Rebranding: Define Your Firm, Define Your Practice

Episode Notes

Transcript

Announcer:

Managing your law practice can be challenging, marketing, time management, attracting clients, and all the things besides the cases that you need to do that aren’t billable. Welcome to this edition of the Unbillable Hour, the Law Practice Advisory podcast. This is where you’ll get the information you need from expert guests and host Christopher Anderson here on Legal Talk Network.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Welcome to The Un-Billable Hour. I am your host Christopher Anderson, and today’s episode is about marketing. You’ll remember that in the main triangle for what it is a law firm must do. We’ve all got to acquire new clients. We call it acquisition and marketing is definitely a part of that. We’ve got to produce the results that we promised to our clients that’s production and achieve the business results for and the professional results for the owners. And of course, in the center of that triangle driving it all for better or worse. Are you our faithful listeners? And today everybody’s so happy because we’ve been doing metrics and some year end stuff that’s been really important. But we’re going to return to everybody’s favorite topic marketing, but we’re going to focus on a very specific area of marketing that used to be almost taboo in some jurisdictions and in some still a little bit is I’ll never forget in the nineties, reading an opinion from a particular state who I don’t want to put on my bad side, that described why law firms couldn’t have trade names to read.

The opinion that the highest court in that state came out with to justify it was an act of, was one of the biggest acts of self-justification I’ve ever read. And it ended up being basically like law firms can’t have trade names because trade names are bad. And that was the extent of the intellectual exercise, but that’s time gone by. And so we’re going to be talking about branding and it’s not discussed too much today in marketing shows and stuff like that. And particularly we’re going to talk about rebranding and I guess in a sense we’ll be asking our guest here in a moment isn’t rebranding. Isn’t the first branding really a rebranding too? Everybody’s got a brand, so it’s just whether it was intentional or not. Our guest today is Jim Heininger, and first of all Jim, I’m going to ask you, did I say it right? You sure did. Thank you. Awesome. And he is founder of the rebranding Experts, also known as the rebrand man. He leads the efforts of rebranding experts He founded in 2017 after doing 30 years of business and brand strategy for Proctor and Gamble. PG is Proctor and Gamble.

Yep. Yeah, McDonald’s, Anheuser-Busch, which now called InBev, I think they rebranded and others, his team believes rebranding should be a strategic growth accelerator and create a forward facing organization ready to grasp new opportunities. He calls it a jet pack to your success. So Jim, welcome to the show.

Jim Heininger:

Thank you. It’s great to be with you.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Not at all. So 2017, not that long ago, eight years, you stepped out on your own to found and form the rebranding experts. Can you just tell us a little bit about after your experience in Fortune three companies, what led you to step out on your, what is it about rebranding that wanted you to set forth onto this new leg of your career?

Jim Heininger:

Well, a couple things. First of all, we had been asked to do some rebranding in my previous agency that I also own and learned in the process. There’s a lot more to this than just what everybody assumes, which is the name change, a logo change, new website, new marketing message. So a lot more to what rebranding can do to reposition an organization and overcome perhaps some things that are tethering it to the past and be able to open it up to be able to achieve a new kind of future success. So we learned that along the way. And what I enjoyed about it is it was a chance for me to be able to pull together all my career experiences, everything from branding and marketing and communications and change management and corporate positioning and so forth to put together a methodology that could be used by organizations. It’s really beginning to end and helps them address all the important questions, all the important decisions that need to be made in a rebranding process. We didn’t see anybody else doing that. They were just doing the marketing piece of it. We saw the business transformation piece as the opportunity and then open rebranding experts.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Cool, that’s great because business transformation is kind of what we’re all about here. And so let’s go to that first premise that I raised in the intro that a lot of law firms, some of my listeners are people that are just going to found their first law firm or maybe start a new law firm or break apart, create a new law firm, or they’ve been operating under their name and they’ve been seeing other people and also listening to me and understanding that your name is great, but it’s hard to divest from yourself at someday if you ever want to exit the business. But so they think about the concept that comes to their mind is branding for the first time. And the premise that I laid forth is no, that’s rebranding too. But can you just before we get into the conversation about rebranding and all that, just what does branding mean from our perspective? What are we talking about and is there such a thing as the first brand that you create?

