Secrets to Attracting (and Keeping) Clients—Advice for Lawyers and
Accountants
What Do Your Clients Really Want?
Introduction
Quick, what do Gary Bettman and Bob Goodenow have in common?
They’re both lawyers.
At the time of writing this essay, they have both led their respective organizations (the NHL and NHLPA) to the edge of the precipice and maybe right off the edge already as well. Is that what their clients (the NHL Owners and the NHL Players, respectively) really want? I don’t think so but that is what both have received. Lawyers have a reputation (deserved in my view) for being able to state the case for their clients in an effective manner but not being able to recognize that it might be in the best interests of their clients to settle the matter.
Providing your clients with the highest possible level of service requires a more sophisticated approach.
When Steve Klein asked me to come here today and talk to a group of up and coming legal and accounting professionals, I was excited about the opportunity. Thanks Steve.
I have worked with dozens of lawyers over the years and nearly as many accounting professionals. I have a pretty good idea of what clients expect from both. So let me try to describe to you what clients really want, in part, by telling you what they don’t want and then, in part, by telling you what they do.
Ethics and Branding
Let me start with ethics. There is nothing more important for you and your career than your reputation. When I was just starting out in business in 1982, a wealthy lawyer by the name of Kent Plumley (he made a lot of his money as an early stage investor in Mitel and later in Newbridge) told me: “Bruce, the number one thing you have to remember is: protect your reputation.”
I thought that was easy for
Well, here is how it works:

One of the best recent examples I have seen of this process at work is the current marketing for Clarica. Their television ads are done with a sense of humor and have made a lasting impact on the marketplace I am sure. But why would Clarica have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in a marketing campaign like this? It is instructive to find out why.
First, let me ask you another question. How many of you have wanted to get up off the couch after watching one of their commercials and place a call to a Clarica agent to buy some life insurance? I don’t think there is even a call-to-action at the end of theses commercials; selling life insurance is not like selling K-Tel slicers and dicers: “Call now; operators are standing by to take your order at 1-800-555-5555!” Well selling legal and accounting services isn’t like that either (or at least, mostly, they’re not. You have to ignore the later night commercials by lawyers asking if you have recently been injured an accident…)
So why does Clarica do it? If you look at the diagram above, they market through a marketing process to build their reputation and brand. A good reputation and solid brand creates trust in Clarica in the minds of the public. So when a life insurance salesperson sits down with John and Sally Smith in their living room to sell them life insurance, John might say: ‘Oh, I have heard of you!’ John and Sally already trust the salesperson before their meeting ever takes place.
They trust Clarica a heck of a lot more than they trust, say, the Pirate Insurance Company of Kinakuta, who they have never heard of before and who hasn’t spent a ton of money creating their brand and a reputation.
Note that Clarica doesn’t sell a thing through their marketing; they have established a separate sales process (having thousands of life insurance agents out there, making meetings and actually doing the selling.) Lawyers and accountants can learn a lot from this example I think.
Note that a sale, any
sale, actually gets completed because of trust—the client trusts you and,
therefore, they are willing to buy from you. That’s the real secret to
selling—creating trust. Remember, people like to buy from people they like and trust.
When I was starting out, one of the real estate lawyers who helped
me also helped herself. We noticed that whenever we were closing on a property,
another developer always seemed to be in the same area, sniffing around. It
wasn’t long before we figured out there was a leak in the law office we were
using at the time and, with the help of the senior partner, we set about trying
to prove it. Unfortunately, it turned out to be the case. It was a devastating
blow to the firm and the lawyer involved was summarily dismissed. She was never
a significant player after that in the real estate business in
I don’t care what city you practice in—a small city like
What that means is that if you muck up your reputation, you probably have to move. Better to keep it in the first place, right?
‘Intricate’ Your
Clients
You all know the one about the Ford Motor Car Accountant who sat on their BOD? At every BOD meeting, he kept pressing the Board to shutter factory after factory. That was his entire contribution to the debate on going at the time (circa the 1980s). Finally, one of the other Board members told him: “Imagine how much money Ford could save if we closed every plant?”
