This tip comes from Erin Roberts, the founding partner of Zzeem, Inc, a consulting and technology firm in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.  Erin works with businesses to build strong business processes within industry, professional and government organizations.

Erin runs workshops that help organizations focus on excelling at the services that they provide.  Her advice is how to start moving your business from where it is now to where you want it to be:

Step One: Assessing Your Current Situation

• What legal services do you provide now?
• How do you deliver them?
• What works well for you?
• What needs improvement?

Step …

Google is one of the run-away success stories of the Internet. They rethought the business model for search, they drove all sorts of innovations and they have changed the way that all of us think about information.

Because they know that they can’t stay on top of the search heap without the best people and practices, they recently decided to use their data gathering and analysis capabilities to determine what makes a good boss. Now, using the information they came up with, they’ve rethought the rule book for managing people and teams. It’s no surprise that their ideas on management …

Regardless of how you say it, in order to make every day a successful one and keep your energy and enthusiasm levels high, you should spend the first few minutes of it (or – even better – a few minutes at the end of the day before) determining what your most important tasks are. Jot them down.

Change the sequence of tasks to get ready for a meeting well in advance to avoid being caught in the time crunch and end up being late.

At the beginning of every new case, give your client a roadmap that is a written chronology or frequently asked questions sheet for each particular type of matter that you handle, to guide your clients through the process.

Add your photo to your v-card and set up Outlook to automatically attach this to all outgoing emails. Let people see a picture of you and start building a human connection!

Usually, when a firm’s billing realization rate starts to slip, this is an indication that the firm is using ineffective procedures to do the work, or the responsible time biller isn’t as familiar with the area of law as he or she should be, or both. Either way, it means it’s time to take a look at who’s doing the work and how he or she is doing it, to determine whether training or the implementation of new work processes is needed.

While you still should ask for ernest money up front from a client (and keep the trust account balance in the black by repeatedly asking for replenishment of the trust retainer), the next best thing may be to bring in a retired partner and give him or her the task of putting the accounts receivable into order.

GnuCash is a free open-source accounting system that will handle general and trust transactions for lawyers.

If you consistently and accurately log your time, your work in progress report is like an oracle, allowing you to take information in your financial system and turn it into a reasonably accurate prediction of what your cash flow situation will be like in the weeks to come.