Law office management is one hell of a tightrope to walk.

On one hand, you’ve got the usual duties of managing a team and dealing with clients. On the other, you have the added pressure of a single mistake changing “business as usual” into a $50 million malpractice lawsuit.

Now, I won’t claim to have expertise in any legal fields, but what I can do is trawl through hours of research to bring you the best law office management tips on offer.

In this post I’ll cover:

• Document storage methods
• Using cloud software (whether it’s appropriate, the benefits, and the risks)
• Onboarding employees
• How you can delegate work
• Onboarding clients
• How to arrange and conduct effective meetings with clients and employees
• Security management methods
• And more…

Read on to find out how you can improve your law practice in terms of efficiency, security, and productivity.
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Dictation software isn’t just something that can save you time by typing out your speech and performing commands. Talking instead of typing can and will help you prevent lasting damage to your hands.

You might think that sounds silly, and so did I.

I’m 23 – way too young to be worried about my joints or work-related injuries (my work isn’t exactly manual labor).

Then my hands seized up. Repetitive strain injury.

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Home pages are typically the most viewed location on a website and your main opportunity to connect with the audience as a brand. Get it wrong, and all of those views will go from potential customers to part of your bounce rate.

“Your homepage is probably the most visited page on your website — in fact, for the majority of websites, it typically receives more than 50% of all visitor traffic. In light of that… you may want to start thinking of your homepage more like a landing page” – John Paul Mains, Your Homepage Is THE Landing Page

Knowing this, I decided to do something similar to our SaaS pricing pages study by analyzing 100 leading startup home pages to see what they have in common, and how you can apply these lessons to your own website.

In this post I’ll go through 11 core data-backed takeaways to give a better outline of how to make your home page, and highlight the differences you’ll need to know if you’re targeting a niche audience.

From word count and jargon usage to social proof and CTAs, keep reading to see how the top 100 startups use their home page.

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The Art of SaaS shows that even industry veterans are sick of unnecessary jargon and bloated descriptions.

Rather than spending thousands of words (or multiple books) trying to explain every variation of the SaaS model, it draws from the experiences of Dr. Ahmed Bouzid and Dave Rennyson in order to cover all of the basics of a quality SaaS business in less than 60 pages.

Being so short, an Art of SaaS review might seem redundant at first. Why not just read the book in about an hour and learn what the authors believe to be:

• What SaaS is
• The bargain between vendor and user
• The importance of uptime (and how to maintain it)
• The three priorities all teams should share
• The three practices which achieve those priorities
• The structure of every team, and how they should be managed

Well, in this post I’m going to cover both the core takeaways of The Art of SaaS and the context surrounding the book itself by drawing from other figures in the field.

I’ll show you why this odd little volume is worth reading and what pitfalls to avoid when taking it at face value.

Let’s get started.

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Bidding for jobs can be cutthroat.

Not only do you have to create an accurate estimate of how much everything will cost, but you have to do so as quickly as possible to have the best chance of securing the customer.

You don’t want to waste time filling out forms when you could be working, but any mistakes can severely damage your chances of getting the sale (if the estimate is too high) or even ruin your reputation (if the estimate is too low).

That’s why we here at Process Street have created and gathered these 14 free estimate templates.

Instead of having to create your own job estimate form, all you have to do is look through the templates below and see which one you like best. All serve the purpose of giving your clients a professional job estimate document, but allowing you to just fill in basic details instead of creating each document from the ground up.

Just head for one of the following sections and make your pick:

• General free estimate templates
• Microsoft Word job estimate templates
• Microsoft Excel estimate templates
• PDF estimate templates

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From putting together flat-packed furniture to avoiding nuclear war, we’ve talked at length on why processes are important.

They’re the lifeblood of any consistent business, allowing it to repeat its successes, avoid mistakes, increase efficiency, and create effective to do lists. Without them you have no hope of even knowing what you’re doing right or wrong – you’ve more chance of putting together IKEA furniture with no instructions than of improving your situation and growing your business.

However, without standardizing processes you make, anything you document will do more harm than good.

Different layouts will make it hard to distinguish what the correct version of the process is, varying language across your teams will make working together a nightmare, while multiple naming and storage methods make it impossible to search for the process you need.

So, today I’ll show you how to standardize your processes by creating a documentation style guide which suits your needs. This guide can then be followed whenever anyone in your business needs to document a workflow.

It’s time to unify your company and cement your success.

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No matter what kind of business you’re in, if you have a supply chain then it’s vital that you have a system of logistics management processes to guide how that chain runs.

Without set, trackable methods for ordering and managing stock, fulfilling customer orders, inspecting your facilities and so on, you’re leaving the success of your business (and the level of waste) up to random human error.

“One participant described a customer who used air freight for items that went into long-term inventory. Another recounted how individuals ordered 100 units of a product which they had not even used 30 units of in the previous year. Uncoordinated buying led to different groups in the same facility paying different prices for the same goods and ordering uneconomically small quantities.” – MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics, A Sickly Supply Chain

To stop this kind of inefficiency and needless waste, we here at Process Street have created these 8 free logistics management templates.

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If all you want to know from this E Myth review is whether or not the book is worth reading, then go and buy a copy right now.

Michael Gerber passionately runs through the core reasons why so many small businesses fail from over 40 years of experience, and how to create a business that will be successful.

“Every year, over a million people in this country start a business of some sort… Within five years, more than 80 percent of them – 800,00 – will have failed.”
– Michael E. Gerber, The E Myth Revisited, p. 2

The book is a fascinating insight into the experience of Gerber dealing with not only failing businesses, but the people in charge of them who are often at their wit’s end. His drive to help them and satisfaction in seeing them blossom into true business owners is infectious, leaving you enthusiastic to start your own journey after every chapter.

It’s the same enthusiasm you can hear in Gerber’s voice when we interviewed him on Business Systems Explored to explore why small businesses fail.

If you’re running a small business that isn’t getting off the ground, want to know how to create a business that works, or have ever thought about how you could make a successful business to fuel your ideal lifestyle, then keep reading.

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Project proposals are how you can get management to act on your ideas. They’re the bottom-up version of a project request form.

They are how you can influence your company’s future.

Writing a project proposal isn’t rocket science, but it is a vital skill for being able to successfully pitch projects that you know will benefit your team and business as a whole. Casual conversations aren’t enough – you need to give a formal document which addresses concerns before your manager, CEO, and stakeholders have a chance to voice them.

Plus, having a set template for writing a proposal gives you a document which you can reference throughout the entire project. Instead of having to rely on notes and your vague memory of a water cooler conversation, you have set instructions to follow, and a defense against anyone who says that the project isn’t worth it.

It’s a great example of effective business process management – if anyone questions you, you can show them the project proposal and say “this was approved, and so this is what we’re going to do”.

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For your business to survive it will need to evolve. For it to evolve, you need to make changes. Without a change management model, the success of those changes is up to nothing more than hope and dumb luck.

British Airways didn’t successfully overhaul their entire organization by making changes and crossing their fingers – they had a model and strategy to follow.

“Before King began announcing layoffs, he explained his reasons… to prepare them for the upcoming change. Without his transparency, British Airways could have experienced employee backlash and negative press around all the layoffs.” – Laura Troyani, 3 Examples of Organizational Change Done Right

A model which paved the way for them earning $284 million in profit (the highest in its industry) within ten years of the changes.

I’ve already gone over how to form your own change management strategy, so today I’ll break down the change management models you can use to do the same for your business.

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