1. As much as your practice is about you, it’s completely about your clients.  Who are your ideal clients?  What do they do for living, which associations or organizations do they belong to, how much money do they make, what kind of process do they prefer, etc.  Understanding the psychographics of your clients will help you make decisions about marketing, convening, serving, and following up.  

2. Identify in what form(s) your clients prefer to communicate with you.  Knowing which medium they prefer; reading an article written by you, attending a seminar at which you are a speaker, participating in a training you offer, engaging with you on social media platforms, or networking face to face.  Understand how to connect with clients and prospective clients helps you to initiate and maintain a dialogue with an appropriate message that lets them understand you have the right experience and are speaking their language.

3. Use the previous two points to determine how you’ll reach out to clients and prospective clients, what to say to them, how often to say it and via what medium.   You might find that an audio/video file you’ve recorded on Zoom and posted across your podcast and social media accounts is adequate.  You might also have prospective clients that become paying clients when your message is received via several points of connectivity over time (most often the case). 

4. Have the right mindset.  Remember always that you are an entrepreneur building an ADR business and not a mediator or arbitrator trying to build a practice.  This isn’t a word game, it’s a mindset.  Entrepreneurs read business and marketing books, they listen to business and marketing podcasts, seminars, webinars, and more.  This mindset is the number one common denominator amongst my most successful clients. 

5. Whether you’re focusing on individuals, firms, or businesses, you need to create a database of both your current clients and your prospective clients.  The goal of your database is not only to note a contact’s address, phone, email, and name, but also to note how you’re connected with that contact, any notes that you’d like to record, calendaring future points of connection, and linking with contacts on social media. 

6. Most of my clients greatly benefit from putting together a communication calendar that sets out the dates of all your points and platforms of connection and in what way or what content you’ll be connecting.  Create a six month calendar in Excel, Google, Outlook, or on recipe cards that you keep taped to your monitor.  It doesn’t matter.  What does matter is that you have an actionable plan, and you follow that plan daily.

7. With a critical eye, open your website (yes, you really must have a private website) and your profiles on social media.  Check to be sure that your contact information is up to date and complete, that your bio is current, photos engaging, and that each is linked to the other.  Clients don’t usually hire a mediator or arbitrator based solely on a website or social media profile, but they do look for social proof that they’re inclination to hire you is substantiated by your online presence.   

8. Give some thought to your work environment.  If you have a physical office for hearing cases, be sure that it is clean, appropriate, comfortable, and that your clients can be made to feel like honored guests.  Think about the amenities like validating parking, your ability to serve any special dietary needs of clients, accessibility, local support businesses like nearby coffee shops, copy shops etc.  How can you make your clients’ experience better?  If you’re working online – getting your video skills up to par and beyond is an imperative.  For 10 Essentials for Looking and Doing Your Best in ODR click here:  https://www.howtomarketmymediationpractice.com/blog-1/10-essentials-for-looking-and-doing-your-best-in-video-conference-calls

9. Since mediators and arbitrators are hired primarily because someone knows us, likes us, and trusts us, a main source of new business for many practices is existing clients. You need to leverage your existing relationships through referrals, recommendations, and testimonials.  What others say about is far more important than what you have to say about yourself. 

10. Follow up and say thank you.  We love our clients.  Make sure they know it.  Send a handwritten thank you card.  Send an email via Survey Monkey or other similar platform and find out what your clients loved, liked, or loathed about working with you.  Pay attention to what they say about their experience and work to eliminate any negatives.  Be sure to give them a prompt to provide a testimonial (which you’ll use in point 9 above) and let them know that you appreciate referrals.