Customer Reviews

Making Mediation Your Day Job: How to Market Your ADR Business Using Mediation Principles You Already Know

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4 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

Author of How to Mediate Like a Pro: 42 Rules for Mediating Disputes

The subtitle says it all. How To Market Your ADR Business Using Mediation Principles You Already Know. Lenski points out in Chapter Seven, Building Dialogue With Your Market, that the same tools we use as mediators can help us with marketing.

Tammy Lenski left her job ten years ago as a Dean at Middlebury College to pursue a full-time career in mediation. After building a successful practice, she is sharing her quest and experience. However, this is not your ordinary book on marketing. Marketing is not about getting your name on panels and lists. It is a soul-searching interactive process with questions that need to be analyzed to determine each mediator's niche and to expand his or her thinking.

For example, Lenski expanded her business by narrowing her market. In the beginning she focused her business on higher education where she had her contacts. However, some markets came to her like artists and design professionals. And she found other markets, such as the environmental "green" market, where there was a need she could meet. Mediators can also be facilitators, ombudsman, advisors, educators, strategists, negotiators and coaches (see chapter six.)

Lenski has an award-winning blog. [...], and in her book, she explains blogs, websites, podcasts, video blogs, discussion forums, and social networking sites. She practices what she preaches and her website is very aesthetically pleasing. I particularly like her logo of an origami peace crane. She started her blog as a resource for her mediation students, but it has expanded as a resource for all mediators. Throughout the book, you can tell Lenski is a teacher, and a good one. She offers good advice and encouragement to all mediators.

As an added incentive, Lenski has provided bonus material for those who purchase the book. She provides a special workbook and other resources on her webiste only for her readers.

I recommend this book to all mediators, new mediators starting out and more experienced mediators who want to expand their practices and/or get a little more high-tech. It is the type of book that can be read and re-read.

Shakespeare once wrote, "This above all: to thine own self be true." These words, written 400 years ago, resonate today. They do so especially for the many professional mediators who cringe at the very thought of marketing -- with its associations with shameless self-promotion, glad-handing, and cold-calling. For many mediators, marketing just feels wrong.

Now, at long last, there's a guidebook that achieves something no other mediation marketing resource has done. It helps mediators do the impossible: become more effective marketers and remain true to themselves and their work. Dr. Tammy Lenski, a mediator and mediation marketing coach who has run her own successful practice since 1997, has created Making Mediation Your Day Job, the definitive resource for mediators who want a realistic, practical blueprint for marketing their practice.

The clue to Dr. Lenski's formula for success is in the second half of the title of the book: How to Market Your ADR Business Using Mediation Principles You Already Know. She asks readers, "Would you enjoy marketing more if your primary aim isn't selling and self-promotion? I'm betting most of you would say yes." Like the skilled practitioner she is, she reframes, inviting readers to see marketing anew, "as dialogue or as a learning conversation", something mediators already know how to do, and do well.

Using humor, anecdotes, and real-life examples drawn from her clients, her students, and her own experience, Dr. Lenski encourages her readers to step outside their comfort zone and draw upon the professional skills they already have to build opportunities. She also offers sensible productivity tips, business planning advice, and useful exercises that help mediators master marketing.

What also distinguishes this work from the numerous resources available now on mediation marketing is its emphasis on professional integrity -- on honoring the profession through a commitment to mediation excellence. Dr. Lenski reminds readers that it's not just good marketing that matters; mediators also have a duty to uphold standards of excellence and develop their professional skills. She wisely observes, "In the end, it's the quality of the work you deliver that's going to help keep the clients coming."

More than a book, Making Mediation Your Day Job functions like an honest conversation with a wise and caring friend. Dr. Lenski writes as someone who has been there and understands where and why any of us get stuck when it comes to marketing. She's there to nudge us forward, with encouragement and straight talk. Making Mediation Your Day Job offers authentic, real-world advice for mediators who want to use marketing to take their practice to the next level -- and all the while stay true to themselves and their work.

I just finished consuming Making Mediation Your Day Job: How to Market Your ADR Business Using Mediation Principles You Already Know.

When I say "consuming," I'm talking about the way we exhaust our appetites over a Thanksgiving dinner plate -- eager, greedy and far too quickly -- before pausing to wonder where the turkey, potatoes, gravy, green beans and yams could possibly have gone.

Teacher, trainer, and mediator, Tammy Lenski is less than candid when she says this book is about marketing our ADR Business. This book is about locating and achieving our dreams. But Dr. Lenski doesn't stop there. She goes on to provide practial advice about making our living by living our dreams.

Why such effusive praise for a short book on marketing a mediation practice? Because it's not a "how to" but a "why" and a "what," with workshop questions to help us fill in the gaping holes of our lives.

This book does what no other career or marketing guide I've ever read even seeks to accomplish. It inspires and guides. It suggests reaching for the stars with our feet firmly planted on the ground. It asks us to look inside our very own hearts; to assess our strengths and weaknesses; and, to measure the width and depth and breadth of our desires. Then it gives us the action plan we've all been waiting for. The one that helps us make ME, INC. our day job.

It would be unfair -- selfish even -- to recommend this book only to mediators. Why would we withhold this practical wisdom from the aspiring lawyers, chefs and novelists in the world? Why would we deny the entrepreneurs and financial wizards; the actors and the politicians of the benefits of Dr. Lenski's ground-breaking work? It wouldn't be nice; it wouldn't be fair; it wouldn't be right.

And in this I do not exaggerate even a little.

If you are looking for a book that gives you the nuts and bolts of how to market your mediation practice--this isn't it. This book is about how one should think about marketing, not the steps one should take to do it. I've noticed that I am the only person to have written a negative comment and that all other reviewers (6 as of today) have given the book a 5-star rating. There is no doubt in my mind they are all friends of the author's. The one positive remark I can make is that Lenski gives concrete, good advice regarding websites and blogs.

I am an inveterate collector of self-help books.
Dr. Lenski has just cured me!
Having read this book, I don't think I'll need to buy one more. (Sorry, Amazon.com.)
More than another other book, this one bridges the gap between wanting to make changes in marketing your mediation (or any professional) practice and actually making them, by asking insightful questions and providing useful and creative bridges.
Dr. Lenski has written a thought-provoking book which I will return to again and again.

I have read many books on Mediation and I found this book to be the best I've ever read for creating a context of successful marketing. Most books talk about building your business by getting on this or that mediation panel, networking in many of the same ways as other professional do and just "figuring out" a pathway to success. Tammy's book goes much further, using mediation skills that I already possess to propel my business forward. I have already incorporated many of her suggestions into my marketing strategy, including my website design, and feel that the information in this book will continue to help me as I build my mediation business.

I give "Making Mediation Your Day Job: How to Market Your ADR Business Using Mediation Principles You Already Know" my highest commendation.

Finally! A book about marketing mediation that works for those of us who hate to market and love to mediate. Even though I've been making my living in this field more than 23 years, I read this in one sitting, and immediately recommended it to a class full of soon to become mediators that I was teaching...and keep recommending it. Buy it now!

I'm still going through my second read. Excellent suggestion from a fellow trainee from Green Valley, AZ.