The Client Revolution

Noon to four is not a time. It's a cop-out

Short post over at the new jayshep.com on how appliance-repair companies and other providers can't seem to schedule appointments. Wow: something lawyers do right when it comes to time.

What Kina Grannis can teach professionals about marketing

Have you seen the video with all the jelly beans?

If you ever spend any time on Facebook or surfing through YouTube videos, you probably know what I'm talking about. In late 2011, singer-songwriter Kina Grannis debuted a video to her song "In Your Arms." It took 288,000 Jelly Belly jelly beans and nearly two years of planning and stop-action photography to create the three-minute video. Since its release in November 2011, 5.4 million people have watched it on YouTube. The video directly led to Grannis's appearances on Ellen and The Jimmy Kimmel Show. At the moment, she's on the European leg of a very busy world tour, and her Stairwells album is currently climbing the records charts.

But none of this success was left to chance. Instead, it has been the result of savvy social-media marketing and a lot of hard work.

There is a truism that success requires three things: ability, affability, and availablity. The ability part is taken care of with Kina's talent and appearance. Those are mainly something you're born with. Sure, you can take lessons and practice to improve your singing and playing, and there are things you can do to burnish your appearance, but if you're born tone deaf and homely you may want to consider another field.

Kina has the ability part down, being possessed of both talent and beauty. She has a sweet, mellifluous voice that well fits the music she plays. And she's gorgeous, with large, liquid eyes and a melting smile. But ability and looks are just table stakes; there are plenty of attractive good singers who never manage to get their careers off the ground.

The second factor, affability, is also a combination of the innate and the intentional. Kina projects a light, infectious charm that makes you feel like you'd enjoy getting to know her. It may be perfectly natural, or it may be partially an act (which I doubt); either way, it comes across as authentic, and that's what matters most.

The third factor, availability, is where the hard work comes in. More than most up-and-coming artists, Kina has worked hard at using social media to make herself as available as possible to as many fans — and potential fans. She has a well-developed blog (kinagrannis.com) where she connects with people to say where she'll be touring, when she'll be on TV, and how people can get her latest music or videos. She has a good Facebook fan page, and she tweets frequently on Twitter.

She does an exceptional job with her YouTube channel, where she hosts more than a hundred videos, including several different performances of the same songs. At the end of some of the performances, she talks into the camera for a bit, addressing her fans directly. Many of her videos are embedded with links that allow for further interaction. For example, if she mentions on camera an upcoming show in Paris, a link will appear that will take viewers to a page on her website where they can order tickets.

And she doesn't just sell tickets and records, t-shirts and tote bags. At most of her shows, she offers fans the opportunity to pay a few bucks extra to receive an armband for a show. The armband covers the fan's admission to the performance, but also lets the buyer come backstage after the concert is over and meet her in person. Now that's availability.

So what can professionals learn from Kina about marketing their services? A lot. Too many accountants, lawyers, and other professionals rely on their abilities alone, expecting that because they're talented at what they do, the world will beat a path to their doors. But ability is a table stake for professionals, just like it is for singers. It's the affability and availability that will bring in the business and lead to success.

Many professionals often ask what the return on investment (ROI) is on the use of social media. The answer is that social media can effectively project to your clients and potential clients both your ability and your affability. Social media gives you the availability, allowing people to learn about you, get to like you, and see how good you are.

Are you a good writer? Clever and creative blog posts can inform the world that you're talented at your profession. Have a comfortable presence on camera? Short, interesting videos posted to your branded YouTube channel can get people to like and trust you. What can you do differently to make yourself more noticeable online — to make yourself remarkable, in the true sense of the word? Think Kina's "In Your Arms" video with all the jelly beans. That video was different enough — remarkable enough — to get 5.4 million people to notice Kina's talent.

What can you do that will showcase your ability, affability, and availability? Figure it out, and start working on it today.

Also check out the seven-minute "making of" video that shows how the jelly-bean video was created.

Playing to win: Survivor contestants and lawyers

This week saw the season premiere of the still-successful CBS reality show Survivor. Remarkably, this is the series' 24th season; CBS has aired two seasons every year since 2000. (If you haven't seen the show, well, where've you been? Don't worry, though: I wrote about it over at Gruntled Employees back in 2010 — "Why employment law is like "Survivor.")

