5 Ways to Make Your Practice Stand Out

The marketplace for ADR services is far more competitive now than when I first opened my own business in a tiny office in Santa Monica, CA more than 25 years ago.  Personally, I like it that way.  I enjoy competition and find that it drives me to do better.  Board games, sports, puzzle solving, and entrepreneurship have always been fun to me.  I also think it’s good for our industry.  Having an open marketplace and healthy competition means that our clients have access to many truly great providers. But with more and more professionals entering the resolution industry it’s now more important than ever before that you make your services and your practice stand head and shoulders above the rest.   

Below are 5 ways in which you can make your mediation practice stand out.

1.     Take a look at your perceived competition.  What does their website look like?  What services do they offer, what fees do they charge, what is their specific niche, how engaged are they with clients and prospective clients (do they note their articles, networking, speaking, and training)?  On what social media platforms do they post?  Note also what they post, how often, and what kind of feedback they get.  

Remember that you’ll want to strike a balance between being your sincere self and offering your practice information in a format that your clients most appreciate.  For example if your clients really love Facebook then you need to love it too.  Love it more than your competition does and you’ll make headway. 

2.     Make a list of those things you have in common and those things that set you apart now or could set you apart with a little tweaking.  Maybe it’s going to be your customer service, making best use of your background or experience, or perhaps leveraging your understanding of another culture or language.

Note the things your competition does really well and do them even better.  Also note those things that you think they do poorly and make sure that you let potential clients know that you do it better.

If you decide to differentiate on fees make sure that your practice is different because you have a better understanding of how your clients want to be charged.  For example are they a frugal group that wants to pay by the hour and have each activity explained and charged separately?  Maybe your clients are more sensitive to an ‘all included’ fee schedule and just want to pay by the day and know that everything they need is covered by that fee. 

3.     Be more service oriented.  How can you offer different or better experience than your colleagues? How can you make your services more appealing to your clients?  Maybe it’s a pre-conference video chat to make sure that everyone is comfortable, or you give them a video, book, or workbook, to help them understand the process.  Maybe your practice is family oriented and you offer a play room full of toys for the children of your clients. It might be that your clients want to pay with a credit card so that they can accrue miles.  Perhaps your clients are tech savvy and want to manage their time and case via online calendaring, document sharing platforms, etc. If so, be sure that your practice is tech savvy for them.  Other clients will want to know that your practice makes efforts to be ‘green’.  The point is, making things not only the best but the easiest for your clients to use your service is one of the best ways to set your practice apart from the others.

4.     Mediators and arbitrators only get hired when prospective clients know us, like us, and trust us.  Connecting with people on a personal yet professional level will build stronger relationships.  Keeping in touch with past clients, not just for marketing, but for relationship building is important since they’re your primary source of referrals.  Reaching out and meeting new people who are within your primary, secondary, or tertiary target markets (or their gatekeepers).  Make a list of the associations or organizations to which your potential clients belong and decide which of those groups has the best fit for your goals.  Then, get involved.  Attend events and actively network, write articles for them, speak to them, train them, volunteer for their board of directors.  Get involved and be a resource.

5.     This one is easy and obvious – do a good job.  Our clients aren’t delusional enough to think that we can assist in resolution for every case that we hear.  But they definitely know when we’re giving them our all or just phoning it in. Keep up to date on what’s happening within the ADR industry (like the current demand for Online Dispute Resolution). 

Being able to give our clients the best service we can means that we need to pay attention to the growth and wellbeing of our practices and but just as important we also need to take care of ourselves as humans.  Be well rested, get some exercise, eat healthfully, and find activities that feed your passions.