What can law firms learn from Apple?

When Apple’s first business plan was created in 1976 it was called “The Apple Marketing Philosophy” and was a 1 page document.

It contained 3 principles:
• Empathy – Understand the needs of your customers better than your competitors do.
• Focus – To be good at what we do we must eliminate things which are not important.
• Impute – people judge a book by its cover. If we present our product in a creative and professional way people will assume we are creative and professional. Appearance is important because people make judgements based upon it.

When the 3 principles were written down Apple had about half a dozen staff and operated from the garage at Steve Jobs house.

At the same time as drawing up the principles, the author, Mike Markkula, also told Steve Jobs that Apple would be a Fortune 500 company in 2 years. In fact it took them 7 years, but they got there.

What can we learn from this?

1. A good plan can be very short and simple.
2. Identify the group of customers you want to serve and meet their needs better than anyone else. You cannot be all things to all men. You cannot delight everyone. Find those you can work with best and focus on them.
3. Focus on the elements of your product which are important to your customers. Increase those. Decrease or remove elements which are not important to your chosen customers. It saves you cost and means you can give your chosen customers more of what they value.
4. How customers see you is important. They will make assumptions based on how you appear. It doesn’t matter what you want to be or what you say you are. It is all about how you appear and how you behave.
5. There is nothing wrong with having big ambition. Fortune 500 in 2 years was never going to happen, but Apple made it in 7 years.
6. Good strategy is not complicated. Remember you need to write it down and make sure your people know about it, understand it and believe in it.

The three big things about strategy are having it, talking about it and doing it.