So now that you have a good understanding of how your firm is performing financially you can begin to work on each department in turn.

The first thing to say is that although your immediate reaction may be simply to close certain areas of activity it is a last-resort thing to do, something you should only consider when there really is no hope of improving it. There are several reasons:The difference between a decent performance and a poor one can be quite small. A serious programme to increase fees by 10 or 20% will often change the entire complexion.You may well be able to turn the department around. Throwing it away may simply turn out to be a waste of all the business, contacts and referrals it has built up over the years.Even though it may not be performing as it could or should, it is still contributing something to overheads. Dump it and unless you can cut overheads in proportion that share will need to be borne by other departments, each taking on more than they currently do. You may think you can cut overheads to avoid this but that is unlikely. You currently have a receptionist and two cashiers. Can you really reduce them by the 20% needed? Will you be willing to move premises and if so could you save 20% doing so? And do you want to face redundancy costs and the damage that such steps will do to your local reputation, sapping confidence among your clients and staff?You will lose cross-referred work. Conveyancing may be doing quite a lot of work for Probate and house buyers may be doing lots of new wills. Cut one out and the other will suffer.

No, the first step is to begin to work on the department that is performing worst, then the next-worst and so on. What to do? Here are some ideas:

1) Communicate. Discuss with each FE how they are doing and what is getting in their way, what changes would enable them to achieve more. If there are FEs in the department who are doing OK or better try to discover what they are doing right. FEs need to know what the problems are but don't discourage them - stress that the firm is looking at this positively and trying to support them better.
2) Encourage the departmental head to hold regular meetings. On the agenda should be all the things that are holding performance down: individual and departmental billings and targets, new matters started, matters for which we pitched but failed to get, daily work routines and how to achieve efficiency gains, problem clients including debtors, the effectivenesss of the support staff, and so on. We will go on later to build in such things as quality and risk management issues but right now we need to focus on financial performance.
3) Work out and then discuss break-even bills delivered figures. Encourage FEs to sit down at their desks each morning with a figure in mind - a minimum figure that they simply have to achieve to avoid losing money. Get them to keep a pad in a desk drawer to monitor this. If their daily target figure is £300, say, they need to see the averages reaching or bettering this. For every day at £200 they must know that they are going to need a £400 one to keep up. And for each day that they cannot bill enough they must know that they have done enough work to produce real bills in the future.
4) Give rewards and prizes. This is seperate from any incentive payments you may implement and can be quite light-hearted. It means such things as a bottle of Champagne to the FE who produces the biggest improvement over last month, or the biggest billing total for a period, or the smallest unpaid bill total, or the highest figure for chargeable hours.
5) Try to make it as much fun as possible. Struggling to improve poor peformance can be very depressing and you want all the staff here, FEs and secretaries, to see that you are with them, on their side, and are being encouraging and supportive rather than critical.
6) Look at the marketing and involve the team. Get them to come up with ideas and, ideally, carry them through. Consider advertising, PR, tapping every referrer you know and pressing other departments for more cross-sold work. Inded, add this to your monthly prizes - a worthwhile something or other for the member of staff that gets the most new work referred.

Keep at it relentlessly and when you see improvements look hard at how they have been achieved and at how they can be repeated.

And in essence this strategy can be applied in all your departments. Just because you a pleased with the way one may be going does not mean that it cannot be improved further. Your own time may be better spent elsewhere but get the members of the department involved in developing their own areas.