I’m a huge proponent of end-of-year reflection, both for myself and for the law firms I work with. Specifically, we should try and learn something from both our successes and our failures—the former, so we can find ways to replicate success; the latter, so we can find ways not to repeat them.
Singling Out Your Greatest Success
So let’s begin with an exercise: Can you identify your greatest triumph from 2018? Hopefully you’ve had at least a few successes, but is there one in particular that stands out—perhaps one that defines the year for you?
If you’re unsure how to identify your greatest success, perhaps the following will help you narrow it down:
- Look at your new clients. Have any of them transformed your revenue stream?
- Look at your new leads. Was there a point in the year when a change in your marketing caused a significant spike in leads?
- Look at your workflow. Did you implement any changes that freed up more time while generating more income?
- Take an inventory of your challenges from the past year. Did you find a solution to a challenge that truly turned the situation around?
Take a Closer Look
Once you’ve identified the one success you can consider your greatest triumph of the year, take a closer look at it. What was it about this one thing that made you count it a success?
- Was it a sizeable increase in income?
- Was it something that maximized your time or productivity?
- Was it a new method you implemented?
- Was it a risk you took that paid off?
- Was it pure luck?
- Is it a process you could repeat and experience similar results?
The objective here, in a manner of speaking, is to try and reverse-engineer the success—to find out what made it work so you can do it again and again in the upcoming year.
Why Focus on Just One Success?
You can obviously repeat this process with every success you’ve had this year, but focusing on the one greatest success will maximize your efforts. It follows the 80/20 rule—80 percent of your benefits come from 20 percent of your efforts. Focus on the top 20 percent of what you did right, and you’ll see much greater returns for the energy spent.
If you’re not sure what it means to replicate your successes or how to do so, we can help. Give us a call at (888) 207-2869.
