Get your Ducks in a row

This account of the founding of  Ducks in a Row law firm is the story of one of those times when my work with a client ends up with a product and I think, “Yup… I know a lot of people who are going to need that”.

It’s also a story with lots of learning points for the rest of us on how to find a gem of a product that will stand out, even when you’re in an ultra-competitive field. 

But let’s go back in time a few months… 

The folk from Aquitas Law originally came to me for some business coaching to help them with digital marketing. Like many founders, they wanted to attract more clients and sell more services. 

Along the way, we had some interesting and brutally frank discussions about how to move forward. I’m afraid that I said some things such as: 

“I’m not a fan of your current brand. It makes you look like someone has died.” 

“We need something different; otherwise, people have no reason to buy from you rather than any other commercial law firm.”  

“How can we make this as streamlined and profitable as possible?” 

“Can we cut through the crap of legal services to give the client a brilliant experience and exactly what they need?” 

There was no (unique) magic here

A big part of the process we follow in the Productise Your Expertise programme is the section on finding your magic. We’re looking for your superpowers, what you can offer to clients that no one else can and in a way that no one else can do it. Usually, the source of this magic is the expertise you’ve built up over the years, where you’ve built up some unique knowledge and methodologies.

The trouble with Aquitas was that they had set up a fairly standard commercial law firm. It was very similar to hundreds of other law firms. When we got into where the magic came from, the best we could come up with was that they tended to use qualified barristers to do the legal work and that these folks tended to be more clever than other lawyers.

Unfortunately, their target market (including me) doesn’t really understand the difference between a barrister and a solicitor. They’re all just lawyers to us non-lawyers. And (top tip here) it is completely impossible to differentiate your offering on the basis that you are more clever than the competition. You have no way of proving this, and even if you did, it would probably put people off.

We needed a different way to approach this.

It’s all about the customer’s problems

Fortunately, the next part of the productising process is to focus on how to solve problems for our customers. These lawyers have tons of experience, so we could brainstorm a whole bunch of problems their customers have and look for which ones were worth focusing on. 

We were looking for the golden opportunities where: 

• Someone needs help with a problem with well-defined boundaries 

• There’s a clear reason for someone to pay for help with this 

• We have an opportunity to do the work in a different way 

Where does productising fit into this? 

I don’t think the Aquitas founders came to me for help productising. They just wanted more customers. But they’re sophisticated business owners, and they got the idea very quickly.  

Productised services for professional services firms 

Building stand-alone products where the client can use your product without any time from you is very difficult for professional services firms such as lawyers. People tend to want the reassurance of a Done For You service, and the market for generic solutions such as downloadable contract templates is already pretty much saturated, at least in the UK. There are some opportunities for 99% stand-alone products such as Make a Will Online, but most of these will take a lot of hard work and time to make them work effectively.  

A faster-to-market solution for professional services founders is to create a productised service. A productised service is where you take your service and streamline it so that the process you use for clients is the same for pretty much every client. 

 Read more about productised services.

After much discussion, we got…Ducks in a row 

Ducks in a Row was born. It‘s a productised service for business owners in the UK who want to get their ducks in a row legally when preparing to sell their business.  

I love Ducks in a Row for a few reasons: 

1. I’ve worked with many founders when they’re preparing for exit, and this is an area where it pays to have your legal situation sorted before you start talking to prospective buyers. It’s needed.
   
2. The streamlined productised services approach means there’s the opportunity to concentrate on providing an excellent service rather than endless rounds of meaningless meetings. I’m not a fan of meetings at the best of times, and I have to say that I’ve seen some of this legal work done by people who are great at charm and chat but not so good at watertight legal preparation.  

Why all this is important 

There are a few important lessons in this story. For me, I learnt that this process of going through different possible options, using the multiple lenses of looking for your magic, searching for problems you can solve for your client and simplifying everything into an improved service by productising…well, it works.  

And at the end of this, you can get going with some marketing and start solving those customer problems.  

Check out Ducks in a Row

Want to try this for your business? 

Ducks in a Row proves that the productising approach works for all kinds of businesses, even ones where you might think that it’s not possible. Work with us and Productise Your Expertise.

Image credits 

Thanks to Tom Garfield of Brand New Notebook, who made the Ducks in a Row website look so lovely. Tom drew all the duck images for the site and gave permission for us to use them here. Plus, I made a mash-up of the pic of a bath duck, which Tom found on Adobe Stock images. I did the slightly rubbish Venn diagram.