Over the years, we’ve opened four regional offices and more than 20 satellite offices—a growth strategy that has consistently prompted questions about how we’ve managed to do this successfully
As the architect behind these expansions, Tony Karls recently joined me to discuss our data-driven approach to selecting new territories and ensuring each location contributes to our firm’s growth.
Our Territorial Analysis Playbook
When considering a new location, we start by understanding where qualified online traffic comes from.
This is crucial because our firm gets between 36% and 42% of our traffic from Google Maps. With this knowledge as our foundation, we analyze several key factors:
Demographics Matter
We examine the demographics of potential areas, focusing on:
- Marriage rates: Since we’re a family law firm, the percentage of married individuals directly impacts our potential client base. In areas with lower marriage rates (like one city in our sample where only 32 percent of residents are married versus the average of 52 percent), we adjust our expectations accordingly.
- Age distribution: We look at three specific age groups—25 to 34, 35 to 54, and 54 to 65—as proxies for potential clients. Our goal is to find populations clustered within these brackets.
- Income levels: Our sweet spot is households earning between $75,000 and $200,000 annually. Interestingly, we’ve found that in areas with significantly higher incomes (above $200,000-$300,000), our conversion rates actually drop. We presume this is because these individuals often have established relationships with other professionals who provide referrals, making them less likely to search online for legal services.
Analyzing Drive Times and Reach
One of our most significant discoveries came from our experience in Chicago. Despite ranking well in organic search and maps in downtown Chicago (the Loop), we saw disappointing results.
Why? Because in dense urban areas, normative travel expectations are completely different.
We use a tool called Smappen to analyze how people typically travel in an area. In Chicago, where public transit is predominant and people expect short 15-minute travel times, our potential reach was limited to just a few blocks.
This contrasts sharply with more spread-out communities like Appleton, Wisconsin, where residents routinely drive 20+ minutes for services.
For each potential location, we overlay Google Maps with travel time data to determine our actual reach.
The rule is simple: the higher the density of law firms in an area, the smaller the expected drive time. The lower the density, the greater the drive time people will accept.
The Magic Number: 70,000
After compiling all this data in a spreadsheet, we’re looking for a minimum of 70,000 people in each category (marriage, age, income) within our potential reach. In our most recent analysis, we identified a region with:
- 142,000 total population
- 77,000 ideally married individuals
- 82,000 within our target age range
- 106,000 within our income parameters
- 88,000 average overlap
This makes it an ideal region for expansion. If we don’t exceed these numbers, we don’t consider the area.
Rural vs. Urban: Surprising Profitability
Interestingly, our best-performing offices have often been in rural locations.
Despite our intuition that urban areas might yield better results, our rural offices have performed financially just as well, or better, as those in the densely populated Chicagoland area.
We believe this success stems from several factors:
- Rural areas typically have less skewed income distributions, with more residents falling within our target range
- Higher percentage of married individuals
- Lower competition from other lawyers (likely due to the absence of nearby law schools)
The primary challenge with rural locations isn’t profitability—it’s lawyer recruitment. This factor cannot be understated. (If I were starting over, I would go to a rural area!)
Selecting the Specific Office Location
Once we’ve identified a promising community, we select the specific office location based on:
- City selection: We choose the city within the region that demonstrates the best metrics with the least drive-time friction.
- Courthouse proximity: While we consider the distance from the county courthouse to minimize travel for our team, we prioritize client convenience. Clients care about proximity to themselves, not to the courthouse.
- Office specifications: For satellite locations, we typically seek spaces of 500-600 square feet with a reception area and one or two conference rooms. We’ve had success with both standalone offices and shared office arrangements, though the latter can present challenges with Google Maps listings.
- Security measures: To address security concerns, especially for female attorneys meeting with potentially problematic clients, we’ve implemented an automated system through our CRM that ensures no attorney is alone in a satellite office during such meetings.
Data-Driven Decisions
The key to our successful expansion has been making data-driven decisions rather than convenience-based choices.
We often encounter firms that want to open offices in affluent areas where the owners live, but these locations frequently don’t align with our data metrics.
As Tony puts it, “Make a data-driven decision, not a convenience decision. If you want to grow your business, let the data guide you. If it’s not a good location, you might be trying to fish where there’s no fish.”
This data-driven approach to opening regional and satellite offices has been one of the major drivers of our growth over the past decade, taking us from zero to more than $15 million in revenue today.
The strategy works because it’s grounded in research, not intuition or convenience.
