Get in the driver's seat!
Get in the driver's seat!
Winning the business development game! Guest: Norman Bacal
A lawyer's business development playbook is constantly changing. But there are some steadfast truths about how to win. Listen to this episode, as Norm shares generously and openly from his experience about what works.
Norman Bacal brings years of leadership experience to a career that included building a law firm from scratch. In 1989 he opened a four lawyer shop in Toronto and over the next twenty five years expanded the firm from a base in film and television finance into multiple disciplines and practice groups. His most useful skills over that period related to the recognition and development of talent and building of a unique cultural environment to retain that talent. When he left his leadership position as national co-managing partner of Heenan Blaikie, the office had grown to over two hundred lawyers and the film was among the best known brands in the country. In his second career as author, consultant and keynote speaker, he mentors young professionals and consults with law firm leaders across the county. He has published three books to assist the career development of professionals, from articling student to managing partner.
You're listening to Get in the Driver’s Seat! We’re telling stories about leadership moments in small to mid-sized professional practices. I’m your host, Sandra Bekhor, Practice Management Coach for lawyers, architects, consultants and other professionals at Bekhor Management.
0:00 Sandra
Hello and welcome to the podcast! This is 'Get in the driver's seat'. We're telling stories about leadership moments in small to mid-sized professional practices. I'm your host, Sandra Bekhor, Practice Management Coach at Bekhor Management. I'm excited to introduce our guest today, Norman Bacal, the former National co-managing partner of Heenan Blaikie. Norman grew the firm from scratch to over 200 lawyers. Now in his second career as author, consultant and keynote speaker, he currently mentors young professionals and consults with law firm leaders across the country. So before we get into our discussion, I'd like to give a shout-out to Gina Alexandris, because, Norm, you and I first met at her Career Conversations Book Club, where you were invited to speak about your book Never Stop. For the YouTube watchers, this is what it looks like. Given this synergy in our work, today we thought we'd talk about business development. Such an important topic for lawyers and other professionals and often a gap. So there are many points in the process where people get stuck. How about we begin at the beginning? So Norm, can you think of any stories of a partner, an associate, even an owner of a firm, who didn't know how to get started with their own business development plans, but eventually found their stride?
1:40 Norm
Well, I could start with me. I can tell you for my first four years of practice, I was basically a servant to the partners in the firm. I was working in Montreal at the time. It was you know by Toronto standards, a fairly small firm. There were only 20 something lawyers. I was a junior lawyer in the tax department. I still remember my first day at work and walking around by the partner's offices. They were all on the phone. The first question I asked myself was like how do you get the phone to ring? Who's going to call me? Why are they going to call me? What are they going to want? I still remember a lunch I had with one of my friends who was also a fourth year associate. I think I told him at that point, I said I can't believe they pay me basically just to sit in my office and do research and answer questions. He looked at me, gave me this odd look because he had already figured out what I what hadn't yet hit me on the head, which was... just sitting around in my office and doing work that was assigned to me was a one-way ticket to nowhere. It took me another good year before the lightning bolt struck and I figured out for myself what I had to do. I think it's certainly the case for many younger lawyers starting out and even lawyers some of them, particularly in bigger firms, up in their eighth or ninth year of practice that have never been forced, whether by others or by themselves, to go out and try and find a client. The biggest problem is nobody's teaching it. So even the law firms assume you'll kind of figure it out or it'll come to you through the ether. But you know law school will teach you the law. But nobody teaches you how to succeed in business, in the law.
3:39 Sandra
You said you eventually figured it out. Well, what did you figure out?
3:45 Norm
You see the book off to the side, called Take Charge? I actually eventually wrote it down and did a TED talk about it. What happened was, my review in my fourth year was basically, "Norm you seem to have all the tools. But there's something missing. We can't tell you what it is...", which of course was extraordinarily frustrating. I had to fix something and I didn't know what. It was my wife, Sharon, who actually put it in perspective. We spent almost all night talking about it, I was so upset. Although that night I spent most of my time listening. She basically said, "You're just not taking initiative. You're letting your career happen to you. You're not taking charge of what you're going to do next or how you're going to do it." It was shocking. But that was like a flip of a switch in my brain. It's not like I went in the next morning saying, "Okay, here's my master plan to become a success and eventually a managing partner of a law firm that's going to be 1,100 lawyers and staff one day. But it was more like okay from now on I'm no longer sitting back and that will apply to pretty much everything I do, every minute I spend, every meeting I take, I'm going to be responsible for myself. I'm no longer relying on anybody. Of course, it was just a first step. But suddenly every file I got was no longer a file. It was, "Okay how do I take charge of this file?
