4 Tips for Managing a New Law Firm

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Managing a recently founded law firm can be quite the challenge, especially for an attorney who is also trying to juggle their own cases while also ensuring smooth operation for the firm as a whole. Playing multiple roles as both “the guy in charge” and someone who deals directly with clients can have you feeling overwhelmed at times, particularly if you haven’t yet established a routine workflow. Fortunately, managing a firm is much like running any other kind of business, so if you have a solid of understanding of basic principles like budgeting, accounting, and account management, you should be able to make things work with a minimal amount of stress. With that said, here are four tips for managing a law firm more successfully during its initial stages:

1. Utilize Consultancy Services

While going it alone is possible, you’ll be in a much more optimal position if you have the guidance of someone who is experienced in the field of law firm management. Thus, enlisting the assistance of a law consultant such as Law Biz is an ideal initial step to take just to make sure you have some experience in your corner before going forward. Such consultancy services will not only help you manage the firm more effectively, they can also help the firm’s attorneys operate more proficiently and professionally on an individual basis.

2. Market to a Targeted Audience

Of course, client solicitation is something every new law firm has to strongly consider in order to expedite the process of building a steady workload for all of the firm’s attorneys. Each firm should specialize in one or more areas of law to allow for a more targeted approach to marketing and promotion. For example, a firm with plenty of collective experience in representing medical lawsuits would want to gear their advertisements towards such clients for a more effective approach than simply promoting general law services.

3. Encourage Client Referrals

Word of mouth is one of the biggest assets for any new firm, as getting the business off the ground and building momentum will depend largely on the recommendations and reviews of your existing clients. Aside from offering commendable service, it’s also good to offer incentives for referrals. For example, some new firms will offer discounted legal fees or even commissions to clients who are willing to refer their friends and family in applicable situations.

4. Create an Optimized Billing System

Billing is one of the most difficult aspects of operations for new law firm managers because you’ll inevitably have to become familiar with some sort of software-based billing system. Avoiding billing mistakes and creating a consistent and predefined procedure for handling billing processes will ensure that your firm is being paid properly while also simplifying ongoing accounting practices.

Hiring the Right People Is Paramount

In closing, all of the above steps won’t help if you’ve brought the wrong staff members on board, to begin with. Furthermore, having to later terminate employees and/or change the line-up of the attorneys in your firm can present an unpleasant stumbling block that could be entirely avoided if you had hired the right team from the start.

How to Run a Successful Business from Home

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When most people imagine the inner workings of a successful business, they usually picture tall office buildings, huge open spaces filled with desks and water coolers, and hundreds of employees buzzing around like bees. Of course, thanks to digital technology there is nothing in the way of creating a business from scratch in your very own home. The difference between running it successfully and letting it become just another failed homemade startup is the level of care and dedication put into it. Here are some helpful tips for you to grow your business from your own home.

One: Outsource Some of Your Workload

When starting your own business, it can feel almost as if it’s your child and you are the only person responsible for it. The sense of ownership can be a blessing and a curse, both encouraging you to do your best while keeping you from letting other people assist. If you work from home because you prefer solitary activities, you will still need the help of others if you want your business to shine. Outsourcing is a great way of getting professional assistance for tasks you either don’t want to do or don’t have the particular skills for. If you need to get yourself seen, enlist those in the know – for more information, take a look at PR marketer. These are the kinds of companies that can make the difference between a functional home business and a successful one. There’s no need to pile all the work on yourself. Delegate cleverly and use your newfound time to focus on more important tasks.

Two: Concentrate

Sometimes the reason people choose to run their business from home is due to financial reasons such as the cost of an office space. Some people even work best when they’re alone with their thoughts. However, your home is full of distractions that can cause you to take your eye off the ball and miss some crucial business opportunities. To avoid falling into this common trap, dedicate a space in your home specifically for your work. Limit the distractions that can enter this space such as food, pets, television, and even loved ones. If you give yourself a set time and place for work, your family will respect that you are busy and leave you to it. Not only will your business improve, you’ll also become more self-disciplined.

Three: Don’t Isolate Yourself

It can be tempting to hole yourself away and work without lifting your head, especially when you feel like you’re onto a great idea or a major breakthrough. Even the most introverted businesspeople can benefit from interacting with others, so take the time to pause from your indoor life and network. It’s important to meet people with similar interests who can potentially help or offer advice in the future. The upside of an office environment that you miss out on when working at home is that you learn from the mistakes of others. Venture out occasionally to do some reconnaissance – your business will thank you for it.

