Would you like more good quality work?

Most professionals are busy.

They have clients. They have colleagues. They have professional networks. Many have thousands of LinkedIn connections. They are busy.

But how much of this business is in doing good quality work?

That is a much harder question.

Over the last 35 years I have observed professionals being busy but grumbling about the poor quality of most of their work.

Sometimes their best potential introducers simply don’t know what complex problems they are capable of resolving so they fill their time with work which could be done by professionals less qualified or more junior.

And sometimes they are so busy servicing the work they already have that they never stop to ask what work they would actually like to replace it with.

Where does your best new business come from?

Most professional firms already possess many of the relationships they need to generate better-quality business.

The opportunity may sit with colleagues elsewhere in their own firm. It may sit within their professional network. It may even sit with the colleagues, friends and business contacts of existing clients.

The difficulty is converting those relationships into conversations.

How many referrals are you missing?

The truth about referrals is that most professionals work in silos, and rarely think beyond their skill set and expertise.

When I work with a professional who wants to win better-quality business, I start with where they are.

What is frustrating them most? Where are opportunities being missed? How do they see themselves and their expertise? What sort of work do they really want? What are they doing to win it — and what is actually working?

Only then do we look at the psychology of winning business: why some approaches cause people to engage, why others don’t, and how to give the right people a reason to recognise an opportunity and think of you.

From there, we develop a carefully tailored approach to address what is frustrating them most and where the best opportunities are being missed. That is what starts to shift the dial — upwards.

Is being busy making you profitable?

When I first became Head of Private Client at Simmons & Simmons, I had two young children.

Working ever-longer hours was simply not an option.

I needed to spend more of my time on better-quality work and enable junior lawyers to undertake work appropriate to their skills. I examined our client income report, numerous clients were generating only £200–£500 annually. This was not the work I wanted our junior professionals to be wasting their time on. By the time one of my team had retrieved the file, understood the history and dealt with the matter, this work was not profitable.

The answer wasn’t simply to charge those clients more.

We needed more of the clients for whom our expertise was sufficiently valuable to justify the cost of providing it.

That meant being prepared to let some work go while I built a book of better quality work.

I eventually became one of the firm’s most profitable fee earners, taking into account the work I referred to other departments.

Are your skills earning what they are worth?

There was another lesson.

When I became a department head, I was told that if I wanted City-level remuneration, I had to generate City-level revenue.

Fair enough.

That distinction matters.

Four questions worth asking

So perhaps every professional should occasionally ask themselves:

Where does my best new business currently come from?

Who knows people who need my expertise but isn’t introducing them?

What work am I doing that I would happily give to somebody better suited to it?

What work would I like to replace it with?

You don’t need a 40-page business-development plan to start answering those questions.

You need a conversation.

That is what I have learned from doing it myself and subsequently working with professionals and their clients.

If these questions have made you curious, sign up to my weekly newsletter and let me know when you can spare half an hour to tell me what you would most like to change.

I cannot assist everyone, but in half an hour I can probably evaluate whether together we can shift the dial in the direction of up.