The Gravitational Effect of Reputation

There are probably three major ways of generating plenty of business if you are in a service industry or profession. Any of the three will work if your objective is simply to make lots of money. Only one will work if your objective is also to have a satisfying professional life.

The first is called “barrier to entry”. Some businesses and professions have managed to create moats or barriers around themselves, limiting the numbers who can practice the trade. By sheltering under some kind of regulatory protection, they prevent others from eating at their trough. Patent agents, realtors, lawyers, architects, and many others have built such walls around themselves keeping the general public from dabbling in their trades. If you can get yourself qualified to practice in these professions, you enjoy a monopoly and your only concern is dividing up a protected pie. The risk, of course, is that anti-competitive regulators are all too anxious to knock down such protective walls, after which you’re left to fend for yourself.

The second is to lure in masses of customers by way of clever advertising. Think McDonald’s, or automobile sales. This works because they are in the volume business. Amongst the professions, at least in Canada, personal injury lawyers work on this model, offering to take your case on contingency, “you only pay if you win”. Their advertising can be seen on billboards, television, and city buses. The trick is to maximize traffic and run a highly-efficient, systematized business.

Almost all such purveyors talk a good line about reputation, being “the best”, but in truth there are only so many ways to package and sell hamburgers or catastrophic injury cases. Professional satisfaction can burn out pretty quickly and “success” in these businesses and professions is almost always measured in money.

There is a third way, a better way which avoids having to be protected by a regulatory wall or having to advertise and run volume. This way centers on reputation.

If you have a powerful reputation for excellent and effective work in your narrow area of expertise, you don’t need to advertise. In fact, the very clients who need you and your proficiencies will seek you out because at that point in their lives they are highly motivated to find the best solution to a very pressing problem. Even if your reputation is not well-known in the general community, it will be well-known in your general profession and in parallel or adjunct professions. As a commercial lawyer, for example, I will know who the “go-to” experts are in tax litigation or in patent disputes, and if I don’t know any personally, fifteen minutes of focused research or phone calls will give me the top three names.

The wonderful thing about building your professional business on reputation is that you will be able to focus on assisting highly motivated clients achieve things they desperately need or desperately want. Because you’re working strictly within your wheelhouse, you’ll almost certainly deliver to or in excess of expectations, turning your highly satisfied client into an evangelist for your cause and burnishing your reputation even brighter. The result is that you will be handsomely and happily paid for doing something that you love doing, and in the process make yourself even more attractive to future clients.

It’s about as close to perpetual motion as you’ll ever get.