Your revenue resets to zero every January 1st

Every January 1st you start at zero. So does every February 1st. You closed a good year, and none of it carries forward, because you bill per matter and matters end. That is the actual problem with hourly and flat-fee legal work. Not that it pays badly. That it never compounds. You can have a full pipeline in March and an empty calendar in April, and nothing you did in March changed that. Anu Kinhal, who runs a business law practice, worked through this on one of our coaching calls. What follows is his structure, not a framework we invented. ## He split the work into three plans The insight was that most of what he does for business clients is recurring anyway. Contract reviews. Quick "can I do this?" calls. Planning conversations before a deal. Clients were paying for those one at a time and flinching every time an invoice arrived. So he grouped them: **Basic Counsel**. Routine support. Contract reviews and short business planning calls. **Business Shield**. Adds contract drafting and litigation support. **Premium Shield**. High-priority access and multiple contracts a month. Three tiers is not magic. The point is that the client stops deciding whether this call is worth a bill, which is the decision that kills small legal questions before they reach you. ## The entry plan is $500 a month That is where he started. One plan, priced low enough that a business owner says yes without a meeting about it. Basim's line on the call was blunt: "Get them in the door and then nurture the relationship." A $500 plan is not the business. It is the thing that lets someone find out what working with you is like, at a price that does not require them to be sure first. ## Where this gets hard, and we should say it Subscription revenue is predictable for you. It is also a promise you have to keep in a month when three matters blow up at once. The firms that get burned by this are the ones who price the plan off an average month and then meet a bad one. Two things make it survivable, and neither is exciting: A defined scope. Basic Counsel is contract reviews and calls. Not "whatever comes up." The moment the plan means everything, it means unprofitable. A cap you can actually enforce. Premium Shield says multiple contracts per month. Pick the number before a client picks it for you. We do not have a clean before-and-after number on this one. It was a working session, not a case study, and inventing a figure here would defeat the point of the post. ## What has to run underneath The plan only works if billing runs without you. Recurring payments that collect on their own, and one place where you can see who is on what plan and what they have used this month. Get that wrong and you have added admin to a practice that already has too much. That is the real failure mode: not that subscriptions do not work, but that the firm ends up manually invoicing twelve clients on the first of every month and quietly stops. The other half is the touchpoint. A monthly note, a quarterly check-in. Something that reaches the client in a month where they did not need you, so the renewal is not the first time they think about what they are paying for. ## If you want to try this Take the last twelve months of matters and find the work that repeated. That is your first plan. Price it, give it a scope, and sell it to one existing client who already calls you often. Then leave it alone for a quarter and see what it costs you to deliver. --- *Based on a Let Go Boss coaching call with Basim Mousilli and Anu Kinhal. Written up by Sadia Anwer.*