Well, you need to do more for your clients than tell them the obvious. I mean, we all know that if next year you increase revenues by x% and reduce your costs by y% then you’ll make more money next year than you did this year. Gee, I had to pay $250 an hour to hear that? It kind of reminds me of what one Manager said to his star player when the Atlanta Braves were perennial losers and the player came in to ask for a raise. The Manager said: “I reckon we could’ve finished last without you.”
If you want loyal clients, clients who send you work year in year out, you’ll have to better than this—you have to make yourself indispensable. As my friend, the late Elliot Richardson, former Attorney General of the United States, said when we were trying to Bring Back the Senators: “Bruce, first we’ll intricate the NHL.”
How do you do this? One of the ways you intricate your clients is simply by the passage of time. Whether it’s legal or accounting work, the fact that you have the entire history of the client is a huge advantage for you. If your client is buying real property, mortgaging it, doing a merger or acquisition, starting a new division, whatever, the fact that you have their files is very important.
But I can’t believe how many law firms and accounting firms don’t harness the data to make themselves indispensable*.
(* The data can be as simple
as remembering and filing your client’s
clients’ and suppliers’ contact information. Recently, a client of mine complained
to me that every time he need his lawyer’s assistant to do something for him,
he needed to give the legal secretary the telephone numbers and fax numbers
over and over again. This is ridiculous. If you are going to be a ‘deal maker’ type
of lawyer or accountant (more on this later), then you need to be able to talk
to clients and suppliers of your client. For example, if you are trying to get
a real estate transaction closed for a client, you may need to talk to your
client’s Banker, Surveyor, Environmental Consultant (for, say, a Phase 1
Environmental Assessment), Insurance Broker (for an insurance binder), Title
Insurer, Mortgage Broker, Appraiser and a half dozen other ‘suppliers’ to your
client as well as your client’s client (perhaps the Vendor, the Purchaser or
the Investor(s)). I can’t tell you how many lawyers just sit and wait to be
told what to do instead of taking the initiative to contact on behalf of their
client all the stakeholders involved in a closing. And then they or their legal
assistants can’t find or remember their contact info including email addresses,
web sites, fax numbers, telephone numbers (not just at work but cell numbers
and even home numbers too), snail mail addresses, etc. Your clients will thank
you and become more loyal to you if you relieve them of a lot of this burden
and they won’t mind paying you and your staff extra because paying you to do
these things let’s them concentrate on growing their businesses while you focus
on getting deals done for them. They won’t want to move to a new law firm or accounting
firm for a lot of reasons, one of which is that they will need to train a whole
new crew to become familiar with their business’ ecosystem.)
I tell my wife that in my consulting practice, my true J.O.B. description is that I am a file clerk. She laughs (thanks, Dawn) but it’s partly true. My clients are generally hopeless at keeping their files straight so they are always coming to me. Simple but true. You can do it too. I put a huge amount of effort into capturing data electronically—I must PDF a thousand documents every year for clients and I can get their information much faster than they can. Information is power. (I also make sure I capture the data on multiple backups too BTW.)
Technology and You
I remember trying to convince my law firm in 1982 to buy a fax machine. They were recalcitrant in the extreme or, at least, that’s what I thought. ‘Why do we need a fax machine,’ he said. ‘We have couriers!’
One of the most important aspects of providing your clients with the highest possible service level is raw speed. I tried for over a year to get them to invest in a bloody fax machine. Fax machines are a classic case of network effects—what is the value of owning the only fax machine in town? Not much. As more people adopt them, the value of my fax machine goes up—I have someone to talk to!
Speed is key. Fax machines allowed us to increase the speed with which we were able to do things in business in the 1980s. The Internet is capable of increasing the ‘speed limit’ even more. (I’ll elaborate on this in a minute.)
