How a Newsletter Saved the Day– a COVID Lesson

1996 was the worst year of my life. Our law partnership had blown up spectacularly, with two partners in heavy-duty litigation against one another, and the rest of us drawn in as hapless bit players. Our excellent staff found work elsewhere and clients fled the radiation zone in droves. Money dried up almost instantly, but ongoing obligations did not. Before long we were in deep trouble.

Joe Cuffari and I scrounged up a couple of computers, a well-used photocopier, a printer and a fax machine and moved our practice to the dining room of my home. The copier had come from a well smoked-in office and reeked in the small space. Oh yes, and we didn’t get to keep the old phone number.

Joe had four kids and I had four kids, and we were the primary breadwinners. The little work that came in barely kept our families alive. It was grim.

The gravest problem which faced us was that our clients had all scattered to the winds, and didn’t know how to find us. Remember, the internet was in its infancy– nobody could just “look us up on Google”. And if clients couldn’t find us, we had no work.

We had to help the clients find us. Fortunately, we had been early adopters of “client relationship management” software, so at least we had an electronic mailing list at hand, unlike many of our competitors who were still using rolodexes. So we knew where our clients were– they just didn’t know where we were.

As the latter part of the year unfolded, we understood that we needed to write to each of our clients, bring them up to speed, and let them know our whereabouts. Since these were the very early days of the internet, few clients had e-mail addresses. This would have to be Canada Post.

Initially we conceived of a simple letter with just our contact information. Then we asked ourselves, since each package was going to consist of a sheet of paper, an envelope, and a stamp, why not maximize the value of the exercise.

The idea that this reaching out was about much more than telling clients how to reach us– it was an opportunity to recapture clients who may have wandered to another office or didn’t need us today, but would next year, or the year after, and we wanted to make sure all those relationships remained warm and tight. So the simple one-sided, boring address information sheet morphed into a much more ambitious endeavour: a newsletter!

Wasn’t this a lot more work? Of course it was, probably by a factor of twenty. More costly? Yes, we had to have it printed. (And our eternal thanks to Blake and Bev Feeley of Eastern Ontario Graphics who helped us at every stage of the process and charged us a fraction of what they should have.)

Newsletter Number 1 was dated January 1997. You can see it here (http://www.purposeful.ca/blog#) . I don’t recall how many went out, but it was at most five hundred.

The response was astonishing. Not only did the phone begin to ring again, but almost immediately we noticed an uptick in new clients as readers shared the newsletter with friends and family. We even got sweet handwritten notes from little old ladies.

We decided to send it out three times a year, and the Newsletter continued until my retirement from law in September 2017. The last edition went out to around 1800 addresses.

This is what we learned. We discovered that in the absolute worst, frightening and disheartening times, if you reach out to your clients with solid value and good humour, and you do it again and again, that you will prosper.

So you must forgive me for sounding a little sanguine in these scary times. The truth is that really hard times often provide the opportunity for great personal revelation and innovation. While the days of paper newsletters are (mostly) gone, the art of reaching out to clients and friends of the firm and giving genuine value, presented in an attractive fashion, will never go out of style.