3 minsI want to introduce you to a concept that was a topic in one of our recent member trainings.
The concept is Management By Vacation.
Could you take a vacation and completely unplug from your practice for an entire month while it continued to serve clients and grow in your absence?
It’s a powerful question. It allows you to think about replacing yourself in your practice so it’s no longer entirely dependent on you.
Replacing Yourself
If you’re like most attorneys, you’re constantly on the hamster wheel. If you’re not the one doing it, then it won’t get done.
This thought exercise is a great tool to free you from the need to do everything yourself. It’s a way to start thinking about how you can replace yourself.
A lot of attorneys have reservations about this concept. They’ve tried to hire people in the past and it hasn’t worked out, or they’re worried that things won’t get done up to their own standards.
It’s a reasonable worry but the fact is, until you separate yourself from your business and hire other people to do things, you’ll never have the freedom you really want.
We’ve all had experiences where we’ve hired an employee but it just doesn’t work out.
The real reason is because the employee didn’t understand the structure of exactly how you want things done — there isn’t actually an operating manual for the practice.
This is what we need to change.
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
If you take on the premise that you’ll be away from your practice and unreachable for an entire month, here’s the question you need to ask yourself:
What’s the first thing that would break?
When you answer that question and find a possible solution, then you can move on to the next potential problem, working your way ever closer to freedom.
For example, let’s say the first thing will break is our client response system.
Clients will call and no-one will answer the phones.
So, we handle that and move on to the next potential problem.
Marketing will stop and we won’t bring in new clients.
How could we handle that problem?
It’s a thought exercise. If you go through this process — thinking about what could go wrong if you were away and how it could be solved or avoided — then you can hire someone or implement a process to make sure things happen reliably in your absence.
This allows you to continue to bring in revenue while gaining freedom.
If you start implementing this strategy and gain more freedom in your practice, you’ll discover that things will most certainly break in your absence.
We could never think of every possible situation that could go wrong, and that’s not the point.
The point is to see opportunity in putting processes in place that will get things done when you’re not there.
So, I want to challenge you to write down the first three things that would break in your absence. Then brainstorm possible solutions and processes that need to be in place to remove those threats.
You’ll find that simply writing this down gives you a mental lift, moving you even closer to freedom in practice.