Jim Heininger:

Great starting point. So we see the brand as the total collection of experiences that a customer is going to have with an organization or a business. So of course that’s things like its name and its logo and its marketing messages, but it’s also the experience that you have when you do business with that organization. How do they make you feel?

How do they treat you? If you have a problem that needs to be resolved, how do they approach that resolution? So it’s that total collection of experiences that one has with a business that helps decide are they going to do repeat business with that organization? Do they want to keep coming back to them in the future? Are you going to buy that product again? Are you going to use that legal firm again in the future? So one of the things that’s interesting is when anybody’s starting up a business, there’s so much that needs to be done and so many demands of standing it up and getting it in place and the resources and so forth. Not enough people spend time thinking about the brand and what they want that brand to really do to differentiate them in the market because marketing is all about differentiation.

It’s very common that people will take on their name because they say, I’m the one that’s leading this. I’ve got the credibility I’m known in the community, and therefore that’s going to work hardest for me, which is a very logical decision. What oftentimes doesn’t happen is thinking about, well, do I want to be perceived as a one person shop or that I’ve got additional resources on my team, so is it and associates that conveys the ability to take on big assignments, more assignments. And then second is, what do I want to do with this business long term? Do I want to be able to grow it to a point where I have a partner that would be able to acquire it from me? Do I have an exit strategy that’s going to allow me to sell the business to someone outside and what’s happening in the industry that might change what my brand needs to be from the very beginning as well too. We’re seeing a lot in the dental industry right now.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Oh, sure are.

Jim Heininger:

Yeah. Yeah. Like lawyers. It used to be that you put your name, I went to Dr. Bruce Eson, DDS, that was the name of the dental practice. Well, when he went to sell, somebody’s got to change that name then because if he’s no longer there, you can’t reflect upon those credibilities anymore. We’re seeing a lot of things like magnificent smiles and signature smiles and so forth, which focus on the outcome of the work that Dennis is going to do and not on the individual dentist who open the practice or who is running it today. So yeah, your first brand, it’s important to think a little bit more broadly about it and try to use a professional resource if you can, to be able to make sure that it aligns with what you want to do with your business 5, 10, 15 years out.

Christopher T. Anderson:

And so is there truth to saying though, let’s say, because you just gave a great list of things to think about when creating your brand, but you also said that a lot of people don’t, at least in the beginning think about it. Does that mean they don’t have a brand?

Jim Heininger:

No, everybody has a brand. The issue becomes is if the brand’s what you want it to be, because if you don’t define it well, and if you don’t continuously promote it the way that you want it to be understood, you’re giving others the license to be able to define what your brand does and to change it up to pigeonhole you, to put negative reputational things around your brand. So the stronger you define your brand and you manage it, the more likely it is that’s what’s going to reside in the minds of customers out there who are going to be making decisions on who they want to do business with.

Christopher T. Anderson:

And it sounds like, I mean you said the brand, and I love the way you put it, I’m probably going to butcher it here, but I’m going to try, is the sum total of the client experience, the customer experience with your business. And what I loved was how the customer should feel after working with you. And then in the very, very beginning you talked about logos and letterheads and stuff like that. People think about that as brand new. That’s not the brand, but I guess it’s just that those things should align with the expectation of what working with you is going to be like.

Jim Heininger:

They’re pieces of it. But again, define upfront what you want people to experience from you so that you build that experience around it and deliver it on a daily basis.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Alright, so now that we have some of those fundamentals down, you are not called the branding experts. You’re called the rebranding experts. Who should be thinking about rebranding? Who should go to a rebranding expert?

