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September 01, 2007 at 08:00 PM
Have you thought about where you want your practice to be five years from now? How about what changes the industry will endure in the next five years?
Nobody has a crystal ball, but there’s one thing I do know for certain: We work in an industry that thrives on change and evolution. The most successful producers are those that can anticipate the upcoming changes and adjust their practice accordingly.
I am talking about making decisions that are no longer reactive but instead proactive and progressive. These decisions involve all aspects of your practice, from marketing methods to products you use to how you service your clients.
Let’s use seminars as an example. In the late ’80s, there was an absolute boon in the estate planning seminar circuit – akin to the “senior financial workshops” being hosted all over the country today. My estate planning colleagues would mail thousands of invitations or put an ad in the local newspaper, and several hundred people attended to learn about the hot estate planning topic of the day – the revocable living trust.
A handful of creative and marketing-savvy attorneys began treating the RLT like a product (almost like a mutual fund or annuity) – a product that was to be sold and not bought. They devised client-friendly seminars explaining estate planning and the RLT in real specifics. Guess what? It worked like a charm for more than 10 years until the late 1990s, when the saturation of “trust” seminars seemed to be complete and attendance at seminars begin to dwindle.
