It was 2015, and I was sitting in my Dad’s law office. He was the managing partner at the Indianapolis law firm that his older brother had started forty years earlier.
They were a general practice law firm. That means they covered various types of law for their clients:
- Personal Injury
- Family Law (divorce, custody, guardianship, etc)
- Criminal Law
- Consumer Debt Collection
- Wills and Trusts
They did a little bit of everything. Handymen.
Because they did a bit of everything, they weren’t really KNOWN for anything specific.
Internally, everything was run through the lens of Personal Injury Law.
All marketing efforts were centered on personal injury growth. Yet, if someone showed up on their website, it would be hard to know that was the focus.
“What if you abandoned everything else and went all-in on the personal injury practice?” I asked.
Dad responded, “I would love to do that. I think the other attorneys would love that too.”
No One Hires a Generalist When They Can Hire a Specialist
Think about it…
If you were to be seriously injured in an accident, would you want a generalist attorney running your case?
No way!
You would want an attorney who focuses every second of every day on high-dollar personal injury cases.
You don’t care what they know about expungements or step-parent adoption law.
You want to be sure they know everything there is to know about personal injury law.
Put another way, you’re probably not going to your family care provider to have your gall bladder removed.
You’re going to a gall bladder surgeon who has removed thousands of gall bladders and is very confident in his skills with a scalpel.
Be Known for Solving a Problem.
“If you are known for solving a problem, you’ll never be broke,” was my response to the above image posted on LinkedIn by Katelyn Bourgoin.
It’s not enough to be known simply for what you know. You need to be known for solving a specific problem.
When people have a problem and immediately think of you, you can get rich. You will for sure never be broke.
What Problem Can You Be Known For Solving?
Are you already known for solving a problem? That’s amazing! Double down.
If not, what problem do you or your business solve really well?
If your business has multiple services, which service are you most competent at providing, and/or which service provides the most revenue and profit?
That was the question we led with in my Dad’s law firm when I first got started in this space.
Personal injury had the biggest upside financially, as well as personally, for the attorneys.
Cases could be anywhere from $25,000 to millions of dollars. Rarely did they ever see the inside of a courtroom, because insurance companies were always looking to settle.
Attorneys spent less time running back and forth to court appearances (unlike criminal and family law), and the attorneys’ fees on personal injury cases could be much bigger than the retainer-based practices they’d let go (33-40% of total case value, usually).
Focus Makes Everything Easier in Business
When you narrow your focus in business, it makes so many other things easier.
You can hone your processes to become more efficient, saving time and money while providing your services.
Marketing becomes easier because you’re focused on a specific problem, and all of your content can be centered around it.
Prospects will never land on your website and be confused by what you offer.
For the law firm, focusing on personal injury helped them grow rapidly.
Their personal injury business was lagging, their marketing was disjointed, and their roster of active clients showed it.
So, we refocused everything on personal injury, starting with their website.
Within 18 months, they were ranking in the top three positions on Google for related high-volume search terms, and they had nearly tripled their active case load.
Not bad, right?
Contrast that with several years of spending thousands upon thousands of dollars every year on marketing to see minimal to no growth.
Why Are “Riches in the Niches?”
When you try to be many things to many people, you spread yourself and your team thin.
It forces you to have a plethora of systems and processes doing different things for different reasons, but often run by the same people with much overlap.
Some things even fight against each other, competing for time, attention, and budget.
It dilutes your external identity. When people don’t know you for one thing, they know you for nothing.
You lose referral business because people aren’t super sure what you do.
Focusing on one or two services you do extremely well that have a higher level of profit makes everything more effective and more efficient.
Business isn’t supposed to be complicated. Usually, if it is complicated, it’s because we’ve made it that way.
Step back, see the forest for the trees, and make strategic decisions on what you want to be KNOWN for in the market.
Want some help evaluating your business to find your focus?
Schedule a free 30-minute strategy call with me. We’ll get a brief overview of your business and a plan for how we can work together to focus it in the most effective way.
If it doesn’t work out, you’ll get a few tips for free to send you on your way.
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