An interesting and unfortunate thing happened during the first "immunity challenge" between the two tribes, who this season are split along gender lines. The challenge featured a difficult obstacle course that began with a leap from a 25-foot platform onto a net. One of the female contestants, Kourtney, broke her wrist on the net. Host Jeff Probst suspended the challenge so that the medical team could attend to her. When she had to be airlifted to a hospital, Probst gave the male tribe a choice.

Since the challenge required that all tribe members complete the obstacle course, Kourtney's injury and withdrawal (both from the challenge and then from the game itself) meant that the male tribe would win by default. But if they wanted to earn some goodwill with the female tribe, the men could choose to resume the challenge and finish it without Kourtney.

The men (not unanimously) chose to take the win. In explaining their decision, they focused on the fact that "Survivor" is a game and the goal is to win. Fair enough. But Probst noted that throughout the history of the game, douchey moves (it's possible he didn't say "douchey") like this end up earning paybacks later on. Contestants often forget that "Survivor" is a social game, with the winner being chosen by a jury made up of contestants who had been previously screwed over.

Lawyers make this kind of mistake all the time — especially younger lawyers. They fall into the mistaken mindset that litigation is all about winning, and that your job as a "zealous advocate" means that you need to secure every advantage for your client. But like "Survivor," law is also a social game. Your reputation, and thus your ability to well represent that client and other clients in the future, depends on how others react to the douchey moves you make in the interest of winning.

And this holds true in other areas of the law besides litigation. Contract negotiations, divorce law, real-estate dealings, criminal law … you name it. It's important for lawyers to help their clients as best they can. But that doesn't necessarily mean squeezing every last advantage out of the other side, especially when doing so could lead to payback later on.

One word that will reinvent how you serve clients

Want to know what that one word is? Here are two easy ways to find out:

1. Go grab your nearest unabridged dictionary. Turn to page one. Start going through each defined word one at a time. You'll get to it eventually. (OK, maybe that’s not so easy.)

2. Go to the LexThink.1 site and vote for my proposed talk, “One Word That Will Reinvent How You Serve Clients.” Just click on the handy "vote" icon (see image).

Voting ends February 24. There are 23 other proposals from a rogue’s gallery of big legal thinkers, and only the top 12 will be selected. Your vote will make a difference.

Then come to the ABA TechShow in Chicago starting March 28. The LexThink.1 program is Wednesday night at 6:30 CDT. You can sign up for free tickets here.

So what is LexThink.1? Well, it’s an evening of very short presentations with a challenging constraint: 20 slides, 18 seconds a slide (equaling six minutes exactly, or 0.1 to you lawyers who still use timesheets). The speaker has no control over the slides, which keep advancing like sands in the hourglass (or something) every 18 seconds. It forces the speakers to keep it brief and pithy, and to leave home all the boring bits. It’s inspired by Japan’s Pecha Kucha Nights, which allows a luxurious 20 seconds for each of the twenty slides. This is its third year; it was previously called "IgniteLaw."

To see an example, here is my talk from last year: "Quantum Leap: How You Will Practice Law in 2019."

No matter which proposals get chosen, it promises to be an amazing event. Hope to see you there. And thanks for the vote!

The Client Revolution is over

Well, not really. In fact, it has a long way to go. Over the past three years, since this blog started, the conversation about replacing the 1919 time-based billing model has snowballed. In many ways, the revolution's initial campaign to discredit the billable hour has been successful. There are now very few people defending hourly billing as an effective and useful practice.

But still, the vast majority of professional-service firms continue to track their time and bill their hours. While many firms pay lip service to so-called alternative billing or alternative fee arrangements, almost none of them have taken a critical step of trashing their timesheets. And until professionals learn to stop keeping track of their time, they will remain trapped inside the burdensome century-old business model.

The very act of keeping track of your time demeans the work that you do. Stopping your clocks and throwing away your timesheets will make your life better.

Until now, The Client Revolution has been geared toward the client-facing issues that go along with billing by the hour. But professionals who already put their clients' interests first justify using the old model by talking about how their clients trust them to bill them fairly and not run up the clock.

But it's not about trust. It's about having a failed business model. And quite frankly, it's about leaving money on the table. Limiting your fees to the number of hours you have available means placing a cap on your income. If you're good at what you do, you'll generally be able to make more money if you price your knowledge instead of billing your hours. Only if you're mediocre does it make sense for you to keep filling in all those point-ones.

So from now on, instead of focusing on the clients and their interests — which most professionals already do — we're going to talk how to improve the business models of professional-knowledge firms. Instead of talking about the Client Revolution, we're going to talk about creating timeless firms.

Welcome to Timelessly.