I think that every city economy (which is really a city-state in the sense that, for most people these days, your economic well being is probably far more tied to how well your local economy is doing than the national or global economy) has a certain ‘speed limit’ attached to it. That is, the maximum speed at which a local economy can move is limited by many local factors such as how fast your lawyer moves, how fast your local financial institutions react to your requests for financing, how fast your customers make up their minds, how fast your suppliers can move, etc.
My perception is that business moves a lot faster in Hong
Kong, NYC and
The investment we all made in computers and, especially, personal computers didn’t really pay off until we added a communication aspect to them—email and even more importantly the browser. Email is a push technology while the browser is a pull technology. The so-called killer app on the Internet isn’t email or pornography or video on demand or any of the things that you may have thought it was—it’s the browser.
Mark Andreeson’s invention of the Mosaic Browser (which later became Netscape) really was the key invention for sharing (communicating) information on the Internet. Think about your own use of the Internet—how many times are you using Google for research, how many times are you checking out websites for information? It is a far more important use than email.
I mean how bad is Spam these days? Well, here is an example that should prove my point. Bill Gates is currently receiving 4,000,000 (!) spam messages A DAY. He is the #1 target for spam on the Internet.
Most people are receiving anywhere from a dozen to 100 spam messages a day. When you send email to someone with a Hotmail account (or for that matter pretty much any account these days), if you don't follow up, you can never be sure they actually received it because of the spam problem.
The THREE TOP THINGS in entrepreneurship are SALES, SALES, SALES.
If you want to make a sale, here is my list is how you communicate (in descending order of priority):
1. Face to face meetings are ALWAYS preferred.
2. By phone.
3. By Browser.
4. By Fax.
5. By IM.
6. By Snail Mail.
7. By Email.
Notice how the Browser ranks third on my list. Now I know that many of you think of your website as nothing more than a glorified brochure. It is a static document that gets changed rarely. Well, think about that for a minute—you are narrowcasting 24/7 to your audience the same thing over and over. It’s like every channel on TV broadcasting reruns of I love Lucy; no, it’s worse than that. It’s like every channel broadcasting the same episode of I love Lucy all the time.
So maybe you think that what I am getting at is you should tell your office managers to get with the program and change the background colour of the home page every once in a while? Nope. What you need to think about is that your firm’s website is a method of two-way communication. Clients can come to your website to find things out but they can also come there to contribute too. This is called reversing out the work* and is a huge part of what the Internet revolution is all about. It’s a huge boon to productivity and to speed too. Let me give you an example.
(* For more detail about how
to get custom outputs from standard inputs, you can go to: http://www.dramatispersonae.org/CustomeOutputsFromStandardInputs.htm.
This is by far the most important change that the Internet has brought to our
global economy. For the first time in history, it is possible to give customers
customized products using standard parts. It’s sometimes called ‘mass customization’. It’s what made
Michael Dell billions and billions of dollars.)
Let’s say you are a lawyer working for a large home builder
in
Of course, the home buyers might want a few changes to their agreement after they have thought up a dozen or so changes in their house plans and finishes, so there has to be another process to capture those COs (Change Orders) and make sure they get paid for too.
But what if we had a different process that went something like this? The home buyer goes to the home builder’s website. Probably they are doing that with the help of the home builder’s sales person, right in their field sales office. They can ‘build’ their own home online—add finishes, change the design a bit, whatever and they can also see what this will cost them. If it’s too much, they can take out some of the options themselves. When they’re ready to buy, the APS reflects the work they have done and is automatically submitted to their lawyer, to you and to the home builder.
You can see some that some of the work is reversed out to the client. I can tell you that clients like doing this and sales people usually don’t. The retail customer is a special breed—they are huge time wasters. So after an hour of showing them how to play around on the home builder’s website and how to use the online engine, the sales person can send them home to continue their research. Customers will spend many hours doing this ‘til they get exactly what they want. That is many hours the sales person doesn’t have to spend with them.
