Reinventing your firm.

Frequent readers of this weblog know that I am reinventing the way that I practice law. Jennifer Rice, responding to this Harvard Business School Working Knowledge article suggests her twelve ways to revive a brand here. They are:

1. Listen to customers and understand what they want.
2. Determine how your customer experience measures up to what they want.
3. If it doesn’t measure up, fix it. If there’s a list of things to fix, start with what’s most important to customers.
4. Do you have a meaningful point of difference from competitors? If not, create one using the understanding from #1.
5. Create a focused, durable brand position that meshes with the previous 4 items.
6. Communicate that brand message consistently over time throughout every customer touchpoint.
7. Break down internal silos to ensure that all departments are working together to build the brand.
8. Create mechanisms to gather ongoing feedback from customers.
9. Make sure your employees understand how they can build the brand, and make sure they’re happy. Happy employees make happy customers.
10. Happy customers generate referrals. Measure your buzz factor.
11. Now that you’ve built your brand from the ground up, it’s worth spending more money on advertising.
12. Have discipline to follow – and continually reevaluate – all the points on this list.

As I move away from time-based billing and towards service-based billing, I will keep this checklist front and center. You should too.