Legal Outsourcing 101: Delegate Your Way to Business Growth

Over the past few weeks, I’ve talked to you a lot about “mindset” and that you’ve got to start thinking about your law firm as a business if you want to enjoy the freedom that inspired you to start your business in the first place.

There’s one major place small firm and solo attorneys get hung up that will keep you running a practice instead of owning a business –and that’s investing in the support staff you need to take some of the heavy administrative and marketing burdens off your plate.

I hear so many excuses from lawyers who desperately need help but sabotage themselves with “I can’t afford it” or “I can’t trust anyone else to do the work” or “It’s easier to just do it myself or “I don’t have space for an assistant” thinking.

If you don’t make the investment in key support staff to assist you in the operations of your firm, you’ll never grow beyond your current earning capacity and you won’t be able to serve your clients as well as you possibly could.

At the same time, you don’t want to get into a situation where you have too much support, which will result in bloated overhead and you keeping very little of your money.

These days, I do as much as possible with virtual support instead of having people in-house.  And in my best years in the law firm it was the same.

My worst years from an emotional perspective were when I had 7 staff members and a $70,000 per month overhead.  Talk about stress!

Fortunately, the following year after that one, I figured out how to keep my revenue the same with only three full time employees and outsourcing the rest.

So, how do you know if you have too much, too little or just the right amount?

For one week do the following:

1. Write down every single thing you do on a daily basis as it relates to your business.   Track your time down to minute and be sure to include seemingly minute tasks such as, “called the courier and arranged pick up of my court documents” to “ordered coffee for the office”.  Have every person on your team do the same.

2.  At the end of the week, circle everything on your list that could have been done by someone else.  And closely examine what your team members were doing.

3.  Make adjustments once you see how your time and your team are really operating.  It can be hard to see what’s really going on, but it’s always worth it.  Add up the number of hours you spent on the items you circles in step 2 and calculate how much more revenue you could have brought in if you had spent that time in revenue generating (or marketing) activities instead.

Once you see what’s really going on, you can make decisions with knowledge instead of remaining in the dark about your business.

Related posts:

1. 3 Sure-Fire Ways to Increase Revenue Without Increasing Overhead