Tips For Making Your Business Strategy A Reality

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Creating a business plan takes a lot of time and hard work. Don’t let your efforts go to waste by failing to come up with an approach for executing on your strategy. It’s an entire process that takes careful monitoring and a willingess to recognize when what you’re doing isn’t working.

As the leader of the company, you have to stay patient and understand the best way to go about making your plan a reality. While it’s a lot of pressure on you, how you handle the implementation process of your strategy will depend on if it’s successful or not. Get excited about it because once you figure out how to elevate your company, you’ll have a lot to celebrate.

Get Input as you Create it

It’s too little too late to ask your other colleagues and leadership team what they think of your business strategy after it’s already done. Get their advice and buy in early, before you try to execute on the plan. You not only want to make sure you’ve covered all of the necessary points, but you want high-level people in your company to have your back and offer their support. They’re going to be instrumental in helping you make your business strategy a reality.

Set Realistic Goals & Include Details

Set achievable goals you know are within reach with extra work on your team’s part. For example, if you want to improve business communications with your customers, then find a unique means of communicating with them. While emails are okay for some businesses, moving into business texting can prove more effective and efficient. Not only do customers nowadays prefer texts over phone calls, but it’s also a quick means of booking appointments, canceling meetings or sending a complaint or positive review. For more information on business texting, contact Text Better.

Select Priorities

Your business strategy is going to be long and in depth. Don’t let that stop you from taking control and understanding what this means for you and your team. There’s going to be a lot of work to get done and not enough resources or time to do it. Be smart and prioritize your goals and projects, so you’re focusing on completing what’s most important first. It’s not a good idea to throw your entire plan at your leadership team and expect it all to get done when it’s not humanly possible. Approach it from an organized standpoint, and explain exactly where you want everyone to be focused initially. Put some of the other objectives on the backburner or save them for next year.

Assign Leaders to Specific Objectives

Your business plan isn’t going to go very far if it’s all on your shoulders. You need people to help you out and take ownership of the goals you’ve documented. Play to people’s strengths and assign the responsibilities based on who’s good at particular tasks. Make sure each goal has a leader matched with it and that they’re aware of what’s expected of them. Delegating the work will free up some of your time and allow your business strategy to take off in the right direction.

Track Progress

Don’t propose your business strategy, assign leaders and then forget about it. You need to have consistent follow up and tracking of progress if you want it to be successful. Have regular meetings with your leadership team, document comments, questions and the current status for each goal. Use your discussions as a time to draw your attention to any red flags or see where you may be excelling and will need another goal to replace the current one. This part of the process is all about open dialogue and holding each person accountable for their role.

Be Open to Changes

Your plan isn’t going to work if all you wrote is set in stone. You have to be willing to flex and open to changes others are proposing along the way. It’s nothing personal; it’s business, and if you don’t want to hear it, you risk the proposed strategy falling apart. Remain levelheaded and remind yourself that when you’re writing the business strategy that it could change in the future. Of course, you’ll want reasons why a particular aspect isn’t working or needs to be changed. Always look for the evidence before you perform corrections or make additions.

Communicate to the Entire Company

Although there may be details only appropriate for your eyes, you should plan on sharing the gist of the business strategy with the entire company. This will help your employees better understand how their efforts contribute to the bigger picture. They won’t be agitated when they receive what feels like a random assignment because they’ll know it has to do with the direction the company’s heading. Hold a meeting to dive into the strategy and answer any questions your staff members have.

Listen & Observe

If you want to experience success and make your vision a reality then you have to always be listening and observing. Hear what other people have to say, use their feedback to improve what you’re already doing and monitor progress closely. Your job is never done; it’s continuous and requires your involvement and leadership on a regular basis. Instead of always doing the talking, sit back and take in what ideas are being tossed at you and if you think you can use them. Read between the lines and pick up on what would have been missed opportunities without your attention to detail.

Believe you can bring your goals to life and you’re halfway there. Focus on the details and executing on what needs to get done first. It’s important to have the support of the other leaders in your company if you want to see your strategy become a reality. Continue to work hard and piggyback off of what goes right so that you can do more of that in the future. Remember that it takes a team effort and solid leader if you want to achieve success.

