3 Questions You Need To Ask BEFORE You Institute Your Associate Bonus Compensation Plan

Associate bonus compensation is vital in retaining top talent at your law firm and motivating your employees. In order to create a bonus incentive plan, however, you need to have an answer to three specific questions: 

1. What does your business need? 2. What will motivate your associates? 3. What is your M.V.P.?

In this episode, we discuss: 

• The 3 questions to start the process of configuring the bonus compensation plan.

Allison Bio:

Allison C. Williams, Esq., is the Founder and Owner of the Williams Law Group, LLC, with offices in Short Hills and Freehold, New Jersey. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, is Certified by the Supreme Court of New Jersey as a Matrimonial Law Attorney, and is the first attorney in New Jersey to become Board-Certified by the National Board of Trial Advocacy in the field of Family Law.

Ms. Williams is an accomplished businesswoman. In 2017, the Williams Law Group won the LawFirm500 award, ranking 14th of the fastest-growing law firms in the nation, as Ms. Williams grew the firm by 581% in three years. Ms. Williams won the Silver Stevie Award for Female Entrepreneur of the Year in 2017. In 2018, Ms. Williams was voted as NJBIZ’s Top 50 Women in Business and was designated one of the Top 25 Leading Women Entrepreneurs and Business Owners. In 2019, Ms. Williams won the Seminole 100 Award for founding one of the fastest-growing companies among graduates of Florida State University.

In 2018, Ms. Williams created Law Firm Mentor, a business coaching service for lawyers. She helps solo and small law firm attorneys grow their business revenues, crush chaos in business and make more money. Through multi-day intensive business retreats, group and one-to-one coaching, and strategic planning sessions, Ms. Williams advises lawyers on all aspects of creating, sustaining, and scaling a law firm business – and specifically, she teaches them the core foundational principles of marketing, sales, personnel management, communications, and money management in law firms.

Contacts – Social Media

https://www.lawfirmmentor.net/speak-with-a-growth-strategist

Snip-Its

00:16:57 (36 Seconds)

As your company grows, you might not want to differentiate the types of benefits that you give from person to person, but you might, right? You might want to have a structured bonus plan whereby people get to elect at the beginning of the year what bonus they're going to be pursuing. You can build out your entire budget around if a person hits a budget, a goal so that they are entitled to bonus compensation that it's already paid for by virtue of you starting at the beginning of the year, setting aside the funds that are going to be necessary for that. But the worst thing that you can do is presuppose that the only thing people care about is money.

• Try to create parity between what's expected and what's delivered.
• How much should be going to the base compensation based on the market.
• Be sure what will motivate your associates so you can create the right incentive plan.
• What you are going to create in the future so you have the balance of your profit and your expenses in appropriate ratios