Formulating a Strategy for Success

the elements of a great injury practice strategy

You know how to manage your cases. You know how to litigate cases. You may even know how to keep your clients happy during the sometimes lengthy pursuit of a settlement. But do you understand the core strategic principles that make any business (yes, your injury practice is a business) a success?

There's more to creating a successful injury practice than just hard work and the skills mentioned above. There are established concepts and principles that define a successful business, and will also apply to the successful injury firm. In this article let's take a brief look at what these principles are and how they apply to your firm.

Define a Clear and Focused Communications & Marketing Strategy

Principle 1: Do you have a properly designed UVP or "Unique Value Proposition"? A well designed UVP has a clearly defined value proposition (an obvious benefit to the client or referring party) and the necessary credibility, or "reason to believe", to convince the client that your firm can deliver the promised benefit. These two items combined should then create a clear differentiation for your practice from the rest of your competitors. Differentiation that prevents you from blending into the field. 

Principle 2: Have you clearly communicated your message to your marketplace? You do this via advertising and public relations. However, beware, if your USP is unclear or you're advertising in the wrong places, wasted advertising is the fastest way a small firm can lose money, and hope.

Principle 3: Have you clearly communicated your USP, and how your business will operate, to your employees? If your staff isn't clear how you provide value, then there's no hope your clients will.

The first principle is critical to getting new cases, and it would be easy to argue that it's the most important of the group, but research shows that for every one of the following principles you take away or degrade, the chance for success is significantly reduced. In order to guarantee a high level of success all of the following principles must also be well implemented.

Execute Fast and Execute Impeccably

Has your staff been trained and empowered to make your clients happy, no matter what? This means without having to spend extensive time looking it up or to ask a superior. Any situation that is even somewhat common needs to be addressed through training so that the client experiences that your employees understand your practice and can execute on their own in a timely fashion.

Does your firm routinely live up to your client's expectations? In order for your client to come back or refer new cases, you have to meet their expectations. Many business Guru's would have you believe that you must strive to exceed your client's expectations -- not true. Walgreen's doesn't exceed many people's expectations, but it does meet them virtually every single time. This, by the way, is part of the secret behind the success of most franchise operations. Your clients expect that you will be able to answer their questions about status during their call, without waiting on hold for 5 or 10 minutes.

Build an Impassioned, High Performance Culture

People would much rather put their trust in a firm whose employees display a passion for their work and their firm. And, employees who feel this way are significantly more productive than those who do not. You need to make every effort to build "esprit de corp", to make work a game your employees will enjoy, and perhaps most of all, cultivate a belief that what your firm does is important; if not to the world, then to the clients, employees and owners. When you play a sport for fun, is it important that you win? No, of course not, but you believe it is and that's why you fight and compete and become impassioned by it.

As part of this philosophy it's important that employee performance is rewarded and recognized. Your employees don't have to be the highest paid in your area, but they do need to feel that you value them, and provide recognition, raises and bonuses based upon their performance.

Innovate

Innovation falls into two general categories: an innovative service, or an innovative business model. McDonald's was an innovative business model. There was and still is nothing innovative about their products. It's the way they produced and delivered the product that was innovative.

The Macintosh computer was an innovative product when it first came out. Amazon and Home Depot have innovative business models. The Tablet PC is an innovative product. Starbuck's is an innovative business model.

You may notice it's easier to find companies with an innovative business model than product; if your product or service isn't clearly innovative then you need to look very hard at your business model. Are there injury firms with innovative services or business models? Yes there are. And they're winning the war for your clients. Innovate, differentiate, or die.

Provide Passionate Leadership

As the leader of your firm you set the tone. Your emotion and energy will infuse everyone you employ. You're the coach of your own small football team, president of your own small country, general of your army. Everyone will look to you for how hard to work and what to believe.

Be passionate, believe in yourself and your firm, set a good example in terms of work ethic and moral values. If you appear to be going through the motions, so will your staff.

Cultivate the Necessary Talent

Not every practice needs "top talent" to be successful. In general, you need employees talented enough to do their job well as you have defined it. There is no need to over pay and get highly talented recruits for jobs that don't require it.

The flip side to this is, when you have a proven performer, do everything you can to keep them happy. You know how hard it is to find good people. When you've found one, do your best to keep them in place. Gear their compensation to their value, modify their duties to improve their job satisfaction and challenge, provide them extra training or education. Treat them, and all of your employees, as you would your best clients. That's how important to your success they are!

Conclusion

You may think that all you need are good cases and everything else will take care of it self. But the reality is that the success of you firm relies on more than that. If you infuse your practice with these principles it's almost impossible to fail. Compare these principles to firms that you know. Do they conform to all of the principles? If they do, then it's likely they're very successful. For those firms that are executing poorly on more than one element, you'll probably find they are only marginally profitable or even losing money. I've been doing this with firms I know for over a year now and I've found that adherence to these principles invariably predicts the firm's level of success. It's truly remarkable.

Shawn

If you have any questions about these ideas please email me at sdavis@Archi-TECH-turetech.com or call me directly at (312) 698-9033.

© Copyright 2003 Shawn Davis, Archi-TECH-ture inc.