You’re a consumer bankruptcy lawyer – Chapter 7, Chapter 13, the whole mess of it.  Intakes, consultations, client petition signings, 341 meetings, confirmation hearings . . . you get the picture.

Actually, you get it every day.  Over and over.

Phone calls, emails, letters, faxes . . . it never ends.  And by the time you’re ready to go home at night you realize that you haven’t gotten anything done.

The next day you come into the office and the chaos begins all over again.

Stop.  Just for a minute.  Hang up the phone, drop the BlackBerry and close your door.

Now.  Think.

What’s your REAL job?

Is it to dole out advice to prospects and clients?  Fix the copier when it breaks?  Order supplies for the break room?  Chastise employees who fail to perform?

Nope.

Your REAL job is to make money.  To constantly and reliably enable your business to turn a profit that provides you and your staff members with a decent standard of living, to pay your bills and add value.

After all, you’re running a business.  And a business thrives on profit.  Sure, you want to do good work – but you can’t do much good work if you’re always looking over your shoulder and wondering if you’re gonna make payroll.

Got it?  Good.  Now remember it.

And consider this: if you’re the one running around taking care of everything in the office then there’s no way you are ever – and I mean EVER – going to ensure a reliable profit in your business.  You will never have time to write a “thank you” note to someone who refers new business.  You will never have time to learn which types of marketing work best for your business.  You will never have the ability to go out and meet new people.

You will fail.  But you’ll be too busy to notice.

So take a few minutes (now that the door is closed, the email is shut down and the phone is ripped out of the wall – oh wait, you didn’t rip the phone out of the wall yet?  Well, we can get to that one later) and think about how you will make just one hour of uninterrupted time available next week to think about how you will make your business a profitable one.

Damn, I hope not.  Because chances are pretty good that you’re lying.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve come across the phrase, “we are a full-service law firm.”

Really?  REALLY????

So you can handle my brother’s divorce, my bankruptcy, my friend’s DWI, my aunt’s murder trial, write my will, handle my wife’s complex estate plan, do a real estate closing for my house . . . and for my office building, collect the past due rent in landlord-tenant court, prosecute my personal injury case and my medical malpractice case . . . as well as my friend’s medical malpractice case, AND then defend my doctor friend in HIS cases?  And while we’re at it, you can incorporate my small business?

Oh, come on!

If you’re a solo and you bill yourself as a “full service law firm” you are either lying or spreading yourself too thinly.  Either way, not a good face to put forward to your clients and the public in general.

Listen, here’s the thing:

If you position yourself as jack-of-all-trades then you’re going to be seen as the lawyer who will take just about anything that walks through the door so long as a check for legal fees is attached.  Success, which is shaped at least in part on the appearance of success, will elude you.

The solution?  Be a jack-of-one-trade.  Do one thing, do it very well, and leave the rest to the others.

Your profit-and-loss statement will thank you.