Jim Heininger:

So we found that organizations that need to rebrand, either they fall into two different buckets. Either they need to or they opportunistically want to rebrand. So a need to would be a merger or an acquisition or perhaps a partner whose name was on the door retires dies, is no longer there to be able to be associated with that brand name. The opportunistic ones are those that are in that business transformation bucket. Those that say there’s something about our current brand, which is just tying us to the past. It’s tethering us down, it’s not allowing us to grow in the way that we want. And so we purposefully want to redefine a new brand that opens up more doors for us, shows that we have more services or capabilities than the way people perceived us in the past, allows us to grow geographically or different reasons that somebody may want to say, I’ve got a strategic growth plan that needs a new brand to support it.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Oh, cool. Even says, because it’s so funny, when you first started talking about it, what came to my mind were brands that got ruined. One particular Atlanta airline that crashed into the Everglades and they decided to rebrand the entire airline because they didn’t want to be associated with that. But then as you were talking, I was also thinking about it could be someone that was really, really successful in their branding and got really identified with a particular feeling, a particular experience as to who they were. And then they wanted to be something like you said, bigger, maybe broader, maybe different. And the rebrand would be one of the ways to kind of break out of their shell. Like Miley Cyrus

Jim Heininger:

Entertainers rebrand a lot. They keep the same name. Well, some change it to a symbol, but for the most part it’s the music that they’re producing, the look that they’re conveying whenever they go out in public.

Christopher T. Anderson:

So rebranding in fact, doesn’t have to mean you changing your name or change your logo. It can be other things.

Jim Heininger:

And we actually break it down into three different levels. And these are all called rebranding out the public language and so forth. But we do see ’em a little bit differently. So you can refresh your brand, and this happens quite frequently. This is where you would say, oh, that logo, that look that we’re conveying is just, it’s really outdated, it’s dusty, we need to clean it up. And so you introduce new colors, a new website, upgrade your logo and so forth, and try to put forth a more modern, energized kind of appearance. And that’s really what it is. It’s a visual makeover to your brand when you refresh it.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Okay, so as you said, there were three, so the first one’s refreshing and where you’re not really changing the fundamentals of it, but you’re just the look of it, updating it, okay,

Jim Heininger:

What’s the next, it happens all the time. Happens all the time. Professional sports teams, every couple of three years will kind of refresh their brand with new logos, new uniforms and so forth just to keep fans buying more merchandise really.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Sure.

Jim Heininger:

But just to make it interesting,

Christopher T. Anderson:

And I love flying, so I always relate. So some of the brands I’m most familiar with and how they’ve changed over the years are airlines. So Delta’s never changed. It’s been Delta since however long. I think they’re celebrating their hundredth anniversary this year. But a Delta airplane today doesn’t even look anything like what a Delta airplane looked like in the nineties. So would that be a refresh?

Jim Heininger:

Well, and remember, they bought Northwest Airlines out of Minneapolis and absorbed them under the Delta name because it was surely determined. There was probably piles of research so that it was the stronger brand name on a national level and had higher perceptions of customer service and on time arrivals and so forth. So they went with the Delta name, the stronger the two brand names and left Northwest behind Airlines are probably the hardest thing to do a refresh on because painting planes and new signage at airplane gates and the trucks that are delivering baggage and so forth, that’s a huge investment to change the physical look of an airline. So that’s why you don’t see them changing unless there’s something driving it like a merger, like an acquisition of another airline.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Got it. Okay. So brand refresh. So what’s the next one? Level up?

Jim Heininger:

So next one would be repositioning. And this would be where you keep your name the same, but perhaps the way you’ve positioned yourself in the marketplaces. It’s worn out, it’s run its term, and you need to present yourself in a different way. Or it could be that cultural dynamics are pushing you to be a little bit different than you were in the past. Some very clear examples of this would be in the retail space would be Abercrombie and Fitch who had all the bare chested, young teenage models and really did not sell anything over a certain size because they wanted everybody to be super skinny in their clothes. The second is Victoria’s Secret, which had the fashion shows with the models, the angels, and was just out of reach for a lot of women saying That’s not the kind of clothes I want to wear. And so those both did a repositioning to be able to be more relevant in today’s marketplace.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Okay, so we call that a repositioning. Would that also include, I think cars come to mind. There’ve been some car brands that when they launched, they were the very affordable, inexpensive quality wasn’t job number one, getting it to the lot at a price point was job number one. And then over the years they become Toyota. When Toyota or Dots, that’ll be a different one. Toyota, Toyota first came, they were an inexpensive car. Now they have some of the more expensive cars. Would that be a repositioning that they did over the years or probably several?

