Young attorneys and accountants have traditionally been a firm’s worker bees. Senior partners throw tons of work at them, and they’re expected to crank out the billable hours. And if they do that long enough, one day they may become partners—some of whom bring in new business, while others just continue on the “worker bee” route.

“It’s all changing,” a managing partner at a Los Angeles firm recently declared over lunch. “Finding new clients isn’t something just for senior partners anymore. The economy has taught us that we have to market the firm, and everyone has to do their part.”

When asked about new hires and associates, he responded, “If they ever want to make partner at our firm, they need to learn how to bring in clients. The day will soon be here when you won’t make partner at a firm without a developed book of business.”

Two Reasons It’s More Important

The economy downslide of 2008 triggered a series of actions that caught law firms and accounting firms off guard. Business slowed, clients were slow to send in their payments, and the phone wasn’t ringing like it had before.

Law firms felt the effects almost instantly, and 2009 was a down year for many firms. Divorce became “too expensive” for some law firm clients. Litigation gave way to settlements and mediation, which reduced billable hours and workloads. Bankruptcy attorneys did well, but real estate transactions dried up, which affected a lot of Southern Cali­fornia law firms.

Accounting firms felt the effects a little later. Many accountants had a profitable year in 2009, when clients locked-in losses and needed to account for them. The following year, 2010, was the year that many accounting firms felt the slowdown.

The second trigger is marketing itself. Until Bates v. Arizona State Bar (1977), it was considered unethical to advertise legal services. And while attorney advertising seems to be everywhere, there are many firms that have personnel who still reject the notion, feeling it belittles the firm.

In the early 2000s, attorney marketing began to increase. This, in large part, has occurred in the more “retail” oriented areas of practice, such as personal injury, class action litigation and family law. But in the past five years, more traditional areas of law have adopted the practice. Law firms focused on business and transactions have joined the ranks, and today marketing and business development is on the rise in most areas of practice.

It’s interesting to note that this rise has also paralleled the shift of marketing dollars from traditional advertising to Internet and alternative forms of marketing. Firms that traditional advertised in “yellow pages” phone directory ads have diverted their budgets to more website, Internet and search engine advertising.

The pressure of a slowing economy and the rise of marketing is forcing senior partners to work harder to bring in business, and that’s given rise to asking even more of younger attorneys and accountants.

What’s In It For Young Professionals?

Other than maintaining a Facebook presence, a lot of young professionals don’t like the notion of marketing. At a recent training session, a young accountant asked, “What’s in it for me? Why should I bring in business if I’m not a partner?” There is not one reason—there are three.

First, learning to bring in business increases your value to the firm. Cranking out the client work is important, but learning client service, client development and new business techniques makes you a more rounded professional. Learning what attracts clients to a firm will help you become better at taking care of the clients you already have. This is particularly important when you consider that it takes far less time and money to keep an existing client happy than it does to go out and find a new one.

Second, business development increases our chances of upward mobility in your firm. Once senior members of your firm see you not only handling your current clients, but bringing in new ones, you will be marked as a long term asset to the firm. They will want to keep you. And to keep you, sooner or later they will invite you to the partners’ table.

The third reason young professionals should learn business development is to prepare for a career future that may include breaking out on their own. A legal recruiter recently mentioned that she is seeing an increase of younger attorneys leaving firms, sometimes solo and sometimes with a few others, and opening their own shops. Generation Y (also known as millennials) are on a fast track to life. They live faster and communicate faster. They want to achieve, but they are also concerned with the environment, family and quality of life. This leads to some Gen Y professionals to feel less inclined to stay in the trenches at big firms for long periods of time.

Three Key Strategies For Young Professionals

If you’re a senior partner, you don’t need to worry about teaching young associates how to network online. Gen Y created social media, and they own it. You may help them focus their efforts, but they’ve got the technology down.

Possibly the most important strategy you can teach a young professional is offline social networking. While conducting a recent training session for young professionals at a firm, the managing partner made it extremely clear to, “Get your butts out of the office and go see our clients—in person!”

Millennials have grown up with emails, instant messages and texting. While this works well with their network of friends, it does not work so well with clients. A client recently complained that one of his best young accountants had a bad habit of expecting clients to email him back quickly, and if they didn’t, the accountant just emailed again. It never dawned on him to pick up the phone and make a call, or better yet, go see the client face to face.

