Any firm with a good name will grow a little if it waits. The question worth asking is whether it is growing in the direction you'd choose, towards the clients you'd pick and the work you want more of, or simply in whatever direction the phone rang from.
What if the next three years of fees came from the work the partners most enjoy and are best at?
What if the firm could say no to the wrong client, because the right ones were already on their way?
What if growth stopped being something that happened to the firm and became something the firm decided?
What if the direction was set once, together, and then the whole department pulled towards it?
Where would you take the firm, if the growth could be aimed?
Growth by accident has a shape. The work that arrives is the work the firm is already known for, from the kind of client it already has, at the margins it has always had. It feels like growth, and it is, but it is the market choosing for you. Over a few years the firm ends up somewhere no one quite decided to go, with a client book that reflects who happened to call.
Growing on purpose asks a harder question first. Which of the firm's services make the most money for the least strain? Which clients are a pleasure to act for, pay on time and send others? Which work would the best people in the firm want to be known for in five years? The answers rarely surprise the partners. What surprises them is how little of the firm's effort was pointed at them.
Here's how I take that off your plate
We decide the direction together, in the room: the most profitable direction, the clients you'd pick, the work you want more of. That becomes Where to Grow, the strategy at the head of the department, with a number and a name against every part of it. Then I make it happen, from the clients you already hold to the ones you've yet to meet, with the research, the writing and the follow-up done for the partners.
It is built to pay for itself early. The first pieces of work are chosen because they bring fees in quickly, usually from inside the book, so the longer work has the room it needs. And then the department keeps pulling in the direction you set, month after month, so the firm arrives where you decided it was going rather than where the phone happened to take it.
Picture a firm of engineers that is brilliant at a specialised kind of project and spends most of its year on routine work, because that is what comes in. The plan names the twenty companies most likely to need the specialised work in the next year, and each gets a reason and a note. One opener: "I noticed your planning application for the new facility went in last month. We did the structural design on two similar schemes recently and I'd be glad to share what we learned, whether or not we ever work together." Growth, aimed.
Growth will come either way. The direction is the part worth deciding.