Last month, I wrote that in this month’s article I would walk you through a 5 Step Plan for Building a Process Dependent Law Firm. Before you start this adventure, it’s highly recommended that you have a clear and documented VISION of what your firm is going to look like when it’s fully developed.
It’s just really important to know where you’re going, because how are you ever going to get there if you don’t know where you’re going?
So, in 5–7 years, …
• How much $ will your firm be generating — your annual billings?
• How many attorney’s will you need to produce that amount of revenue?
• How many clients will you need and what will the average case value be?
• How many other office staff will you need to support the attorney’s?
• How profitable will the firm be?
• How would you describe your typical client?
• How many of these prospective clients are in your geographical area?
• How big is your geographical area; city-wide, county-wide, state-wide, larger?
• How are you going to find those prospects and convert them into new clients?
• Who is your competition and what differentiates your firm from them?• What processes are you going to need to achieve your goals?
• Etc… You get the picture.
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I’m not going into this topic in this series. There’s an excellent process that walks you through each of the steps. It’s available to you right now, accessible from your TouchStone account, in the law libraries. And if you’re reading this magazine, you already HAVE a TouchStone account. All of the tools I’m describing in these articles are available to you as part of your Pilmma Membership. Just log into your TouchStone account, go to your Four Key Functions and click on the GOLD button. Then, access the Strategic Planning Process from the General Process Library. Once there, click to download the pre-written process called [STRATEGIC PLANNING] and answer the questions in the Custom Form called Strategic Target Questions.
Claim your Free Law Firm Strategy Session
Claim your Free Law Firm Growth Strategy Session
NOTE: if you need help with this, give us a call at 707–522–6253 and ask for me, Michael Mills. It’s super easy and incredibly valuable. And, if you’re not absolutely convinced you need to complete this simple exercise, read the article at this link: http://bit.ly/BDC-CreateYourVision
The Next Step – Creating Your Organizational Chart
Once you’ve got a clear picture of what your business is going to look like in the near future, it’s time to create the org chart of that future picture.
But First —“Why do I need an org chart?”; you might ask. “We’re just a small firm. We don’t need an org chart. I do this. She does that… What we really need are better employees. We need more sales. We need more…”
I can’t tell you how often I hear that. And I can tell you from my experience assisting with the growth of hundreds of businesses, that having an org chart and using it as a strategic growth tool, will have a profound impact on your firm.
Most firms, as they grow and start adding new employees, do so without a plan and without a strategy. They’re growing. They’re busy. They need some help so they hire someone.
And they develop positions around personalities. They think; “Well I’ve already got this person doing [whatever it is he/she is doing]. And they are also good at [something else]. So I’ll just have them do both things…”
There’s little, if any, thought to ‘who’ they actually need — and by that I mean ‘what position’ and ‘what you need that position to do’.
This is a huge mistake. What you must do is build the ‘positions’ of your firm and then hire the right people to fill those positions.
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Your org chart is the blueprint of your future business. Build it in terms of the positions you’ll need to accomplish the goals you have defined in your vision. It will become a key part of your strategic planning process. It is your plan for how your business processes and work flow need to be structured for you to be able to achieve that future vision.
Think of your organizational chart as an accountability chart. It not only illustrates who will be reporting to who. It defines the positions and the tasks, or processes, of every employee in your business.
Your org chart tells you:
• Who to hire next
• What they will be doing
• What is expected of them
• How they will be able to achieve what is expected of them
• How much you can afford to pay them
• How quickly you need to achieve a return on your investment in them
Without this future thinking, without organizing your growth plan, what often ends up happening is everyone is doing everything. And; “If everyone is accountable for everything, then no one is accountable for anything.”
If you have positions defined in your business, each position has a set of tasks that they will be held accountable to. You can hire a person for that position and train and manage them in the processes that someone in that position needs to follow. It makes it easy to find, train and manage employees to grow your business.
On the other hand, if positions are not defined, employee’s tasks develop around their personalities and what they’re good at. When they leave, you’re stuck struggling to ‘find another person who did all of the things the previous employee did’ instead of finding someone who’s a good fit for a specific position.