Jim Heininger:

Yeah, I think you would see that especially as consumer tastes are changing and you need to change up the models, the looks, the feels of the vehicles to be more relevant and have all the features that people want. Today, you also see in the auto industry, a lot of resurgence of old brands must in charger that they’re bringing back because they realize that the mood and the environment might embrace that positioning again. And so they reintroduce those models.

Christopher T. Anderson:

And then the third one, so the first again was refresh. The second was brand repositioning. The third one, we’re going to hold our breaths and we’re going to listen to a word from our sponsors and we’ll have our listeners just wait a second and we’ll learn what a third kind of rebranding is right after these words. We are back with Jim Heininger and he’s the rebrand man. And we’ve been talking, we talked about what a brand is, and we’ve been talking about rebranding and there’s three kinds. And so we talked first about the least invasive, I guess the least big, which is brand refresh. And then we talked about brand repositioning, which is a little bit more major. And then we were going to talk about the third one. So what’s the third level, Jim?

Jim Heininger:

So the third level would be a rebrand, total

Christopher T. Anderson:

Up rebrand.

Jim Heininger:

So they’re all people kind of all put ’em in the bucket. But that rebranding is when you are combining together a refresh, a repositioning, and a business transformation where you are willing to change your name to be able to convey a new direction for the company, to open the doors to new markets, new customer segments that you want to go after. Some examples of this would be, so if you think back to our good friend Facebook that for long operated as a social media platform, well what they did, they didn’t actually rebrand Facebook, Facebook, but they rebranded the corporate structure into Meta. And that was to send a signal that they were going to be pursuing this new strategic growth direction of the universe, the metaverse, and leaning into those virtual reality type products and services and so forth. So question today, whether it really worked or not, but it helped differentiate the corporate structure to be able to go out and explore into those areas and invest in businesses and leave the Facebook brand, which was kind of getting beat up a lot and was under a lot of scrutiny, leave that alone and not taint the new meta brand structure with some of the problems of Facebook.

So that was kind of a very visible example that a lot of people will remember as the way to do that. Now there’s another one that just happened where they didn’t change their name, but they changed just about everything else as part of a rebrand, and that was Jaguar cars. So

A few months back, they announced through a very provocative teaser video that they were going to be changing the brand. They left the name Jaguar, but they changed the logo and that little Jaguar kind of hood implement that everybody knows and admires, and they completely redesigned their cars and moved into the EV market with these bold, dynamic, futuristic looking designs in pink and light blue and are going after a whole new customer segment because their sales were sliding, their profits were kind sinking, and their customers weren’t coming back to buy new cars. So they needed to reposition themselves for a whole new marketplace of young, urban, affluent car buyers that would totally get off on the idea of driving a Jaguar if it was not that old English heritage looking thing, but a dynamic new design. So it was put into the bucket of rebranding, though they didn’t change the name. Most companies would change the name, but everything else about it went through that kind of business transformation.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Okay, yeah, that makes a whole lot of sense. One that at my other office, one that’s right across the street from me that comes to mind also was, and my other office is in Georgia, but we had across the street was Bank of the Ozarks that wasn’t ringing a lot of bells for people. And then all of a sudden, here comes this bank, Oz, and that was the whole rebrand. It was Bank Oz and so Oz, they left. Yeah, I wasn’t sure that the way to go interpret

Jim Heininger:

It as Oz,

Christopher T. Anderson:

But it left behind that. It was tied to the Ozarks,

Jim Heininger:

A physical

Christopher T. Anderson:

Space. And so I don’t know if that qualifies as well. Then they changed everything. The buildings look different. They did a very modern look as opposed to a very classical look from before, et cetera.

