The legal market is a very competitive one. Everybody in this market knows this, and a great deal of money is spent attempting to keep ahead of the game.
However, ask yourself whether you are spending sufficient time thinking and whether sufficient value is attached to the process of thinking.
We are all busy doing and reporting back on the doing but are we making the time to take a step back and consider why we are doing it and therefore whether what we are doing is achieving what we want?
Why thinking is important
Thinking allows you to develop strategy and having a strategy is important if you want to get ahead or stay ahead of the competition. Why? Because it enables you to take a step back, think outside the box and formulate a winning business strategy that distinguishes your offering and attracts clients.
Formulating a strategy is fundamental to delivering sustainable business success. The question is: do you want to become Number One or one of many?
Roger L Martin defines strategy as an integrated set of choices which position you on a chosen field of play and enable you to be the best.
Many legal organisations have a business plan but this is not a strategy. Plans are important but they will be a great deal more effective if they have as their touchstone a clear sense of direction – a strategy.
The starting point
Ask yourself:
- On which playing field/s you want your business to play
- How you can win
If you don’t do this, then you are simply playing – not winning.
Building blocks of a successful strategy
A successful strategy requires imagination of the future. And I stress the words “imagination” and “the future”. A strategy should look forward and not be ruled by looking back.
Imagining the future is most effective if you involve a variety of different stakeholders from different parts of the business (eg management, sales, marketing etc) and give them time to do this. External consultants are worth considering as they can also give you an objective and different perspective.
How they conduct the process will be up to them but may involve debate of questions such as:
- What are your business’ capabilities and strengths?
- What particular areas of practice do you want to develop/do you see as having growth potential?
- What are the highest value areas to concentrate on?
- Who are your main competitors? Bear in mind, there may be new competitors alongside traditional ones.
- Who are the clients you want?
- What do those clients want? It is only when you have considered this that you can see how your business can help them.
- How can you best engage with clients in order to develop a relationship?
- How can you be distinctive and different?
Considering these questions will help formulate your strategy and can then be used to start to map out the actions required to achieve it.
We need to talk about data
Lawyers like facts and data analysis can be very helpful in assessing the success of particular actions. However, it should not be the main driver behind developing your strategy.
It is easy to get very hung up on the importance of data and I am not saying that data is not helpful but remember:
- A strategy is not developed by analysing the past. The past is by definition no longer where the playing field is.
- Return on investment (ROI) should involve medium to long term analysis. Initiatives take time to bear fruit. All too often, lawyers are paralysed into inactivity because they want to be reassured that a particular initiative will work and quickly/immediately/yesterday.
- Just because something has not produced great results is not a reason not to have tried it. Successful organisations have to have several initiatives at play and accept that not all will work equally well.
- Business is all about people which means not everything can be quantified.
Finally…
Remember it is never too late to start!
This article is produced with many thanks to the inciteful discussion between Roger L Martin and Jann Schwarz on LinkedIn’s B2B Institute.