to 206.

Yes. It is different. So is healthcare. So are hospitality, software development, dry goods, hair styling, recreational kayaking and tax preparation. All businesses are differently different. But when it comes to marketing legal services, many lawyers seem to believe that the lessons of 150 years of modern business history are irrelevant. Because the practice of law is somehow “fundamentally” unique. Take, for instance, advertising. If I may distill and paraphrase a few hundred hours of censure; “Advertising doesn't matter. People would never buy something as important as legal service based on ads. Cars, vacations, houses, presidential candidates, an unhealthy body-image, psychoactive drugs, music, social issues, religion, healthcare, charities and political programs, sure. But never legal service. And don't even mention that asinine 'brand' crap or I'll 'brand' the Nike swoosh on your forehead.”

Sound familiar? Don't get me wrong; you can't sell legal service the way you sell doughnuts or shoes. But after we get done talking about how different the business of law is, let me suggest that we look at the goals, measurement practices and process management issues that marketing addresses in other industries. I want to completely ignore marketing programs, deliverables, campaigns or activities for now. Discussions of specific actions often lead back into arguments about how law is different. So, for today, let's take a look at “foundational” marketing stuff.

Goals: I Want You To Want … Something

One of marketing's chief roles in many industries and businesses is to help define the top-level business goals of the organization. Why is marketing involved? Because marketing touches all the pieces of the puzzle. Some typical marketing/business goals that are common to almost any organization:

• Net profit ' what you've got after the money goes through the funnel.
• Customer satisfaction ' how likely your clients are to stick with you.
• Employee satisfaction ' how likely your people are to stick with you.
• Market share ' how much of the “pie” you get.
• Brand/category recognition ' how well people know you and what you do.

If you can honestly say that none of these issues is important to your firm, then by all means, ignore marketing. Just so we're clear, if you think none of those issues are appropriate goals for a law firm, you are wrong.

Measurement: On The Road To Somewhere

In their song, “Road to Nowhere,” David Byrne sings, “Well we know where we're going/but we don't know where we've been.” That is, in a nutshell, the perfect way to get to “nowhere.”

Just about every business in the world, though ' and every large company ' keeps careful track of their performance related to goals like those listed above and many others. They are the gauges by which you measure the health of your organization, both at any given point in time and over time.

Goals without measurements are like sports without scores. It may be fun to screw around with a bat and ball on the back lot with your buddies, but that doesn't cut it in the majors. Same holds true for businesses. If you aren't measuring progress towards goals on a regular basis, you will have no idea if anything you are doing is truly successful. And by “anything,” I mean “everything.”

We see countless examples in the legal industry of firms that “do something” that gets in the news ' new offices, new advertising campaign, new mergers, new partners, new clients ' only to learn later that the effort was a spectacular failure. My strong sense is that many of these activities took place without a measurement system to both define the bounds of success and failure, and direct efforts over time to maximize results. Here's a riddle I love that illustrates this tendency:

Q: What's the quickest way to make your $75 million-a-year firm into a $100 million-a-year firm?

A: Merge with another $75 million-a-year firm.

That's an exaggeration … perhaps … but you get the picture. Each of the goals mentioned above has multiple associated measurements. Profit, for example, can be measured firm wide, by office, industry, practice group, client, matter, activity and attorney. I'm consistently amazed that a profession that measures its work in 10ths-of-an-hour increments isn't more concerned about which of those increments are most profitable. The old saw about “80% of the business comes from 20% of the clients” is often a misleading understatement. In some cases, 90% of a firm's profit may come from as little as 5% of its matters.

If you don't know how your firm fares in the above areas, get cracking on a measurement program ASAP. Without good measurements, you're shooting arrows in the dark. Not only can't you tell if you're on target, but you may be shooting yourself without knowing it.

Process Management: Getting Better All The Time

Quality management defines two types of progress; breakthrough and kaizen. Breakthroughs occur when something extraordinary happens – like when 3M accidentally invented Post-It Notes. Breakthroughs are almost impossible to engineer and can never be anticipated. Kaizen (continuous) improvements, though, can happen all the time.

The basic idea is to set in place cyclical, self-reinforcing processes and then refine them over and over. Like the “Circle of Life” in “The Lion King,” good marketing processes feed themselves over time. The cycle usually looks something like this:

• State an objective or goal
• Measure your current position in that area
• Define a program intended to increase performance to that goal
• Implement the program
• Measure the success of the program
• Repeat

That's a highly simplified version of a process blueprint, but it touches on all the required elements of a successful marketing program: goals, measurements, planning, execution, repetition. Good marketing departments will often have dozens of processes running at any given time.

Every major marketing activity needs a process plan or it will suffer from chaotic degeneration. For example, if you host a seminar and just invite a bunch of people, give some talks and sweep up afterwards, you're not getting any ongoing knowledge about how well ' or even what ' the program provided your firm, the attendees or the participants. You need to have a structured process for all your seminars so that each one is better, more efficient and more productive. Without a good process, your activities may actually be getting worse over time. Which is, I hope we can agree, a bad thing.

Working Hard, But Hardly Working

Lawyers are some of the hardest-working people I know. Long hours, lots of travel, high demands, loads of stress. To say that lawyers can't handle hard work is nonsense. But though they are working hard, much of their marketing is hardly working. Why? Because instead of starting with the basics ' the foundations of marketing ' firms jump in and do “marketing stuff” without relating it to their core business issues. Start your marketing by defining goals, creating measurement systems and developing coherent processes. Once those are in place, your future marketing programs will begin to make sense.