Now you may ask why should you care? You’re only providing their legal services. But you know what I said above about ‘intrication’, if you are part of your client’s processes, then you are much more valuable to them.
Also, capturing your APSs online will hugely speed up the sales process and your closings too. Speed goes up, productivity goes up and your fees too.
Now I had a devil of a time trying to convince my brother,
Peter (a lawyer in
(* If you are interested in
getting some idea of what the Internet will do, read Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. When you read it, remember
it was written in 1989 to 1991 before
the browser. It is that much more impressive because of when it was written.
Ignore the story. It’s the actual uses that the main character puts the
Internet to that are of interest. Stephenson calls the Internet the
‘Metaverse”, a better term I think than cyberspace. It’s a whole other essay to
tell you what the productivity implications are of the Metaverse but suffice it
to say it will dwarf what we are doing today. A lot of research is going on to
turn the Internet into ‘stereo space’ but you’ll have to read the book or wait
for another essay to get more info on it.)
Peter likes email today, but I have already pointed out one of its limitations—the spam problem. Another is that it is a push technology. One of my clients, a CEO of a major corporation, told me that he used email to communicate company policy to his employees and to spread the company’s culture, an important part of creating a team out of all the diverse characters at any firm.
But how many of his employees actually open his mass emails? Fewer than 15%, it turns out. And that is how many actually open his emails on average. We don’t know how many of them actually read it. When an email is more than a few paragraphs practically everyone prints them out* if they are going to read them at all.
(* That’s why I am sure that
email newsletters are all but useless. Sure they’re ‘free’ to distribute but
you get what you pay for. No one reads these things anymore. They don’t have
time and they need to print them out if they do want to read it. So you want to
start a newsletter to keep in touch with your clients? If it’s going to be
email based, don’t bother is my advice. Snail mail them if you must.)
What we did instead is we created a personal website (PWS) for the CEO on their Intranet where he could post his thoughts and his employees could browse them when they had time, when they needed information on company policies and directives and direction. We taught him a few basics in less than an hour—like how to post something to his PWS, how to add an image or graph and a few other simple web development skills.
He can get up at 3 am and post important notices on his PWS—this is pull technology. The next day he can alert the people who need to know by phone or in F2F meetings that the info they need is there. This works much better and is a far more productive use of both the CEO’s time and his employees’ too. Intra-company email is an even bigger time waster with all its unnecessary cc emails than outside spam is.
Notice how we disintermediated the techies. He learned basic web development skills (in less than an hour). All of my students at CU are required to learn basic web skills and I encourage you to do it too. If I can learn how to do this in my 40s and 50s, by golly, you can too.
This is heresy to most IT departments and the marketing and office managers aren’t going to like it either. They like controlling the firm’s website; they don’t want you to have access to your little piece of it. Too bad and tough luck, I say. The productivity gains for you, the higher revenues you will generate and the better service levels you will offer your clients outweigh their petty concerns about every corner of the website having the same look and feel.
Let me give you another (and last) example to try to drive home this point. I am a consultant to a real estate company active in industrial leasing. I maintain a lease agreement for them which is stored on the server side of our IT infrastructure. What that means is that it isn’t stored on my PC’s hard drive. The client, the client’s clients and the client’ legal firm can all get access to the server (just to the little piece of it that stores their data). This means that if their lawyer needs to make a change to their standard lease agreement, she can get at it in only one place—our server. She updates it and saves it, to the server. This is known as source control; there is only one copy of the document but everyone can share it and you know that you are always working with the latest version.
This is hugely different from passing around lease documents (or any legal document or accounting record for that matter) by email for people to use or to comment on or to redraft or update. You are never sure if you have the most up to date copy and you might be adding your changes to an older version of the document. So you can end up with a dozen different documents, none of which contains all the necessary changes. This is very inefficient and opens up the law firm or accounting firm to unnecessary liability if their clients are using defective documents.