Part of offline social networking means getting face time with clients, pressing the flesh, and learning to have a chat over a cup of coffee. While these things are less comfortable for young professionals, this is the way most clients want to network. Study after study shows that people who hire attorneys and accountants not only want a referral, they also want to meet and get to know their trusted advisor before beginning the engagement.

Senior professionals tend to market themselves. Even if they work at a large, well-known firm, they market themselves because they know one true thing: if the client comes in, they will enjoy the largest share of the profits.

Younger professionals have less experience, so it’s harder for them to be perceived as experts and therefore justifying higher rates. This makes business development harder for many young professionals.

One strategy for clients with younger associates is to get them to market themselves as part of a larger team. Associates can ride the coattails of senior partners, leveraging the team’s experience and expertise. By doing this, potential clients can feel much safer engaging a firm because they know there is a depth of experience. They also feel more confident that there are several people working on their account. This also helps justify different billable rates, as most clients will understand that the rate of an associate three years out of school is different than a senior partner with 25 years in the field.

Young professionals can succeed using this technique by learning as much as they can about the senior partners on their team. They should know what schools they went to, what articles they have written, the latest case results they have achieved.

A third strategy for associates is to begin developing an expertise very early in their careers. This works very well when a young associate can focus on one specific area of a practice, and learn anything and everything about it. For example, an accountant who, in addition to his general tax practice, studies the tax strategies of Internet start-ups. In this case, since many Internet startups are engineered by young entrepreneurs, they are generally much more open to having a young accountant who can speak their own language.

Final Thoughts

The days of associates working in the background and not generating business are a thing of the past. Young professionals will increasingly need to generate income for the firm beyond their billable hours.

Senior management needs to know that young professionals will be most effective when they combine their own knowledge and skills with tried and true practices of the past. By learning what motivates them, giving them the tools to succeed, and compensating them for success, you can turn your younger staff into a business generating team. •

What Makes A Potential Client Choose You?

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Buying a business is a huge commitment, and before the ink dries on the contract, it’s easy to focus on the upside—the promise and possibility of a strong return on your investment as well as the retention of the existing customer base. That’s why getting off on the right foot with the existing clients or customers is job #12.

The biggest sales job you will face is in reassuring them that things will be smoother (tricky, especially when they thought it already was); that nothing will change (they wonder how that can be since a new owner always means change); or that there will be improvements (they wonder what kind—and do you really know what needs fixing?)

Customer relationship management. This is your challenge. The challenge is communication and nuance. What should you say? When and how much sharing is really needed? The way in which you handle this determines if you will have to scramble, or if you can really enjoy what was promised—a healthy stream of customers.

There are four things to be aware of that may sound simple at the offset, but pulling them off gracefully is a challenge. Doing it well will make the difference between retention or total reinvention and restart.

Communicate or die. Dramatic indeed but you were educated to be a doctor, lawyer, and accountant or fill in the blank and name yours. And you are knowledgeable, maybe even brilliant, on your subject. Once you purchase a business you need to add the title of seller, soother, educator and grand communicator, too. Your clarity, authenticity and warmth will make up for any perceived missteps in your customers eyes. There will be times when you will have to eat humble pie or crow. Plan on it. Accept it.

Customers hate change. They will compare you to your predecessor right away and might even look for ways to leave. Any mishandling will be grounds for replacing you because their allegiance was with the last owner. Let’s face it, you are auditioning. There will even be some cases where the client wasn’t happy in the first place and didn’t have the nerve to leave the previous owner, so you can be a welcome change.

It’s cheaper to keep them. It’s pricier to replace customers than it is to keep them. Wooing works as long as you don’t use vacant words and can back up what you day with something delightfully unexpected.

Transition is everything. The support staff is an extension of you—their proficiency in wooing, wowing, calming, and smoothing should not be underestimated. They can help or harm your transition process. It is a smart move to keep one or some of the key staffers to make the change less jarring. Frank conversations with them will lay the foundation of how cooperative they will be with you. You can help plant your story with them so instead of idle gossip and hearsay they will be your best brand messengers.

