I left my family for a week and all I brought home was a cactus. Well, let me be clear – seeds to a cactus.
Our team at Kahuna went to a conference in Phoenix and while waiting for our return flight home I looked through the gift shops in the airport to find something I could bring home to my two-year-old son. I decided to go with a kit to grow a cactus.
Surprisingly, even a prickly cactus known for growing in dry conditions needs to be carefully planted and nurtured in order to grow. My son and I planted the seeds and after three weeks of just leaving it on a bookshelf in a dark corner, nothing had happened. My wife, wanting to see something come out of the cool experience of planting something with my son, started watering it regularly, put it in a different room and left the blinds open during the day to give it sunlight. Just a week and a half later, we have several green buds that are growing into great looking little baby cactuses.
When it comes to your business, you have to put some time and care into specific aspects of your business to get it to grow. You can’t just leave it alone expecting something to sprout from a seed planted and not nurtured.
The problem with nurturing and growing a plant or a business, is that it takes time. You don’t have more time to give to your practice, so growth has to come from other activities. Here are six ways to grow your practice starting today:
#1. Put a Capable and Effective Financial System in Place with Forward-Looking Financial Reports
It doesn’t matter what type of business you own, to take it anywhere, you have to have a firm grasp on your financials. Having a financial system in place allows you to prepare for tax season, know if you can pay bills and employees, and helps you to recognize opportunities — like lowering costs in areas to increase your profit margin.
Going about putting a financial system in place requires tracking key performance indicators and pulling forward-looking financial reports that can help you plan for future growth.
#2. Blogging
What you’re reading right now is the product of blogging. We get our team involved in putting out content that gives information to our customers and similar businesses to attract new customers. It takes time and employees that are comfortable and skilled at writing, but can yield great benefits by increasing traffic to your website and creating stronger connections between your business and others.
Tip: Building an audience around your blog is important and takes a lot of time and effort. To help you reach existing audiences and build your following quicker, reach out to blogs in your industry and related to your business to write guest posts. This helps you create relationships with potential partners while utilizing their already existing network.
Also Read: Do You Blog? 23 Lawyers Weigh In
#3. Search Engine Optimization
Organic clicks are the #1 way to get new traffic to your site and new leads. While it’s hard to track how each small effort contributes to your overall search rankings, you cannot underestimate the benefits of coming up on top when a potential customer is searching for services such as yours.
Tips: Incorporate important keywords into the content on your website and blog posts. To find out what people are searching, use Google’s Keyword Planner Tool.
#4. Digital Marketing
Digital marketing includes paid and non-forms of marketing, including PPC (Pay-per-click) advertising, content marketing, emails, social media, and any other form of online promotion.
Tip: Start by seeing what your competitors are doing. Subscribe to their newsletter, search their name on Google and look through the first few pages of results to see what they do to promote themselves, and follow them on social media. This will show you how they are gaining an audience and will give you new ideas of how to market to potential customers.
#5. Delegate Non-Essential Tasks
If you think something in your business is a waste of your time, you’re probably right. You may be capable of doing every task in your business, but that doesn’t mean it makes sense to do it yourself. You should be utilizing others to take on responsibilities that aren’t vital to your business.
How much do you value an hour of your time? If your time is worth $100 an hour and you’re still doing your own bookkeeping, would you pay a bookkeeper $100/hour to do it? If the answer is no, then you are spending too much money on bookkeeping by doing it yourself. You should find a more affordable solution and free up your time for the tasks that are worth spending your valuable time on.
#6. Optimize Hours of Key Employees and Partners
At a recent conference, we spoke with an attorney who had delegated the bookkeeping of his firm to an employee who was a trained paralegal. Bookkeeping was not their specialty, but the job needed to get done. Because she was tied up in the firm’s bookkeeping, the business wasn’t able to get the most out of her work as a paralegal.
To make a quick illustration of why this is a problem, the median salary of a paralegal is $46,680 while the median salary of a bookkeeper is $39,173. While just averages and not a reflection of their importance in a business, the difference in salary means that the firm is overspending on bookkeeping and losing a lot of the value the paralegal could be bringing to the business.
Interested in exploring how working with Kahuna Accounting can take stress out of your business and help it grow? Contact us today to see how we’ve helped hundreds of law firms accomplish exactly that.
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