How do I create relationships out of this file?" Once I made that, I'd call it a little mindset step, it was it you know leap a leap for mankind. But the reality was, it was just a little mind reset. Good things started to happen.
5:53 Sandra
Wow, that's a great story. So empowering, I think. Relatable to many lawyers that are still at that mid-level, who don't see themselves that way and the progress of their careers is really in their own hands to some extent.
6:13 Norm
Yeah. It's funny because I did a webinar for a group of, I'll call them entrepreneurial lawyers in Vancouver. So it's anybody with a firm from one to 10 lawyers and one being basically the sole practitioner out there and, particularly since we've come out of four years of isolation and everything on Zoom and almost everything we do virtually, I asked them how many of you have gone out to visit a client instead of just taking a meeting on the phone or by television or however you're doing it or communicating them by with text which is I think what most people do and no hands in the audience went up, like nobody. Here's a suggestion for you when you go visit a client or a client contact at their place of business. You have the opportunity to take that single contact that you have and turn it into two. If you go a second time, five. If you go a third time, 10. It gives you the opportunity, on a much easier basis, to find out about the business. Because if you're hanging around their shop you're going to find out what their issues are. What you're going to find out after you've made a series of these visits is that you understand the business eventually as well as they do, you see what the problems are and you also see the problems coming down the road, even before they see them. More important, before any of your competitors will see them. I said, that's part one. Then, part two is for those of you who are worried that your contact in the organization is too junior and it's a waste of time. I said, there's no such thing as too junior. You need to be taking a long view of all of this development. This person will eventually be senior, somewhere. You are likely going to be the only person who's taken the time to go meet them and people remember that.
8:19 Sandra
Yeah, you know what this reminds me of in this book, Never Stop. You made a point of talking quite a bit about allyship, which to me is a really important topic. When I coach, I really focus on this idea as well, the idea of building allies. Making that sort of an intention in your business development effort, I mean. I personally think it makes your business development efforts more sustainable, more enjoyable and more impactful. It sounds to me like you're going there a little bit with your own journey. Is there anything you remember about building allies that helped you?
9:10 Norm
I'll say the following. When you do good work for somebody, they're naturally going to become an ally, you know. They're more likely to like you. If you leave it, however, to them to take the next step... I was mentoring a fourth year lawyer who had opened her own firm. This is now five years ago. She is now one of the leading lawyers in her field, in Toronto. But she was just getting started then. It was a brave move. She had left a big firm. She'd gone off to open her own shop. She had done really good work on a particular file for a client. It was about, I don't know, a month prior, she was very proud of it. I said, "Fantastic. I said so when are you having lunch with the client?" So, she said, "Well what do you mean?" I said, "Well you did good work for her. Are you just going to sit back and wait for the phone to ring till she needs you again? She nodded her head. She said that well that's exactly what I was planning." I said, "That's not the best decision you can make. The best decision you can make right now is call the client for absolutely no reason and check in on the business. Or come up with one of five reasons to be calling. It doesn't really matter. You're just calling to check in. Let's go for lunch. Let's talk. You want to build on the goodwill. Don't wait for the next file because the next file may be two years away. She may see you as only being able to do that one kind of thing that you did for her. But if you call and meet and learn about her business, you will probably get all kinds of ideas of what else you can do for her. That's you taking the initiative and again that's part of building up the allyship.
11:09 Sandra
Yeah, it absolutely is. You know the learning about the business, I don't think that people typically associate this part with business development. But I do. I really think this is essential. So when you have those conversations at lunch or whatever you end up doing to get closer to your clients or to your referral network, that is about learning about their business and becoming a more valued person in their network. There are other ways of doing that. I'd love to explore a little bit in our conversation. Just you know, it's not just to rely on one way of doing it. Sometimes people get in their own head and they're like well I'm not the golf type or I'm not the lunch type. Okay so how about these other ideas? Would that work for you? Then maybe the lunch happens and you know by that time you're comfortable with it. Have you encountered other ways, maybe more modern or different or innovative?
