Golden Practices Blog

Holiday Cards: How to Do or Not to Do, Those are the Questions

Each year, usually later than September, CPA firms and law firms begin the process of dreading how to deal with the holiday card issue "this" year.

A fun article appears on ABA Law Practice Management Section's website on this very subject. The article, authored by Mary Beth Pratt, CMO at www.pepperlaw.com, contains numerous ideas about making holiday card delivery special as well as providing lots of alternatives to what many perceive is the overused, impersonal holiday card strategy of old.

*many thanks to Tom Kane's Legal Marketing Blog for referencing this article!

The Experience of Working With You, Part 2

I encountered an absolute first yesterday.

My son sustained a football injury that is now requiring physical therapy. Upon arrival at the treatment center, I noticed a large attention-grabbing sign on the wall. It read:

If you have waited more than ten minutes for a scheduled appointment, please be sure to let our attendant know.

In a perfect world, it might say "If you are waiting beyond your scheduled appointment time, please alert us, we strive to never keep you waiting." so as not to imply that their being 10 minutes late is acceptable but, that aside, I was still impressed.

Seeing that sign made me realize how rare it is that we are actually seen promptly with a medical appointment. I don't even expect promptness anymore in the health care profession. It isn't uncommon to sit in a waiting room for 30 or 45 minutes before being called in and then made to wait, sometimes uncomfortably disrobed in a too-cold room for another 30 minutes or more. A service nightmare.

The rest of our visit at this PT center was, each step, an exemplary service experience. Start to finish. It is certain that I will go there again and recommend them to my friends.

Note: They are Signature Foundation Rehabilitation Services, staffed by RehabCare (in the event you are in the market for great physical or occupational therapists).

To improve your customer service experience, start with little things like making processes such as the "no waiting" policy above to ensure your oh-so-valued customers are never put-out in the process of doing business with you.

If you do a stellar job creating positive impressions in their experience, people WILL recommend you.
(For proof, see my prior post on "...What A-Level Clients Like and Don't Like About Their CPAs"

Why You Need to Focus on the Experience of Working with You

You keep hearing how you should strive to be like Disney or FedEx or Ritz Carlton. What does that mean? How does that apply to professional services firms?

Simple. People are not stupid. At least not the people you want as your clients.

Seth Godin came through with yet another brilliant post depicting his personal experience with a company who clearly doesn't CARE.

Until and unless someone who has the power and authority to change things in your firm starts ACTIVELY looking into what it is like to be on the receiving end of doing business with your firm -- and starts taking steps to correct service lapses -- the smartest buyers may well exercise their options to use another firm.

Home Depot apparently knows there aren't very many alternatives for shoppers. Or at least they act that way.

Maybe you needn't worry about your customers' experiences because maybe there aren't any other accountants or lawyers in your area...

A Fear Firms Need to Get Over: Promoting their People Publicly

Firms still resist promoting their people on the web and in the news. 

The #1 reason cited against promoting them: Fear of Headhunters

This is a fear they need to get past. There are more benefits than detriments to featuring team members publicly on websites and other activities such as issuing press releases upon hiring or promoting them. (benefits are listed below)

Another firm has pushed back (hard) this week to my recommendation of adding their non-partner team members (at least managers and supervisors) to their website. This is a discussion that takes place in just about every firm in which I've worked.

Fact: Headhunters are going to call anyway!  Especially if your people are good. Recruiters are resourceful and they also rely on word of mouth from peers and clients about who is good and who might want to move.

So this means you need to work, not on hiding your people (that effort is futile and hurts you in other ways), but on doing everything you can to assure that when headhunters call your team, they are met with disinterest. How can you do that? By creating "yes" answers to the following questions:

• Is your firm an enjoyable place to work?
• Do your people know you respect and appreciate them, and consider them important to the firm?
• Is career path clear and are opportunities for advancement available on a reasonable time-frame?
• Are technical and business development training, and technology, areas in which your firm aggressively invests?
• Do partners practice what they preach living up to their stated standards?
• Has the firm created the sort of environment in which people want to invest their future?
• Are comp and benefits appropriate for your market? (studies show this is less important than the other questions)

Admittedly, these are not easy things to achieve and few firms achieve them all. But taking one step at a time, you can dramatically improve retention in your firm.

One thing you can do NOW is feature your people on your website and promote them proudly in the public eye. Here are the benefits:

• Shows your people you are proud of their skills and work history
• Shows your people you consider them integral to the firm's successful service delivery
• Allows your people to show family, friends and peers (i.e. prospective recruits) that they are featured proudly by the firm
• Demonstrates to prospective employees that you value your whole team (see above)
• Shows clients and prospects that you have "up and comings" with great qualifications
• Shows that not everyone has graying hair, and probably also increases the number of women and minorities associated with your firm (increasingly important to clients)
• Shows clients you have successors in line (one firm I know lost a long-time client last month because of a perception there is no succession plan)
• Leverage exposure opportunities by issuing press releases around the accomplishment milestones of your non-partners, too--place those releases on your website and share them with clients and trade associations
• Elevate the confidence of your people

Think about how your kids glow when you talk them up in front of people. Or how you feel when a client tells another client how great you are.

These things make employees feel important---a HUGE factor in culture development. When you hide them from headhunters, it eliminates a lot of opportunity to create that good feeling. And it hides them from clients which is proving to be a bad thing.

It is clear that websites are presently more important for a firm's recruiting efforts than for business development.

What do you think a recruit will surmise about your culture when your site features only partners and the other firms feature non-partners, too?  Says something about the firm, doesn't it?

Decision-Making Approaches

At Mind Tools, you can find very detailed steps for using each of the eight approaches. <---read this "cover page" even though I'll provide links directly to each of their described methods:

• Selecting the most important changes to make - Pareto Analysis
• Evaluating the relative importance of different options - Paired Comparison Analysis
• Selecting between good options - Grid Analysis
• Choosing between options by projecting likely outcomes - Decision Trees
• Weighing the pros and cons of a decision - PMI
• Analyzing the pressures for and against change - Force Field Analysis
• Looking at a decision from all points of view - Six Thinking Hats
• Seeing whether a change is worth making - Cost/Benefit Analysis

A nice summary of these Eight tools for streamlined decision-making. was posted by 43 Folders.

Appreciation to Dennis Kennedy for his post on LexThink! that pointed to this useful resource.

the [non]billable lunch

Spent a wonderful few hours and a nice lunch last Friday getting to know Matt Homann of the [non]billable hour blog and LexThink!

Matt's doing some really creative stuff both in creating and refining the [un]conference experience (I just made that up, but you can use it, Matt!) and through his new and innovative coaching model.

If you don't subscribe to his blogs, you should...full of neat ideas and great stuff from other blogs like this great big beer ad from The Marketing Playbook.

On Hurricane Katrina

IIf you haven't seen it, here is a wonderful "yeah, what she said" article on the hurricane with its horrid crime wave and the roles and performance of local and national government and even the impact of blogging in the wake of such tragedy.

by Peggy Noonan, WSJ

http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/