How much profitable work is hiding in your contact list?

Most professionals I meet do not have a shortage of contacts.

They have hundreds, sometimes thousands.

There are LinkedIn connections, former colleagues, clients, professional advisers they have met over the years, business cards tucked away in drawers and names accumulated in CRM systems.

But how valuable are those contacts?

The answer has very little to do with how many there are.

The more important question is: how many of them know clients you would genuinely like to work for — and how many know enough about what you do to think of you when an opportunity arises?

Those are two very different questions, and in my experience many professional firms cannot answer either of them.

Not all contacts are equally valuable

When I took over as Head of the Private Client Department at Simmons & Simmons, the department was loss-making.

One of the things I did was look carefully at the work we were doing and where it was coming from.

We weeded out work which was unprofitable and concentrated instead on the clients and professional contacts who could lead us to the sort of work we wanted to do.

Over time, the department became highly profitable.

It sounds obvious, but professional people frequently do the opposite. They spend roughly the same amount of time nurturing every relationship without asking what sort of work that relationship is capable of producing.

If you have 1,000 contacts, you probably don't need another 1,000.

You need to know which of the existing 1,000 work with the clients you would most like to advise.

Then you need to give those people a reason to think of you.

But do they actually know what you do?

This is where another problem arises.

When I was at Simmons & Simmons, another partner once stopped me in the corridor.

He had clients who were about to sell their multimillion-pound business.

"I don't really know what you do," he said, "but would you spend some time speaking to them?"

What made this particularly striking was that I probably had lunch with this partner most weeks in the partners' dining room.

I knew that he was a keen collector of English porcelain.

He knew that I had a horse called Fred.

But apparently he didn't know what I did for clients.

I met the family. In due course, I established a Family Office for them and introduced them to an excellent investment manager.

It was a valuable piece of work that could very easily have been missed.

Your job title isn't enough

How many of your colleagues and professional contacts really understand what you do?

They may know that you are a lawyer, accountant, investment manager, trustee or financial adviser.

But that isn't the same as knowing when they should think of you.

People don't generally walk around remembering lists of professional services. They remember situations.

A business owner is preparing for a sale. A family has suddenly acquired substantial liquidity. Two generations disagree about the future of the family business. A client is moving overseas. Someone is worried about protecting family wealth.

If your contacts associate you with the problems you solve and the clients you most want to help, an introduction becomes much easier.

Your next good client could already be engaged by someone you know

This is why I believe professional firms should consider adding a strategic approach to what they are already doing.

I| you are curious to know how I turned a loss making group into one of the most profitable departments in a City firm and how you can do the same - just get in touch - if it is  not for you that is fine - you will have lost only half an hour of your time.