After the coaching program: what to keep, what to drop, and what to count
Opening
You've done the program. You know your numbers better than you did, you've made hires, and you've sat with owners further down the road. The next step has to fit your own firm.
There comes a point in many coaching programs when the lessons stop teaching you much and the people still do. You've outgrown the tactics, and you don't want to give up the room. Both feelings are fair, and you don't have to choose between them yet.
A coaching program or mastermind teaches a room. That's what makes it useful: one set of lessons and one scorecard, with peers working through them beside you. Sooner or later the questions you bring are about your market, your practice, and your people, and a lesson built for the whole room can only take you part of the way on those. This page is about the step after the program, whether you stay in it or not.
What the program gave you
Start with an honest list of what you got out of it. It might be a weekly meeting where you look at the numbers, scripts your intake team uses, a plan for your next hire, an operations system, a new way of looking at what the firm spends, or a group of owners you can call when a month goes badly.
Gains like these are real, and they belong to your firm now. They also make the next step easier. A firm that already tracks something and already has written processes gives a strategist something to build on.
What to keep
Keep what's working, and be specific about what that means.
The people. If the room helps you think, stay in it. Peers who have faced the same hire or the same slow quarter are hard to replace.
The weekly look at the numbers. The habit is worth more than the dashboard it came with. Keep the meeting, and put the four numbers below on the screen.
The written processes. Intake scripts, follow-up steps, and the checklists your team already runs are the start of a marketing system. Keep them, and start measuring them.
Anything you can trace to signed clients. If a channel or a referral partner has sent you clients you can name, keep it running while you test what else could work.
What to drop
A program teaches what works for most of the room. Some of it won't fit your market or a firm your size, and the only way to know which parts is to check each one against your own results.
Tactics you run because the room runs them. If nobody can say how many signed clients a channel has produced, pause it until you can, or set it up so you can find out.
Reports that stop at clicks and leads. A lead report shows what you paid for. The signed-client count shows what you got.
Vendors without a manager. An agency that answers to no one at the firm reports on the numbers it chooses. Someone senior should hold it to yours.
You, as the firm's marketer. If you're still running the ads, the vendors, and the reports between hearings, that's the first job to hand off.
What to count
Once the program's scorecard is gone, four numbers tell you whether your marketing is working.
1 · Signed clients, by where they came from. Every new client gets a source: which page, which ad, which referral partner, which talk. This is the number that says the marketing worked.
2 · Cost per signed client, by channel. What you spent on each channel, set against the clients it signed. This is how you decide where the next dollar goes.
3 · Consultations, and how many of them sign. Consultations show up sooner than signed clients, which helps in any practice where clients take a while to decide. If consultations rise and signings don't, the problem is somewhere after the first call.
4 · Calls answered. How many calls reach a person, and how quickly the rest get a call back. Clients you've already paid for can slip away here without showing up in any ad report. I find where qualified leads are being lost between the first call and the signed engagement, and train your intake and sales team to sign more of them.
If you can't fill in the first number today, start there. Trace your last 20 signed clients back to where they came from, and record the source of every new one from now on.
Where a strategist fits
The next step is someone who works on one firm: yours. A firm can come out of a program with capable people and good software and still have nobody deciding what the team should work on first. That's the gap a Fractional CMO fills.
As your Fractional CMO, I work from your firm's own numbers and goals. I set the priorities, build the plan, and hold every vendor to the signed-client count. If you have a team, I lead and train them, so the skills stay inside your firm. If you don't, I run the marketing for you. I do both, and I believe there's real value for a firm in training its own people.
The program can stay. If the room still helps you, keep going. My work happens inside your firm, with your people, and the two sit side by side.
Owners' questions, answered
What should a law-firm owner do after a marketing coaching program?
Keep what's working, drop what doesn't fit your firm, and count four things: signed clients by source, cost per signed client, consultations and how many sign, and calls answered. Then decide who leads the marketing from here: you, your team with a senior person over it, or a Fractional CMO.
Coaching program or Fractional CMO?
They do different jobs. A program teaches you alongside other owners. A Fractional CMO works inside one firm, on its numbers, with its people. You can keep both.
Can you train the team we built during the program?
Yes. I train them on every part of the system they touch, write the processes down so the work keeps running when someone leaves, and lead the team from there.
Joshua David Little is a Fractional CMO for law-firm owners and the founder of Aquila Law Firm Marketing. He has run his own consulting firm since 2004, and has done hands-on work helping attorneys prepare complex litigation for trial in family law, medical malpractice, personal injury, and unjust enrichment cases. He ran the first family-law ad on ChatGPT, before the platform allowed legal-services ads.