Jim Heininger:

And the true testament, if they did it correctly, is if the customer experience both from the walk-in to the retail space to the online call centers, electronic interface that you have with any of your banking apps, if those improved and got better, then they’re delivering on whatever promise that they’re trying to deliver to convey. Got it.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Because what you’re saying is a rebrands changing the promise,

Jim Heininger:

Right?

Christopher T. Anderson:

Okay. Hopefully for the better.

Jim Heininger:

Yeah, yeah, exactly. One of the segments that we get calls a lot about is credit unions. So the most of these were founded as the credit union for an employer. And in order to survive, they had to grow. They had to open up their membership to other employers in the towns in which they operate, but they’re still tethered to that old name that doesn’t make any difference to those if you don’t work for that company. And so they’re needing to let go of those original founding names and we’re finding them, they’re grasping very aspirational names that allow them to position themselves differently against the banks, which tend to be geographical related, bank of America, bank of the Southwest, whatever it is. So we just worked with a credit union out of Albuquerque and it went from Sandia Laboratories Federal Credit Union to Sun Word, and really going with that southwestern kind of look and feel and that promise of the sun and light and the future and so forth, very dramatic kind of turnaround that they were able to roll into that new branding that was kind of the fuel behind it.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Cool. That sounds, yeah, that sounds really interesting. So I think we’ve gotten out of the fundamentals. We know the brand, what a brand is and why one might rebrand and then these three kinds. And so let’s start to talk. We’ve got these law firm owners who are listening to the show. What should they be thinking about? What should they be considering when they’re thinking about rebranding?

Jim Heininger:

Well, it’s interesting. I’m going to say some different calls that we’ve received recently from law firms of different sizes saying, here’s my situation and I think I want to rebrand. What does this sound like a right decision? So we had one that was a smaller firm in Texas and it had the lead principals name on the door. So law offices of Joe Dunn, not his name, real name. We’ll just use that for right now. And he had grown from criminal defense to doing more personal liability kind work, personal injury work, and said, I’m perceived as being just criminal defense and what do I want to do? And I said, well, first of all, do you have an exit strategy that we need to reflect in this? No, he wanted to keep it the same, said, I’m still the lead attorney that everybody’s going to be coming to.

So I said, what I would do is drop the law offices of and call it Joe Dunn law and underneath it on your logo on your website, put criminal defense personal injury. So it ended up being a refresh that not really changing up anything more than the visual presentation and message that they were trying to convey to the marketplace. He had another one where the attorney who had started the firm and he had added some associates and so forth and did see an exit strategy, but also saw that there might be some value to positioning himself a little bit more broadly in the marketplace and wanted to drop his name and come up with a new name that conveyed something that was relevant to the potential clients that would be coming to him. So that was a little bit more of a rebranding because he was willing to change the name and wanted to be able to show that they had a broader sense of capabilities that they could offer to clients.

The third one is a little bit of a wild one, so get ready for this. A gentleman had a partner and the firm was named after the partner and the partner had been arrested and faced some pretty salacious charges and was probably going to be serving some time himself. And he said, what do I do? My firm is named after a guy and it’s getting around the industry and potential clients. And I said, you need to get rid of that name, you need to change the name. So now your question was, is there someone who’s going to potentially take over ownership of it that you’d want to have their name reflected in it, or do you broaden it out to have a less descrip name, something that’s more about law, perhaps geographical, perhaps conveying the kind of law that they’re practicing. So three very different kinds calls that all had a little bit different kind of a rebranding solution to it.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Cool. Yeah, that’s fascinating. And I think it really helps to kind of identify when and how and why you might want to rebrand. We’re going to take a quick break here to hear from our sponsors one more time, and then when we come back, I want to ask you about continuity because with this rebrand, it would be a concern about continuity. So we’ll talk about that and then if you don’t mind, maybe a couple of success stories and maybe what shall we say a cautionary tale that we can do? But first this word for our sponsors. We are back with Jim Heininger, the rebrand man. We’ve been talking about rebranding and it’s really been a fascinating conversation about why firms should rebrand that firms all have a brand, and then the three kinds of rebranding. And then we talked about things to think about in a couple of case studies that we talked about.

