No matter what kind of professional you are, the odds are good that your practice is, to put it nicely, under pressure. Markets are extremely volatile. Clients, for the most part, are not stressing over their investment portfolios—yet. They are not inclined to take action at this time. There are more important matters they have to deal with, like making sure their families are safe.

Evidently, it’s not just the wealth management industry that is feeling the pressure. The business of law has been upended, too: People might be thinking about estate planning, but they aren’t doing anything about it right now. Accountants might be doing better since tax season now seems to last all year. But a lot of the higher-margin work accountants do is being sidelined.

That means most professional practices are going to be hit hard by the economic impact of Covid-19. Now that we’re in a recession, you might be asking some questions: How severe will it be? How long will it last? How are we going to get through these tough times?

I, for one, have no answers for the first two questions. However, I do have an answer for the third. The world has changed. When the worst of this crisis is behind us (when, not if), we’ll be living in the “new normal.”

Maybe N95 masks will become pervasive fashion statements. Maybe videoconferencing will become the norm and secluded lunch meetings the exception. Maybe the very notion of leadership will change. There are a lot of maybes, and we’ll just have to see how everything pans out. But life is not going to just reset to what it was before the crisis.

What To Do In The New Normal?
If your personal life is secure (in other words, if you’re “comfortably” sheltering in place), you’re probably now concerned about your practice. It’s one thing to cope with the market downturn. It’s another thing to worry about your own business survival. To address this, you may be reaching out to clients, possibly with literature or market materials. You may, like most professionals, be thinking about how you’re going to keep doing business during the crisis.

But I suggest you think about the success of your business differently right now. Relatively few clients are now engaging with professionals, so it’s probably wrong to think your efforts are going to produce significant revenues. But you can still supercharge your practice for the recovery when it begins.

Ask yourself: What is your plan? What actions are you going to take to exponentially grow as the recovery starts and clients decide to take action?

I’m finding that most professionals are not thinking at all about the recovery. They’re just trying to cope with what’s happening today. Only a small percentage are considering what happens when the crisis wanes and people want to do something such as restructure their portfolios or redo some of their wealth planning.

Today, you must think about building for you and your expertise. You could build on your current relationships to anticipate the growth that you’ll see when things settle down. Taking actions now can prepare you for that stellar growth.

Your Recovery Plan
You should start with setting your goals for the period after the crisis. You also need to build on, confirm and readjust your strategic relationships. As you’re building greater rapport with others, you want to catalog business opportunities. While doing this, you’ll also likely be adjusting your goals.

Set high-end goals for the new normal. It’s possible that many wealth managers will double their pre-crisis revenues in two years once the recovery starts. Lawyers, no matter what their field of expertise, could also boost their revenues 25% or more from where they were before the crisis within two years once the turmoil passes. Accountants will be able to more quickly double their pre-crisis revenues because of the role they’re playing today.

Essentially, most any professional will be able to dramatically improve revenues.

What will your annual earnings be when this is over? It can be very useful to set high but realistic goals. It’s also important to realize that you need to give yourself a time frame. In our experience, two years is pretty good. So two years into the recovery, what are your annual earnings going to be?

Adjust to the new normal. It’s very unlikely that when the crisis ends, business will go back to the way it was before. More likely, a lot of people are going to be making adjustments, which we can only hypothesize about today.

I, for example, anticipate using videoconferencing more often. It’s become a necessity. Some of the changes in the ways people interact will be predictable, others unexpected. You’re likely going to need to modify the ways you operate.

Work on your strategic relationships. You need to keep improving the relationships you have with other professionals, especially those who refer business to you. While many of you are likely calling these people and sending them materials, it’s likely you’re taking a one-size-fits-all approach, and even if you’re connecting, you’re not having any substantial impact.

The approach I use is called the “Everyone Wins Process.” It’s a way to get results without manipulation or persuasion. The idea is that the more everything is about the other person, the more successful you’ll become. It means you need to concentrate on and understand other people’s agendas. You do this through discovery, finding out what clients’ and other professionals’ concerns and anxieties are.

Most of the conversations you have with these people are going to be about life, not your services or products. Wealth management is not high on the list of topics for most ultra-wealthy people. If it returns, it will be because affluent families have addressed higher priority concerns and are willing to turn to their personal financial situations.

Cataloging business opportunities. While it’s important to make other people and their concerns the center of the discussion in this process, it’s also important, if you want to win business after the crisis, to catalog business opportunities and build a backlog.

You must be able to see where you’ll offer a client value once they decide it’s time to actually take action. These possibilities will frequently arise in the conversations you’ll be having. You must listen closely when clients talk about things “they need to get to” or what they’re focusing on “once the madness is over,” as one of my super-rich clients put it.

There will be a lot of opportunities for all sorts of professionals once the crisis is over. Building rapport with other professionals means they’ll refer their better clients to you.

By listening to clients’ interests and worries, you’ll be able to often identify solutions that can be instrumental to their ability to weather the crisis. By listening to other professionals, you’ll be able to offer ideas that can help their practices during the recovery. When you adeptly structure the relationships, they are motivated to send their top clients to you for your expertise, and you’ll have what could be an extensive list of people who might turn to you when they decide to take action.

What’s important to realize is that a percentage of clients (and those of the professionals you’re helping) will take some sort of action during the crisis. This can easily result in more business for you before the “madness is over.”

As you’re cataloging opportunities, you’ll probably find yourself reassessing your high-end goals. Don’t be surprised if you’re upping the numbers. What you thought was a stretch will commonly be seen as low. You’re also going to likely re-evaluate your strategic relationships. It’s not uncommon to refocus your efforts on different professionals who can deliver clients to you.

Bottom Line
I’m confident that like me, you’re hoping for the crisis to end as quickly as possible and for it to cause as little pain as possible. But right now, you can be a major help to other people by connecting and delivering value where possible.

Doing so will not only benefits clients and other professionals, it can make you very, very successful. By focusing on others, you’re laying the foundation for your practice to grow later. And the odds are quite good that you’ll be generating more business while the crisis is still ongoing.

Russ Alan Prince is president of R.A. Prince & Associates.