Keeping customers happy doesn’t require elaborate schemes or for you to change your personality unless you want to. Customers want love, attention, respect and the S.H.E method: Share, Help and Educate. It will take you far. •

CASE IN POINT:
Doctor O and Doctor N

Dr. O was a seasoned Park Avenue dermatologist with alternative healthcare leanings. He was ahead of his time, humble and had graduated from an Ivy League school. He enjoyed his own blend of East/West healing modalities. Because of this, he received accolades from Prevention Magazine and had a brisk practice concentrating on acne treatments and hair loss. Alopecia was his specialty and most of his clientele were women. He earned most of his revenue from office visit charges and his custom injections. It was more than enough for him and his wife, who was his receptionist, and they owned the office space (a condo) in the building. As he was nearing the age of 80, he decided to retire and sell his practice to Dr. N.

Dr. N was young, handsome and ambitious. He was buying a tony location and hoped to piggyback on Dr. O’s international recognition. Dr. N wanted to expand on product offerings, remodel the office, hire beautiful front desk women, write a book and add an anti-aging twist to the business. With most of Dr. O’s patients coming in for hair loss and acne treatments, he estimated that he’d probably lose upward of 50 percent of the clients within the first year. He didn’t mind since he would still be able to cover his overhead. He become acquainted with clients and kept some of Dr. O’s potions, which included his unique hair retaining injections and more.

The initial month was spent with the two doctors seeing patients together. Dr. O introduced Dr. N to patients and openly offered his blessing while praising him.

After a three-month transition, Dr. O’s presence was tapering off. New patients had been directed to Dr. N and existing clients were making up their minds whether to try him out or to go. Dr. N recognized that he needed something to entice existing patients to stay, so he offered beauty packages for hair and skin restoration. The packages involved a flat monthly fee for three months. This enabled him to guarantee his own cash flow. If patients started to balk, he was comfortable reassuring them that “they were worth” the small investment. It was a risk and he enjoyed the reward—they said yes.

As the office brightened and he started to display private label products, he began gifting samples to the existing clients, and it worked some of the time. What Dr. N lacked in warmth and age, he made up for in hiring great staffers. They were the ones who knew how to sell, compliment and coddle. Dr. N went on to be written up in many fashion magazines in New York as a skin authority to supermodels and mom’s alike. •

CASE IN POINT:
Joan, Eric and Unified Tax

Unified Tax and Planning Company was founded, owned and operated by Joan for 15 years. Joan was a feisty personality whose experience came as a bookkeeper turned Certified Tax Preparer. Although she wasn’t a CPA, it didn’t matter to her clientele. They knew she could take on the IRS if any of her clients were called in for an audit. She made a respectable living, enjoyed teaching workshops and did a lot of public speaking at every Chamber and women’s group within 25 miles of the office. Her kids were grown and she wanted to relocate, so she sold the practice to Eric.

Eric had made wise real estate investments and had retired 10 years earlier. He had become itchy after playing lots of golf and babysitting the grandkids. He was smart, personable and genuinely excited about returning to a business. However, at his age, he had no designs on running around as much as Joan did. Instead, his plan was to audition and win clients over, keep the receptionist and office staff, keep the look of the office the same (down to the pictures on the wall) and offer more year-round services.

His transition execution was impeccable. He diligently went through all the steps mentioned previously. Joan, on the other hand, didn’t do as well. She sent out the cursory introductory letter and said nothing would change. Together, Joan and Eric isolated the 10 most valuable clients and jointly met with them. But during the meetings, it wasn’t a gracious hand off. It became clear that Joan was having a personal ego struggle.

Clients liked Eric and he was answering their questions deliberately, and educating them along the way. This was something Joan didn’t previously do. She would say, “Don’t you worry, I will take care of it. I know what I am doing, so you don’t have to.” In contrast with Eric, she seemed patronizing. Eric was the model of solid and dependable. He was comfortable talking to people and had a well-balanced, logical and intuitive sense.

Eric asked Joan to leave the firm earlier than expected. But the Unified Tax client retention was a success and still is to this day. Here’s how he easily sold his clients:

Some of the feedback his female clients gave were: He really cared; he didn’t really need the money so he wasn’t obnoxiously hungry; he focused on them; he remembered babies, grandkids and asked about them. Feedback from men included: He talked a bit more about new tax codes to show competency but not too much to bore; he shared what he did in retirement; he demonstrated his enthusiasm to own the business and serve and swerve clients away from having to overpay taxes.

Eric was a “salt of the earth” man who helped with pre-tax planning, money management, and who was respectful of time. He sent out helpful checklists in advance so the appointments would run smoothly. He allowed enough time in his meetings so he never appeared rushed. And he held Joan’s rates for at least a year. Not only did he retain most of the client base but also he continued to add to it through referrals. •

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