You’re listening to SmartTalk with Victor and Mark; SmartTalk is hosted by Victor Medina estate planning, elder law and private client attorney in New Jersey and Mark Merenda CEO of Smart Marketing a marketing and coaching firm for law firms, Attorneys and financial professionals.

SmartTalk is a podcast for solo practitioners and small firm attorney’s looking to improve their practice.

This is SmartTalk episode 15 the boys moved to video

Victor: All right, welcome back to Smart Talk with Victor and Mark; hey look at us we’re on video now

Mark: we’re doing something different today

Victor: yeah unless your listening on audio but now you know there’s a video version

Mark: that’s right

Victor: you can go and look at it; we’re going to put it on YouTube. All right, so what do we have on tap for this week Mark?

Mark: We’re going to do something a little different we’re going to talk maybe a little more on practice management then marketing. I think it definitely impacts marketing it’s certainly going to impact the long-term development of your business.

Victor: Great, introduce our first topic.

Mark: okay, well lets talk first of all about what it is that you like to do and how that impacts the growth of a firm and how that should determine some things for you.

Victor: okay

Mark: you talk about a quadrant, I guess you use a quadrant, and I tend to use a symbolism of a bullseye; a target bullseye and say in the center of that bullseye is your unique ability it the thing that your gifted to do, its the thing that you love doing, it’s the thing that’s easy for you to do and difficult for other people.

Victor: Sure

Mark: and then in the next ring out from that bullseye is the stuff that you’re very, very good at; your probably better then most people at; and the next ring out would be stuff you are maybe more then adequate at; then the next ring out would be stuff you can do if you have to; your probably not that great at it but you can get away with it; and then the next ring out would be stuff that your not very good at; and the next ring out would be stuff that you stink at.

Victor: it’s like a reverse Dante’s Inferno

Mark: Well yes

Victor: The circles of Hell

Mark: each one of these things that your good at or that you stink at or so on, has a corresponding quotient of do you take pleasure in doing it?

Victor: Okay

Mark: with the likelihood that there’s a pretty exact correlation between your not liking to do stuff you stink at.

Victor: Right

Mark: right; I mean to do things your good at. So what that does is give you a road map in the growth of your firm and the hiring of your firm about which tasks and which duties you need to outsource or hire to place yourself in. To turn this from something less abstract into a personal story, I can tell you how it started with me; I was a solo marketing consultant and I had one client at the time,

Victor: a true solo? it was just you?

Mark: just me that’s it. I had one client and I was renting an office within his office suite

Victor: and he paid you to do that?

Mark: This guy was kind of a mentor to me, he’s a very smart guy, and as a matter of fact, he’s upstairs in this building that I’m in now, and I learned a heck of a lot from him, and he kept saying to me ‘Mark, you have to hire an assistant you have to hire an assistant’ and I would to him, ‘I can hire an assistant I made seventy five thousand dollars last year, a good assistant will cost me like thirty five forty thousand dollars, that half of my gross, there just no way.

Victor: Right

Mark: I can’t do it. And he said ‘ I guarantee it that you will make more than the thirty five forty thousand that this assistant is going to cost you by what that assistant frees you to do.’ And that was a moment of revelation to me. Cause he was saying to me was ‘ Mark you can make more money doing the stuff your good at and paying somebody to do the stuff your not good at or don’t like doing than you can save by doing it yourself.

Vi[...]