Nicole Whyte knew the construction and real estate booms wouldn’t last forever.
When founding Bremer Whyte Brown & O’Meara LLP in 1997, Whyte and her colleagues mainly tackled construction litigation. But they knew the market would eventually drop. And they knew they would need to be prepared.
By diversifying its offerings, the law firm grew its client base and, in return, its bottom line. Bremer Whyte has grown from two attorneys to 141 employees spread throughout seven cities.
Whyte says there are four aspects to consider when deciding how to diversify and grow your company: your clients’ needs, industry trends, your company goals, and the flexibility and talent of your people.
“The key is being able to look to the future and being able to anticipate clients’ needs and industry and other trends to be ahead of the curve,” says Whyte, a founding partner and family law expert at the firm.
Smart Business spoke with Whyte about what to analyze when it comes to deciding how to diversify.
Understand and anticipate clients’ needs. Communication is key — it’s staying in touch or being in touch on a daily or at least a weekly basis with the key people, the key leaders of your clients.
Communicating with them, and finding out what’s happening within their industries or businesses, and what their needs are and how those needs are changing.
Frankly, just sometimes asking point blank what we, as essentially a service provider, can be doing or should be doing, or what do they want us to do to better serve their needs.
It just comes down to communication. I think the one-on-one relationship is key. Obviously, today, much communication is done by way of technology, e-mail and so forth, but I still think the one-on-one meeting in person (is essential).
Getting out of your chair and traveling to the client, going to their facility or to their offices, meeting the key people, having an understanding of the employees and so forth is key so that you can see what their operations are and how they operate. That is extremely helpful.
Research trends and diversify. All of the partners within my firm are responsible for being informed and staying informed (on trends), and we have regular partner meetings. It’s really a group project if you will.
The key is looking to industry trends. That would be just staying on top of obviously the news and the economy, reading relative media publications, newspapers and so forth that will help keep you ahead of what those trends are.
To give you an example of that in my legal practice at the law firm, when we started the law firm we were handling a lot of construction litigation and that was in the ’90s when there was a construction boom here in Orange County and all over Southern California.
Of course, what we foresaw would happen because of the real estate boom and market (being cyclical) and even construction is cyclical — that ran for a seven-to-10-year cycle — we saw the real estate market (would) take a dive and with that construction, new construction.
It’s really having an understanding of what the trends are by speaking with people in the industry or reading the news publications and anticipating in seven years time this very busy construction arena is going to slow down, and with it, the litigation will slow down. We foresaw that and early on diversified into other areas of litigation. One of the areas we got into, for example, was employment litigation. That was an area that we got into that turned out to be a good area of practice.