Of the seventy-seven restaurants that Gordon Ramsey has tried to assist on “Kitchen Nightmares,” sixty-one have closed. Marcus Lemonis of “The Profit,” who invests his own money into the businesses he hopes to help, has a similarly low success rate. Spend five minutes on Google, and you will find many more examples of genius advice that yield terrible results.
Why is this? Because expert advice is a process, not a series of one-size-that-fits-all, hard-and-fast rules. But, to market themselves, consultants who want a large audience must dumb it down. You see it all the time in the legal industry. Ever receive emails or read LinkedIn posts promising “5 ways to boost your practice” or “9 ways to accelerate business development for lawyers”? They work. Attorneys click them and sign up for services to find the shortcuts to success.
Exposed to these messages, attorneys contact me looking for the same sort of “advice” for their firms, assuming that I have a ten-point “answer sheet” hidden in my office. They are often disappointed and unimpressed with me as an expert when I tell them I do not.
Admiral William McRaven explains, “if you want to change the world, start off by making your bed.” I say if you want to improve your law firm, start with a finance and accounting process that produces the information you need to measure your progress and manage your firm to success.
If there is a secret sauce at NexFirm, this is it. We focus on the behaviors, analysis, and practices that lead to insights useful for excellent decision-making. We provide our clients with timely and accurate financial information, so they are thoroughly informed about their progress. The value we bring comes from consistent data analysis and the application of the experience we have built working with many law firms. Our clients improve their practices over time as we work the process together.
Expert advice, to be effective, should be more like exercising regularly at the gym to get in share and less like liposuction surgery that give immediate results. Get started today by improving your finance and accounting process so that you can put your hands on the financial information you need to gain insights and make great decisions. Forget about the checklists.
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David DePietto is the founder and CEO of NexFirm. He can be reached at 212-292-1001 or email ddepietto@nexfirm.com.
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