What does it take to be a successful practice builder?

After you have established your goals and laid out your plan of action for reaching your goals, one of your next steps is to take control of yourself.

Remember all those guys in school who were so proud of their imagination, and were so quick to deprecate the plodders and the planners? Well, let me bring you back to reality with a corollary to the story of the tortoise and the hare. Consistency trumps all.

I learned a very valuable lesson from my mentor the other day about repurposing content, one of her favorite habits.

Now, I’ve heard lots of chit-chat on the internet about repurposing content, and I have consistently thought of it as rewriting the same old article or report in forty or fifty different ways. Sort of what the online bunch call “spinning” an article.

As I have tried to make abundantly clear to the members of my practice building tools website, as an “old, tired and ugly” retiree, I don’t keep up with a lot of accounting or tax law these days. But this little tidbit just slid across the desk in front of me and I thought it bore some further comment.

One of the best pieces of advice I ever received was related to goal setting. My mentor, repeated the often quoted phrase “if you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll never know when you get there.”

It’s not a great leap from that quote to the idea of trying to picture where you want your practice to be in five years. In today’s practice building environment, every effort you undertake, must be directed toward your eventual goal.

Because they could not advertise, these “Rainmakers” used the skills lawyers are trained to use, writing and speaking. This came naturally; those lawyers are trained to write, things like briefs and contracts, and to speak, especially when arguing a case.

Financial professionals, such as accountants, were not so lucky. Their college training focused on how to add and subtract. Harsh as it may seem, accounting rules are basically rules of when to add and when to subtract from one side of the ledger to the other.

Being a “Rainmaker” is a designation aspired to by many professionals. It doesn’t matter whether they are self-employed, work for a regional or local firm, or are employed by a major firm in their industry. Firms in almost all professions seek Rainmakers as part of their team, whether they are engineers, doctors, lawyers, accountants [...]