You have all experienced this problem. The answer is working on what is called server-side documentation. For my client and his salespeople, they know that if they download the document using a browser* (or for the somewhat more technologically sophisticated, using FTP (File Transfer Protocol) software), they are always using the right lease agreement.
(* They can use a Browser
since we land them on a secure page that requires them to use their personal
password that generate for them.)
Now you can see how efficient this can be and you can see how I have intricated myself into my clients affairs (I control their documentation—information is power.) So build a PWS and use it for more than just a nice brochure or puff piece about youself.
Deal Maker or Deal
Breaker?
But the passage of time and being good at keeping files only gets you so far. You need to be a deal maker rather than a deal breaker.
As an Accountant, it is much easier to simply be a bean counter; do the double entry bookkeeping and leave it at that. But anyone can be good at that and therefore you can be replaced pretty quickly if someone else will do it a bit cheaper.
One accounting firm that I know, intricates their clients by
providing their management and ownership with what I call Personal CFOs; that
is, they know, how busy these people are so they have bookkeepers visit them in
their offices or in their homes to do personal bill paying, make personal
deposits and generally handle personal financial affairs. These bookkeepers tie
into their tax practice—so that personal tax returns are a breeze. And because
they are doing the personal work, they can provide advice on tax strategies for
the business too. As my father, the later Professor O. J. Firestone once told
me: “Son, be proud to pay your taxes in a great country like
One young lawyer I worked with in my early days, Bill (not his real name) was a funny, profane, charismatic guy who was a supreme deal maker. He had so much charm that he could get away with saying practically anything. I remember at one meeting we had with a fantastically wealthy home builder, Ian (not his real name either), Bill said: “Now Ian, I know you want to pay $6 million and Bruce wants to sell for seven. There’s no f’ing way Bruce is going to sell at your price and no f’ing way you’re going pay his price so let’s stop frigging around and cut the crap and you both agree to six and a half and let’s go get a glass of wine right f’ing now.”
I couldn’t believe it but Ian, who was a real gentleman, burst out laughing and we made the deal. Not I am not suggesting that you brush up on your slang but I can tell you without a doubt that the vast majority of accountants and lawyers that I have known are deal breakers not deal makers. You want more clients, better clients, more interesting work? Then be the latter type of professional, OK? Find ways to make things happen for your clients.
Returning to Gary Bettman and Bob Goodenow, would you send two lawyers into a room by themselves to work out or negotiate anything? Not likely. Lawyers are trained to state the case for their client in a forceful and convincing manner. No doubt Gary and Bob are doing this supremely well. They are both super bright, talented guys but I wouldn’t call either of them deal makers. They need to have players and owners in the room without which, nothing is going to happen (except the NHL is going off a cliff).
It takes years to unlearn what your schooling and profession have taught you. But if you want to become indispensable to your clients, you need to do this.
Billing your Clients
Clients hate the feeling of being nickel and dimed.
I can remember the day that Ted Beament completed a large
and complex negotiation for my family. It was 1972 and the final agreement had
been reached to gift the Firestone Family Group of Seven Art Collection to the
people of
Mr. Beament, a former Captain in the Canadian Armed Forces
and a WWII hero, had returned to
Ted had two bills that day for my father, the later Professor O. J. Firestone. “Jack,” he said. “I have two bills for you. The first one totals $ _______ which is for our time and disbursements in this matter. The second one is for $ _______ more. Now if you don’t want to pay the second one, I’ll tear it up right now. But in the past, you know that sometimes I have adjusted our firm’s billings down because the results for you weren’t worth paying those kinds of fees for and I didn’t think it was fair for you to pay them. But in this matter, I feel that the results have been extraordinary for you and your family and I think our services are worth more to you than just our time on this.”
My father picked up the second invoice and said: “Ted, you’re right.”
