During this time, you have two options: wait around for your circumstances to change, or take the initiative and do what you can to change them yourself.
I recently sat down with attorney Joe Suhre of Suhre & Associates to explore the pivots and priority shifts he’s made to better align his employees and clients with the firm’s new goals.
Check out our full conversation here:
1:20 – Creating ideas. I needed to come to the table with something for my team to do because my goal was not to lay anybody off during this. We started a Slack board for our top five ideas. Everybody was contributing to it, and we came up with our newsletter, both print and electronic, which will be out May 1st. I’m writing a DUI book and will have that out in six weeks. We’re doing cups, coasters, and I’ll Drive card partnerships with our bars and restaurants that we have relationships with.
3:55 – Level the playing field. I’m in court three, four days a week and so are the other attorneys. Right now, we’re not in court. Court’s been postponed, everything’s getting moved out to May and June and sometimes even beyond. So being inside, being at home gives us that opportunity and the time to do these other things. And in fact, it’s given me a little bit of concern, because I’m working from 7:00 AM to 5:00 PM nonstop and then more after dinner. None of it’s legal work. It’s all marketing and I’m thinking, “How the heck did I have time to do all of this in addition to the legal work when we didn’t have this?” My perception is that normally we’re fighting to level the playing field as attorneys that are marketing, whether it’s branding, direct marketing, social media, but right now, the COVID-19 circumstances have really leveled that playing field for us.
6:54 – Utilizing Crisp Video. We’re leveraging our Crisp videos in the email version of the newsletter. We’re going to have FAQs and then we have a dozen criminal FAQ videos that we’ve shot. We’re going to create a hyperlink in our electronic newsletter to send folks to that Crisp video. The other thing that I’ve been really impressed with is a lot of my team. I have a marketing director and she’s fantastic. She has great ideas, but I’ve got a lot of really interesting ideas from other staff members that haven’t been in the marketing side of things. It’s kind of neat to be able to incorporate some of those into our projects.
8:10 – Put ideas into action. The optimistic view is to hope everything goes back to normal at some point, whether that’s June, July, who knows, right? I’m not going to just sit and hope that something happens. We’re going to take the initiative to make something happen. It reminds me of The Untouchables, where Sean Connery said to Kevin Costner, “What are you prepared to do?” Well, I’m prepared to get all my team together and create ideas, take ideas that we haven’t been able to do, and put them into action. When we come back, when normal returns, instead of being here, we’re going to be up here.
9:43 – Biggest lesson. I would say that the biggest lesson is I’m amazed at our capacity to get things done when we really push to get them done. These projects that we’ve had in the past, we’ve worked through them and we’ve got some ideas, and things move forward at a certain pace. When you execute like your life depends on it, boy you can get a lot of stuff done.
11:24 – Opportunity calls. This is an opportunity for you to step up and produce something in terms of either team unity, marketing. There’s just a lot of opportunities here, and there’s a lot of negativity, but we’ve got to find the positive in it. I would say dig deep, find that motivation, and execute like your life depends on it.
If you agree or disagree with anything said here, I want to know about it. Text me at 404–531–7691 to tell me your thoughts on staying committed to your team during a crisis.
