Solo In Chicago…Grow Your Practice!

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Here’s the full article and the 3 shared characteristics shared by failing firms:

• Below average financial performances that included excessive leverage, significant deferred obligations, low productivity and poor realization was one main category.
  
• Internal dynamics involving leadership problems, incompatible goals among partners, differences in compensation philosophies and a lack of succession planning was the second common theme.
  
• External dynamics dealing with competitive pressures over a historical client base, access to new clients or an ability to recruit was the third major component shared by failed firms.

Question, are we really going to hear about the next 20 years of child custody battles of Brian Urlacher? I hope not. I’d guess it will slow down once ‘ole Brian retires from the Bears. If you’re looking for the issue in the case, the question is, are Cinderalla pull-ups and painted toenails a “serious endangerment” to the child (750 ILCS 5/607)?

I think not.

Well, I’m not running for office right now so I don’t mind using the “R” word or bagel as Josh Lyman used to call it on The West Wing. We’re trying to deal with the real issues facing legal professionals here at SIC and reality suggests we’re nearing a recession.

How should that impact your business? Saw this interesting post including advice from many places entitled, Not a Bad Time for Small Businesses to Raise Prices. Is the title true?

I’m not sure. I’ve generally kept rates steady on flat fee stuff like some estate planning or residential real estate transactions. I feel like the profit margin on these sorts of things are too thin already to cut prices. However, on things that are generally billed hourly I’ve been more flexible to drop hourly rates. A good hourly divorce or other litigation matter could be too big of a fee case to let 10-20 dollars per hour lose a client. This was good advice from the article:

If you are going to raise your prices, set them higher than you have to, suggests Karen E. Klein, writing on businessweek.com. That way, if your customers balk, you can reduce the price increase a bit and still end up with the increase you need.

I thought the best piece of advice from the article was this:

“If your competition is busy nursing their recessionary wounds, then you should  become aggressive in marketing yourself and your products argues Morebusiness.com, a Web site that describes itself as a “one-stop resource Web site for entrepreneurs.” aggressive in marketing yourself and your products.”