Steps For Optimizing Your Company’s Processes

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Whether your business or company venture is new or just in need of being redesigned, then keeping on top of rules for optimization is crucial to effective business management and room for growth. In business, time is money, so, in order to maximize sales, longwinded and time consuming processes and procedures must be avoided.

Processing documents digitally can save you a significant amount of time, providing the software you’re using is running as efficiently as it can and you’re utilizing your business’s capabilities for success. Optimizing how your business runs concerns more than simply improving software; however, having said that, it does a long way in helping your business succeed. Over the course of this article you will learn how best to optimize your company’s business processes.

Healthcare Processes

Make tired processes an act of the past and ensure that your staff can do their job to the best of the abilities and giving them the adequate tools to do so. If you work in healthcare or any medical practice, then you’ll know the importance of having efficient coding and billing processes. As complex as the procedure of billing can be, once you know the best medical billing features to look for in software, then you can save yourself time and resources. Open Practice Solutions offer fully integrated revenue cycle management to help your company succeed, which can be found at www.openpracticesolutions.com. You want your software to be doing the very best it can to take some of the pressure of you and any other the billing and administrative staff.

Optimizing business management wherever possible will give rise to easier processes, and ones that once fully understood by those using them, will speed up time it takes for a claim to be paid.

Identification

Once you’re aware of which business processes need attention, then you can get the overhaul underway. Figure out what the desired goal from changing processes needs to be, and make firm steps to getting these changes made. Identify which of the processes is most important and change that first, even if getting this altered is the most challenging business process to oversee the change of, do it with speed and accuracy. Throughout the time it takes you to implement change, always have the desired outcome at the forefront of your mind, address potential areas of improvement by brainstorming with those on your team and if a general consensus is that a qualified candidate needs to be hired, then prioritize this and begin the process of finding the candidate by conducting application reviews and interviews.

Process Mapping

Map your processes as you go. You can list the procedures you’re going to undertake by categorizing them into a list of importance, relevance to finished and completed outcome, and how they stand by way of priority. Start with the processes that needs the most immediate attention and work through the process map. By effectively mapping, you can visually keep track of what is being taken care of and which processes still need to be finished. Understand who is a part of the process and what their specific role and feature is in the redesign process.

How to Save Money for Your Business

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We don’t tend to be very thoughtful when it comes to business spending. Truth be told, most companies wait until they’ve hit a cash crunch before they start looking at their spending levels and end up having to cut key personnel because of that. Avoiding losing valuable members of staff because the business overspent when the good times were rolling along and expected to never end should be a priority for any CEO who understands that people are the lifeblood of their business.

Here are a few ways to begin reducing the spending levels to give the company breathing room in difficult economic times; possibly even allowing for expansion plans when competitors are having to cut back.

Better Contract Negotiations

When negotiating with suppliers, making payment arrangements that spread the cost over a longer period makes cash flow easier to manage. Even if the sales don’t add up to as much as hoped, at least the costs of the purchases are distributed well. Make the payment terms part of the agreement, not something to tack on at the end. If the sales staff intimate that that’s not their area and try to brush it off, then ask them to bring the finance people into the meeting (by phone if necessary) to get a deal done to your liking.

Sub-let Space You’re Not Using

Does the business currently lease more space than it needs? Whether it’s a warehouse facility or an office, other people will pay dearly for the convenience of an office (or part of a larger one) that’s near to where they live. There are plenty of ways to rent an office out without needing to pay a high fee to a broker, which would make it a bit pointless otherwise.

Renting a “hot desk” is all the rage with digital nomads at the minute because they can grab a desk for a week or a month and use the photocopier, the internet, and the other facilities while there. Eager to fill the need, sites like Desks Near Me and Deskcamping act as an intermediary, connecting spare desks with people who need one.

Frugal Spending & Money Management

Spending less and managing money better go together. There’s not much benefit to watching the pennies if the dollars are flying out the door faster than you can cut back. A company that’s lost its way when it comes to the financial management side of the equation will struggle mightily as a result.

One way to get a handle on this is to study for an Ohio University masters in financial economics, which covers financial markets, business accounting, and touches on a broad range of subjects to better understand money. The Ohio University course delivers a well-rounded education on financial matters, which is bound to help staff who are struggling to manage the money well. This Ohio University online course is accessible over the internet, so no time is lost in traffic getting to the campus on time.

Managing money helps in all aspects of a business because when there’s too little of it available, all the clever strategic thinking in the world won’t save the company. Just like with the foundations of a house, getting the money management right provides something solid that can be built upon.