LawVision INSIGHTS Blog

Law Firm CMO/CBDOs: Staying On Course

By LawVision on March 14, 2013

I was thinking of you Chief Marketing and Chief Business Development Officers out there as I was reading an aviation magazine recently to support my addiction to flying as, in addition to being a former CMO, I am also a private pilot.

As the principal leader of your sales, marketing and public relations effort within your firm, you have a multitude of requests and issues to deal with resulting in the need to make dozens of important decisions on a daily basis; often with little time for deep thought. The correlation to aviation is a direct one. Like a pilot, in order to be an effective CMO/CBDO, you must be able to identify, triage, prioritize, and solve the myriad issues that you deal with every day, ranging from the silly “last minute change to someone’s bio” to a complicated human resource issue involving some level of subterfuge by one of your staff members.

To be an effective CMO/CBDO, thoughtful planning is critical and effective communication is essential. However, despite good planning and decision making, it is still easy to get distracted and maybe even ‘off course’. Pilots experience much of the same thing and we are instructed not to let distractions get in the way of “flying the airplane”. The point is that you shouldn’t forget what your top priorities are as you become inundated with distractions of the routine business day that is rife with people trying to get a piece of you. In most cases, it is better to focus on solving the problem ‘right’ than it is to solve the problem ‘fast’. The key is to multitask, delegate and take your time to slow the game down as you navigate through the distractions to get back ‘on course’ to focus on those three or four activities that will actually make a difference as you help your firm achieve its goals and objectives.

“Safe flying!”