Join me for a free lunch on how to move away from hourly billing. There is limited space in this workshop so please e-mail me ASAP if you are interested. The program will be held at the Downtown Harvard Club in Boston.

A few weeks ago, I finally got rid of my car. It was a 1994 Honda but it only had 115,000 miles on it. As far as I could tell, it still had a lot of life left in it. Unfortunately, it didn’t look great. Rust was beginning to eat away at the body.

The pragmatic environmentalist in me told me to keep driving it despite the relatively high repair bills. After all, it is still cheaper to keep an old car on the road than it is to incur the great expense of purchasing a new car (or the expense of a late model used car). And from an environmental perspective, replacing a car means consuming all the raw materials required to create the new car.

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Yesterday, I had the pleasure of receiving an entire day of feedback on my oral presentation skills. I’m in the midst of putting together some video for my website and I spent seven hours at the studios of Rampion Visual Productions in Watertown, MA.

Steve Tringali, the brains behind Rampion, was the director and for the past several weeks, I’ve been working with Steve to develop scripts for a series of videos that will be posted at www.seckler.com (check back in late May).

In many ways, I felt like a contestant on American Idol (don’t worry, I only sing in the outtakes). And Steve was like one of the nice judges on the show (he kept prompting me to be more believable–to commit; to really mean what I’m saying).

It was a good reminder that commitment is a key element of selling all professional services. If someone contacts you about a legal problem, they want to know that you will be able to help them. They need to believe that you are capable of handling their situation and that you have experience working on similar matters.

You can accomplish this through marketing (e.g. through writing and speaking about your area of expertise). Your referral sources can give you a big leg up in sending you good prospects (“Oh you should really contact my good friend attorney Jim Smith. He can really help you!)

But at the end of the day, if you want to get the business, you have to be able to look into the eyes of the prospect and tell him or her that you can handle their situation.

It’s a lot harder to look into a camera lens and be that convincing; but it sure is good practice.