So one question that came to my mind when you were talking about all of them, including the last one, is continuity and two kinds because the last one just made me think about the second kind, but the first kind being like you talked about the lawyer who was successful who’d built a successful firm, good reputation in the community, dah, dah, but was really well known for criminal and wanted to, didn’t want to drop criminal but wanted to add personal injury. But regardless of whether they want to drop something or not, I imagine most people at rebrand do want to carry forward the goodwill, do want to carry forward whatever the reputation is, the good parts of the reputation that they’ve built, how do they take care of that in a rebrand? And then conversely, when you want to dump some bad will, how do you do that? But let’s talk about the continuity of the goodwill.

Jim Heininger:

First of all, it’s understanding what that goodwill is. So it’s doing some research, informal or formal research to understand how you are admired. What are the things that you’re potential clients differentiates you in the marketplace with? Because we all have competition at the end of the day, it’s we want to be the preferred choice over another firm. So you have to understand what that is and then make sure that’s the foundation with which you’re going to build upon in your new brand so that those characteristics aren’t lost, but that they’re amplified in the new brand. And then what are you going to add to that to change the perceptions that are going to drive the new business that you’re wanting to achieve? So it’s an important question, and as we go through that kind of discernment process with our clients, once they see we’ve gotten our arms around that, they feel much more comfortable of saying, okay, I’m willing to move forward because I understand that I’m not going to lose anything that was critical to our success in the

Christopher T. Anderson:

Past. Alright, that makes total sense. And now how about if you need to dump some bad rep, the case of the airline that crashed in the everglade, let’s go

Jim Heininger:

There. And we will always ask the question as we go through this process is what do you want to leave behind? So what are the instances, the history, the things about the reputation that you have built over the years that you’re wanting to ditch and that you want to leave behind? And so we need to make sure that there’s a clear line dividing those things in the past. And that tends to be that when you lean into that more aspirational positioning built upon the equities that you want to continue, it allows you to shed those in a way that you can move forward and people are going to, they’re always going to base their perceptions from where you came from, but they’re also going to open their minds a little bit toward perceiving you differently because of this change. Change is an amazing thing in terms of how it allows people to think of you differently.

Christopher T. Anderson:

So before we close the show, I was hoping you might have maybe a great success story you could share and maybe a cautionary tale in whatever order you choose to kind of give the listeners a sense of how rebrands go.

Jim Heininger:

Well, so I’m going to start with a cautionary tale because it leads into the good examples. So we will often say that what’s the biggest mistake that people make in rebranding is not being aspirational enough. So if you’re going to go through this effort, you’re going to put the time, the money, all the energy into changing up your brand and fueling a transformation that you’re wanting to go through. Don’t hang too closely to the past, but be aspirational. Think big, allow names and the creative process to inspire you in where you can go and how it opens the ability for you to position yourselves differently than you did in the past. So the example I would share, which did this beautifully, I’m in Chicago and there’s a professional service firm based here that focuses on it’s leadership development. So they will work with CEOs of organizations to advise them on human capital related issues, be it everything from their personal leadership style, the culture to performance management, all those kinds of things. It went by the name, the initials, BPI. BP was the founder of the firm, his initials in France where it originally began. And as it expanded, it took that name with it. Well, now the US management team wanted to do a buyout and be able to operate the US operation separately. And they said, so we got to sever from this bp, there’s no good story necessarily behind it for us in the United States. So we spent a lot of time with the leadership team saying, okay, so if we get to recreate the brand,

