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Purpose, people, pipeline, production, and profit: The pillars for firm success
Focusing on employee needs and development is fundamental for firm leaders to ensure ongoing business success, says one managing principal.
Grace Robbie
Speaking on a recent episode of The Lawyers Weekly Show, Andrew Douglas, the founder and managing principal of FCW Lawyers, emphasised the significance of legal leaders catering to the needs of their staff, as it not only fosters a positive work environment but also contributes to a boost in revenue growth for the firm.
“There are five pillars in law practice. There’s your purpose, there’s your people, your pipeline, your production, and your profit. And they’re all starting with P because I just thought that’d be clever,” he said.
He illustrated how adopting this mindset assists legal leaders in gaining a clearer understanding of the various values and domains that they need to train people to understand
“The idea of it is to say, when you’re training people, you are [doing so] over a number of different fields of skill,” he said.
In light of the busy schedules often faced by legal leaders, Douglas emphasised that having a clearly defined framework serves to optimise time management and minimise wastage during your work day.
“What most partners are is chaotic. They are literally running from thing to thing. And one of the things to learn in leadership is to be deliberate in your allocation of time.
“People who say, ‘I’m so busy I can’t be deliberate’, that’s just nonsense,” he said.
Douglas stressed this due to having the firm belief that having an “understanding leadership skills and building, what happens is you actually find more time and better time to do and execute those five elements for business. But you do it in a mindful way, where you are looking through the lens of purpose. Always.”
Douglas disclosed how cultivating this particular mindset can lead to beneficial outcomes in every area of your professional life.
“That means clients hear more clearly what the business’s proposition is. That means the people around you know what they’re doing. They’re proud of what they’re doing, and it has meaning for them.
“It means you are structured in the way that you market so that you do have ongoing work. It means you have identified what good productive skills look like, and you reward and recognise that,” he said.
Adopting such a mindset and integrating it into your firm, Douglas said, can ultimately be advantageous for the profitability of a business.
“At the end of the day, that just comes through as profitable because you maintain good talent, you’re not getting turnover, you’re not getting the cost of business stuff, of not leading well. And the result of that is you’ve got people present well and committed. That’s pure profit because the thing that burns you is turnover,” he said.
