Am I growing a brand? That is a question law firm owners should be asking themselves every day. If you just want to be a legal technician, run your small firm as essentially a one-lawyer office, make a living, and call it a career, cool, no need to worry about your brand. But if you have goals beyond offering your one-person legal service and you want to build a company that can become very valuable and much bigger than just yourself, then every day you should be asking yourself am I growing a brand?
The ultimate goal of building your brand is to replace the type of law you practice in potential client’s minds with your brand name. For example, if you practice divorce law in Tampa and your slogan was Tampa’s Divorce Team, when someone is getting a divorce you want them thinking I need to call Tampa’s Divorce Team, instead of I need to call a divorce lawyer. You want to literally replace the type of legal service you offer in clients’ minds with your brand name. You want to become the way people in your market think about that legal service.
That level of branding success (Tissue = Kleenex, Soda = Coke, Tampa Divorce Lawyer = Tampa’s Divorce Team) is very difficult to achieve, and takes many, many years, but it is possible. And if you get to that level, you really can’t put a number on how valuable it is to your firm’s success and your family’s wealth. Getting to that pinnacle of branding success is a game changer.
Again, it’s a long, difficult process, but it is possible. One way to make it more likely that you’ll get there is to ask yourself daily, am I growing a brand? And your goal each and every day is to make your brand a little bit stronger by the time your head hits the pillow at night than it was when your feet hit the floor in the morning.
Grow that brand every day. Reap the rewards.