What is it that you want conveyed? What is the outcome of doing work with you and your consultants? And we got around this whole issue is that will we really create different futures for our clients as a result of the training the council that we do? They’re able to be much bolder leaders within their companies and be able to produce a different kind of future, lead it to a different outcome. We really got after many different kind of ways of articulating got around this idea that we create bold futures. We ignite bold futures because we bring a excitement and a passion that’s faster than just creating, and it’s really trying to ignite change within the organization. So we got that as our brand promise, igniting bold futures. And then said, okay, from a name perspective, how are we going to convey that? Lots of different, the name generation process, you come up with hundreds if not thousands of different names that seek to define the way that brand promise is communicated. We got down to a handful of words, and some of ’em were brave related, kind of showing that bravery, the courage that we wanted leaders to have and brara, which is means to go bravely. But we also wanted kind of a call to action. So we were exploring names there. Well, there’s this wonderful term, Avanti that is Italian, which means let’s go onward. So what we did is coined a new name, bringing together Brave or Bra and Avanti to create bti,

And it was an entirely new name, which makes it a lot easier for trademarking in the legal process. And you’re able to build in your own unique story of enabling you to go courageously forward through the work that you’re going to do with our consultants, with our team. Then they brought onto it a colorful new kind of imagery and really bold patterns and so forth that they could use on their website, on their marketing materials that brought to life the uniqueness leadership of the organization went crazy for it. They loved it because it really positioned them differently than an industry, which was a lot of individuals names who founded their firms, and it brought so much more promise to ’em. So we had to make sure that all the employees understood it could convey that brand message and opened up the door to cross-selling their services, which they had not done all that well before in the past.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Got it.

Jim Heininger:

And now, within a matter of a couple months, cross-selling shot up like 60% of clients that were willing to introduce or hear one of the other services that they offered. So it not only ignited the work they did for their customers, but ignited the business itself and was really a good catalyst for change.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Excellent, excellent. What was the cautionary part of that?

Jim Heininger:

Well, the good thing is that they were aspirational. So they didn’t fall back and hang on to the past. And actually I’ll tell you, they had a previous firm in there before us who was proposing very, very traditional kind of language and positioning, and it was not the breakout stuff that they really were ready for. And so once we got ’em going on that discernment process and they saw the outcome, it lit the fire behind them and really help show what rebranding can do for an organization.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Excellent. Listen, I think we’ve really lit the fire for a lot of our listeners on this because law firms haven’t been really well known for amazing branding, and the whole name thing has certainly been, that’s most of our history. But I also know we’ve only scratched the surface. So if people want to learn more or get in touch with you and just ask you some questions or whatever, how should they do that? How can they reach out to you?

Jim Heininger:

So website is rebranding experts.com, and email is [email protected]. And probably LinkedIn is one of the easiest ways to follow us. I write for Forbes on the topic of rebranding, post a lot of those kind of stories. There’s just a depth of resources on our website.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Cool. We do a segment of the show called The Unbillable Hour Community Table, and it’s on the third Thursdays at 3:00 PM Eastern, and it’s just an ask me anything show. Would you be willing to come on and let the listeners ask you questions directly? Of course. Yeah. Happy to see how I put ’em on the spot right here on the show. See how it works, Chris, when they say no, we just edit it out. So you never know. You never know. But he said yes. So we will be, whenever you’re listening to this show, when it’s new, the next community table is probably where you’ll find Jim. So check us out. Jim, thanks so much for being on the show.

Jim Heininger:

It’s been a pleasure.

Christopher T. Anderson:

And that wraps up this edition of The Unbillable Hour. I thank all of you listeners for listening to us. This has been Jim Heininger has been our guest, and he again, is the founder of the Rebranding Experts. And of course, my name is Christopher T Anderson, and I’ll be back and Jim will be back on the community table. But I’ll be back on the next show next month with another great guest as we learn more about topics that help us build the law firm business that works for you. And just as one more reminder, the Community Table is on the third Thursday at 3:00 PM and you can join us live 3:00 PM Eastern, 12 o’clock Pacific. That’s one o’clock Mountain, 2:00 PM Central Time, and you can join us live and ask Jim questions live. But if you can’t make it, just go right here to the unbillable hour page on the Legal talk network.com and you can leave questions there and we’ll just ask Jim those questions. So come live, leave written questions either way that works for you. We look forward to seeing what Jim can offer based on the questions that you have. Remember that you can subscribe to all the editions of this [email protected] or on iTunes. Thank you for joining us. We’ll speak again soon.

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