Customer Churn and
Horsepower
I tell my students at Carleton, that it takes years to create a great business. Terry Matthews told me it takes at least 7 to 12 years. If it takes Terry 7 to 12 years, it’s probably going to take you and me longer. I also tell them that if you want to learn how to get rich quick, they can leave now. I don’t know how to get rich quick and I am pretty sure that you have better odds of getting rich quick by buying lottery tickets than you do in professional practice or business.
You can’t plan on winning the lottery but you can plan to get rich, slowly. Build your practice one client at a time. Even mighty IBM starts off every year at $0. They don’t suddenly go out and sell 85 billion dollars worth of stuff on day 1 of their new fiscal year—they build their business one customer at a time just like you do.
If you have great clients, even if the number of them is small, and you keep them happy, your practice will grow. There is practically nothing worse for a business than customer churn. Churn is very expensive—it takes time, effort and money to attract clients in the first place and to replace them if they leave. The customer that comes in the door and needs a tax return for herself and her spouse isn’t a $1,500 customer. If they stay with you for ten years and all they do with you are personal tax returns, they are a $15,000 client. But if they bring you their business audit and other work and referrals too, they represent a lot more than that.
As your clients develop their careers, they can bring you
along for the ride. One of the things that I look for especially in legal work
is horsepower. When we were closing the purchase of an expansion franchise with
the NHL in December 1991, I remember stopping counting the number of layers
working on the transaction in
Timeliness* is another one of those crucial elements—you just can’t be late. Whether you are preparing tax returns, closing a transaction, conveying real property, whatever, don’t be late, ever.
A client of mine just fired his law firm of 15 years because they were chronically late. If the partner in charge were here today, he would have a million good reasons why they were late and a lot of them he would pin on his client. So what?
(* Here is a comment from a
good friend of mine, Dan Warren, CA, who has built a very successful accounting
practice by paying attention to quality, reputation, service and also being a
part of the solution for his clients instead of being part of the problem.
“I tell our people that if
they focus on the quality of their work, have frank and honest communication
with their client and (as you say) try to make themselves indispensable, they
will be successful.
I have found that as some
professionals age, they act as if they are more important than their
clients. While they did not start out
being arrogant, some seem to develop that attitude. This is the starting of the end in my view. A good dose of humility now and again keeps
professionals grounded and focused.
One attribute that is worth
mentioning again is responsiveness. I
think it is very important for a professional to get back to their clients on a
timely basis. Clients notice this and
appreciate it. Now it is not always easy
to do. I started this email to you this
morning and had to run out to a one hour meeting. During that time, I have received 15 emails
and 4 phone messages. As already noted,
it is a challenge to manage one's communications, but it is necessary. Being responsive I think is a key attribute.
My final thought deals with
your comment about providing your client with something more than just the core
service - a legal agreement or a financial statement. This is often hard for a young professional
to come to grips with. They may feel
that they do not have enough experience or that the client may dismiss their
ideas. That is a risk that one has to
take but in the end; I have found that clients recognize that you are trying to
go beyond the core service and give you credit for that.”)
Now if you want to have a good meeting with your Banker once a year, then you need to remember to make a profit every year. Do you think your Banker wants to hear how many cold calls you made, how many presentations you made, how hard you worked? No, they really don’t care about any of that. They just want to hear that you got results.
You need to manage your clients, not the other way round. You need to worry about her business as if it were your own. You need to push your client so that they are not a roadblock to their own (and your) success.
I have always liked Sigourney Weaver’s character, Ellen Ripley, in the Alien film series. She was the first woman I ever saw in any film that didn’t scream and wait for some hero to come by and rescue her. She took charge. She adapted well to very rapid changes in her environment. No matter what bad news came her way, she coped. She didn’t sit around trying to figure out who to blame. She figured out how to survive.
I don’t care whose ‘fault’ it is, just get it done. That’s what your clients really want from you.
Thank you.
Copyright. Dr. Bruce M.
Firestone, Founder, Ottawa Senators, Adjunct Research Professor, Carleton
University, Executive Director, Exploriem.org, Ottawa, Canada. December 2004.