You are a lawyer, not a business person, right? Wrong!! It takes more than good lawyering to build a successful law firm where you practice on your own terms and have time for the life you want.

But law school didn’t teach you the business and practice management skills you need. Instead, you’re overwhelmed, frustrated, or just plain exhausted at having to work so hard to get all of the important client work done. We get it. We used to feel guilty about sacrificing personal time with family, friends, and our communities to keep up with our practices.

Welcome to Gimbal’s Tip of the Week, where you get practical, actionable advice you can use right away to start building a more productive and profitable legal practice.

This week’s tip applies to you if you are a solo, a practice group leader, or the managing partner of a large firm. If you want to stay ahead of your competition and build a really successful practice that you love, but and also have a happy and fulfilling life outside of work, you need to think about law as a business, and not only as your profession.

Want to watch this week's tip instead?

You Need Your Business to be Healthy

A healthy business is profitable and sustainable. A healthy business is one where people feel inspired by a common mission that’s supported by a strong vision, guiding principles, and clear messaging. A healthy business attracts and retains top talent and keeps everyone engaged and thriving.

It’s a given that you are already, or are fast becoming, a really good lawyer. But to create a really profitable practice, one you can grow and scale for years to come, you also need to understand the interplay between the following 6 elements:

1. Leadership
2. Marketing
3. Sales (yes, lawyers actually do sell)
4. The legal services and related products you offer
5. Overhead; and
6. Cashflow

In addition to the above, you should also have a set of frameworks that ensure each element is in good working order, and that they exist in the right proportion to support the developmental stage of your law firm business.

Take this quick test to see how healthy your law firm business is. The Business MRI will help you identify those parts of your business requiring immediate attention. This knowledge is the first step in any strategy to develop a clear plan to improve your results and strengthen your business.

The Business MRI is the brainchild of Donald Miller. If you’ve been in Gimbal’s LeanLegal^® community for any time now, you will have heard us recommend Don’s work. He's a NY Times best-selling author, a very popular speaker on all aspects of marketing and business, and the CEO of StoryBrand and Business Made Simple. He teaches business professionals from start-ups to major multinationals how to grow their businesses.

After more than a year of working with Business Made Simple’s online learning platform, I’ve recently become a Business Made Simple Certified Coach.

These are practical, step-by-step frameworks that Don and his team have created for:

• Developing a mission statement that gives you and your whole team clear direction
• Improving your personal productivity
• Communicating more effectively
• Clarifying your marketing message
• And more…

All of the above apply directly to building a productive and profitable legal business. By adding the BMS frameworks and courses into our LeanLegal Academy, we are even better able to help entrepreneurial lawyers like you practice law on their own terms, and have time for the life they want.

Your action item this week is to follow these three steps:

1. Take the test now,
2. Get the results, and
3. Create your step-by-step action plan to accelerate your practice!

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Thanks a lot everybody!