Practice Development Tips For Mediators From Lessons I Learned In The Kitchen

I like English Toffee.  It’s simple to make and delicious.  And it’s the perfect analogy to marketing your ADR practice. Here’s how. 

English toffee has 5 basic ingredients that most of us have at our fingertips.  Toffee is just sugar, water, butter, salt, and vanilla.  You’ll also want a candy thermometer.  For practice development those 5 ingredients translate to networking, writing, speaking, training, and social media.   The candy thermometer is the analytics you use to measure your success. 

Making toffee requires patience.  Building a practice requires patience.   

For toffee, you combine all the ingredients in the right amounts and stir consistently until you reach the hard boil point. Et voila – a perfect and delicious hard candy.   

The thing is if you’re impatient, you either end up burning your toffee or with soft caramel.  Burning your batch of toffee is just tragic.  And being impatient and taking your toffee off the stove too early will result in a pan of caramels.  Now I’m a fan of caramel. It’s soft and yummy.  But it’s not the ultimate goal – hard toffee.   

In building your practice, you want the hardness of toffee.  

And just like making hard toffee, building your practice is both an exercise in patience and exercising your stirring muscles.  The first ten minutes of stirring doesn’t show much progress.  But then … the magic happens and very quickly your mixture turns from bubbling sugar into amazing toffee.  Hard, sweet and delightful.

When you’re building your practice, it takes a basic recipe (your strategy), a little patience and consistent efforts to see results.  Practice development is a simple mix of ingredients, networking, writing, speaking, training, and social media all applied in the right amounts over time and using analytics to mark your successes.

For us the recipe (strategy) is simple – sit down and figure in what portions you’ll be promoting your practice using networking (the main ingredient), augmented and flavored with writing, speaking, training, and social media.  Be sure to utilize your preferred analytics tool to manipulate (stir) your strategic recipe to the right temperature (for us this success is getting more cases).  Now add a massive amount of patience and keep stirring.   

And then … bingo … the cumulative effect of your marketing efforts turns your slowly boiling practice into a full-blown success

Without the recipe, it’s unlikely that most folks would make it to minute five, never mind ten.  But you’re not most folks.  I happen to think that just knowing it can be done, just tasting that success makes it far more likely you’re going to stick it out and do it again.  Because once you’ve set out to make a hard toffee or a successful practice, you’ll want to repeat that experience. 

It might feel like a bit of slog now, but when the magic happens, you’ll be happy with the results and you won’t be thinking about those first 9 minutes of burning arm muscles and unfulfilled goals.  You’ll be thinking about the sweet success you’re seeing and repeating the recipe for those successes again and again.

Often, we assume that today’s caramel is the entire result, but it doesn’t have to be.  Keep at it and you’ll get the English Toffee you were hoping for.