Motivate Yourself To Do Continuous Business Development

My client, Ed, is a successful attorney who has been in practice for about 15 years.  He has enjoyed his work and is very successful.  He came to me because he wanted to grow his practice so that he could sell it when he retired.  He asked me to work with him on business development.

Ed like most of my clients was well aware of the different techniques of business development.  For most attorneys who come for coaching the problem is not how to do it but actually doing it on a regular basis.  Attorneys and other professionals usually start their practices because they love their work.  Most would much rather do the legal work than do business development.

So how do they get energy and motivation to do the business development work they know they must do?  As a coach for attorneys I suggest several different approaches. 

One way I suggest is to look for places where you do have energy?  Perhaps you coach a team, lead a scout troupe, or sit on a nonprofit board. Often attorneys find themselves drawn into the work so that they have to pull themselves away from it.  If this is true for you ask yourself what it is about that activity that makes it so engaging.  Is there a way to find that in the business development that you would like to do?

Another way to approach it is to look at your values.  Values are feelings that are most important to a person.  If you are not sure what your values are, you can take the values assessment that you got when you subscribed to my newsletter.  Misplaced it?  Email me at asparker@asparker.com and I’ll send you another.

If you can align your business development with your values, you will find the energy needed to do business development.  For example if one of your values is “to learn” you might find ways to see all your business development activities as a means to learn about your clients and potential clients.  The more business development you do the more you learn.

Finally many of my clients find they get energy from envisioning their practice exactly as they want it to be.  We spend time during our coaching session vividly imagining their practice.  If you would like some visioning exercises, drop me an email  at asparker@asparker.com and I will send them to you.

Ed’s vision was that his practice would grow to 6 attorneys in the next 5 years.  He also could see adding a new practice area to the firm by bringing in at least one attorney with a book of business in that practice area.  The more detailed and clear the vision the easier it is to get the energy to move forward on business development.

Sometimes my clients use one of these methods for energy and others use a combination of them.  Business development is something that an attorney with a small firm needs to do on an ongoing basis.  Using a coach can be invaluable to keeping the attorney on track and focused. Attorneys however must find their own way to motivate, energize and engage themselves in business development so that clients continally flow into the practice.