Here’s a quick story as an example.
Our client had a really great receptionist. Let’s call her Jennifer. She was ebullient and cheerful. A real people person. When she answered the phone, you could just tell she was smiling. And she always seemed to remember your name and the reason for your call. It was a joy to call their firm.
Our client’s business was growing. He was getting busier and busier, and he was getting behind on his billings and collections. He had not yet hired a bookkeeper. Jennifer was a single mom and she was very cash conscious. She did all of her own home budgeting and bill paying. So, our client decided to hand the company’s bookkeeping duties to her.
After all, she was really good at it. Why shouldn’t she do it, right?
So now the Receptionist was handling the phones, greeting customers, scheduling appointments, processing new client intakes and doing the books.
Things progressed smoothly and efficiently and then Jennifer got married and left the firm. She no longer needed to work.
To replace Jennifer, our client now needed to hire a receptionist who could do bookkeeping. It wasn’t an easy task, so he hired someone with bookkeeping skills to be the receptionist. It was a terrible solution.
The new bookkeeper wasn’t a people person. She was a bookkeeper. She didn’t have the skills to be a receptionist. Now when you called the office, if the phone was answered, it was answered by someone who sounded grumpy — like your call was a nuisance for her. Your call was interrupting her bookkeeping work. She was more used to making collection calls than greeting people.
In short, she was an excellent bookkeeper but a terrible receptionist.
These two positions have two completely different skill sets. It wasn’t long before our client redeveloped the position separating the Bookkeeping duties from the Receptionist duties, creating 2 positions and hiring 2 different employees to cover the very different types of tasks.
If you are looking to create a process dependent business, you need to organize your company around ‘positions’ and the org chart is the tool to help you make that happen. Do not organize your company around ‘personalities’.
As you translate your firm into an organizational strategy, think of it as having Four Key Functions, (I’ll get deeper into these in next month’s article), and organize the firm into work groupings — categories of work that can be accomplished by employees.
For example:
1. You have sales processes, the things you do to GET new business.
2. You have client services processes, the things you DO for your clients.
3. You have all sort of processes that happen behind the scenes, processes for administrative work, financial work, hiring, firing etc, the things you do to run the firm.
4. You have processes to plan and manage the firm’s growth, the things you do to guide the business from where you are today to where you need to get to in the future.
NOTE: If you can’t wait until next month, we do have an e-book on systemizing your firm. That e-book can be found on our website at www.BusinessDesignCorp.com.
Strategy/Management
Sales/Marketing
Operations
Finance/Administration
Then think of the positions you’ll need within each of these key functions or categories. For example; in the Finance and Management Key Function, depending on the size of your firm, you might need a Chief Financial Officer managing a Billing Clerk, an Office Manager, and a Receptionist. In the Sales Key Function, you might need a position for Social Media and Advertising and a Call Center Specialist. And, of course, in Operations, you’re going to need Attorneys, Legal Secretaries and Paralegals.
Your firm might look like this (Figure 4).
Once the positions are defined, write a sentence or two that describes the ‘objective’ of each position.
The OBJECTIVE for a position answers questions like these;
• Why do we have this position?
• How does the firm benefit from this position?
• What are the results that the firm needs someone in this position to accomplish?
If you can’t describe why you need a specific position, ask yourself whether or not you need that position in your firm.
It’s also really valuable that every employee in your firm understands the overall result for which they are accountable.
In summary:
- Create the organizational chart of your future vision
- Use the Key Work Functions of the business to help you develop the different departments within the firm
- Create positions and find employees that are a good fit for the position.
- Do not develop positions around personalities
- Use your org chart to determine who you need to hire next and why — remembering that a dynamic organizational chart can be a valuable strategic growth tool for your firm.
In next month’s article, we’ll start breaking down these four key functions into subfunctions and process lists. Now that you’ve created a blue print of your business in terms of it’s positions, the next step is to create a blue print of your business in terms of it’s processes. So, until next month, here’s to creating the firm you deserve!
If you’d like to watch a video on how to create and an organization chart and use it as a strategic growth tool, go to http://bit.ly/OrgChartTraining.
