Having a Happy New Year

The New Year is an excellent time for a lot of things: celebrating, planning, making resolutions you’ll break a month later. But it’s also a good time to ask yourself this question: what are you going to do to make sure that your Happy New Year really is, well…happy?

Yes, happy. Face it, the day goes by faster and work seems less like work when it makes us happy. In a perfect world, most of us would like to do interesting work for loyal Clients who value our services and pay us fairly. And if we can do less work and have more free time for ourselves, our families and our friends, that will make most of us happy too. Life is just too short to be unhappy. 

It’s the same for business development. If you enjoy it, you will always be more successful at it. Too many attorneys I talk to think that business development means ‘pitching’ or ‘schmoozing’ or ‘working the room’ at a cocktail party – and the thought of that does not make them happy.

Fortunately, that’s not what business development is all about. In fact, there are so many things you can do to develop business that there is something almost any attorney can find enjoyable…