Finish Your Task List Before Vacation
This post originally appeared in Susan Kostal's Legal Marketing Bits & Bites Newsletter. Sign up for more content here.
If you are in the parts of the country suffering from the heat dome, you have my profound sympathies. It’s 61 degrees and breezy here in San Francisco. But all that heat and humidity is the perfect time to stay indoors and work on your mid-year marketing to-dos, particularly if you’ve neglected those in the last few months.
Catch up on your to-do list or add a few more easy ones in the summer lull.
Here are some suggested tasks before you go on vacation, hopefully to somewhere breezier: 1. Review and update your law firm bio. Have you taken on new responsibilities for a client, or done certain types of work for the first time? Add those to your skill set. Add cases or deals (unless there are confidentiality concerns) in progress. No need to wait until you can write about them in the past tense. 2. Review and update your LinkedIn profile. Have you taken new responsibilities at your firm, such as a seat on the compensation committee? Spoken at a must-attend conference? Published a post on Medium? Add these to the relevant sections of your profile on your way to the airport. 3. Ask for a LinkedIn recommendation. If you haven’t already done so this year, ask for a recommendation on LinkedIn while you're waiting for wheels up. Ideally, you should have 1-2 for each position you’ve held. 4. Conduct a mid-year review of your personal marketing and business development plans. How are you coming along in meeting the steps needed to meet your objectives? Commit to knocking off 1-2 more before you leave for the beach. 5. Finish that article you’ve been procrastinating. To stay current in your field, you should be publishing on topics relevant to your client base twice a year. You’ve been thinking about the topic for months; commit to actually sitting down and writing the first draft with a mojito in hand. 6. Line up a Q3-Q4 speaking engagement. If you haven’t spoken to a group that includes referral sources or potential clients, reach out now to secure an opportunity to do so. Look for colleagues who are speaking at your targeted organizations and ask who to speak with about speaking engagements. DON’T wait to be asked to speak. You don’t want to find yourself still waiting Dec. 31. How did I come up with these ideas? I’m doing them myself. Will I get them all done this week? No. Do I want to get them done before I take my kids back to college? Yes. Set a deadline and take it as seriously as one set by the court. You’ll enjoy that ice-cold gin and tonic so much more.