12:03 Norm
Golf was good only because it gives you six hours with someone. You don't ever have to be talking about business. You're spending six hours with someone which is which is pretty good. But the other thing I'd say and I think I'd worry less about how you're going to do it, than what you're going to do, is the other thing people really value are people who can act as connectors. So we have this notion of networking as going to cocktail parties and handing out your business cards, which in my view is, I hate to say, it's a complete waste of time. But it's largely a complete waste of time, unless you have a strategy. We can deal with that later. But the reality is people will want you for two things. One for the expertise you developed. Two for the person that you know that can help them. If in each of your contacts with people you can figure out how they might fit into something else you're working on, you're creating a value for yourself. That's way beyond you know a golf game or handing a business card or any other form of networking. The best networking is when you sit down, listen to what somebody's working on and and the light bulb goes off. "Oh I know Marie and Marie is an expert in this field. Let me connect you with Marie. The three of us will get on get on a call together. So it's an excuse. The one thing I would never do is make the contact and step out of the way entirely. You always want to keep yourself in the middle, so you know what's going on and develop an appreciation. But you know I used to tell my women lawyers who'd say, "Listen, none of my clients are doing hockey or baseball or football or you know." I said, "Well, what about a spa day? If you want that, hours where you really undress someone else and get to know everything about them, I mean that's it. Something different. But as much as anything else, something you enjoy.
14:27 Sandra
Right. So that is important because then you'll actually do it... more than once.
14:33 Norm
Yeah, I have some contacts now who you know will go on dog walks together. You don't even have to be talking business. It's going to move there eventually. But you don't have to be talking business because your dogs are going to bond, if nothing else.
14:50 Sandra
right you know I actually think it's an important point that you're making, that you don't have to be talking business because because just your very presence is creating a bond.
15:02 Norm
It's about showing you care. In the end that's what people remember. I felt I wanted it for my staff, but I also wanted it for my clients. The thing I think we all know in the back of our heads is, we don't have a single client in the world that somebody isn't trying to steal from us because after all that's how we get all our clients. We're trying to take them from somebody else and show we're better or smarter or more devoted or you you name it. We're trying to get a client who probably is somebody else's client today. Sometimes you'll you only get the opportunity when the other service provider starts showing they don't care or makes some mistake. But you need to be at the ready when that day happens. You do that by showing the other person that you care about them. It doesn't have to be about, "Let me tell you about the Bills of Exchange Act, because like I know more about that act than anybody else. That's a surefire way to get nowhere, unless you're trying to get hired by a university to be a lecturer on the subject. For everybody else, it's more about you want to create in your context, and in particular in your clients', this feeling that they don't understand and that thought that goes through their head when the phone rings from the person trying to steal them is, "I could never do that to Norm. I can never do that to Sandra...". You want that to be their gut reaction whether they're thinking about it consciously or not. You do that not because you're a great lawyer but because they think you're a great person.
16:54 Sandra
Well essentially these bonds are based on values, shared values. Those are the strongest bonds. I think that's what you're referring to.
17:01 Norm
That's right. It doesn't have to be because you're a nice person. I still remember some of my clients were complete mercenaries and ruthless and heartless. So that's what I was tapping into, assuming I wanted them as clients. It's like what's the commonality? What's the next deal we could do? I'm like your partner in crime to figure out what's the next thing we're going to do together and that's the way I want your brain always working. What's the next thing we're we are going to do together?
17:38 Sandra
Right, partnership.
17:40 Norm
What's the next piece of work I'm going to ask you to do because you're my servant and you're just gonna do what I pay you for. As long as they see you as you know the service provider who's driven the best bargain, who you know can give them the most amount of results for the least amount of cost. I mean that's one way of doing business. But it's completely transactional. You will lose every day to the next person who can do it a little more efficiently than you.
18:14 Sandra
This is also about mindset like what you were saying earlier. This is about seeing yourself as a lawyer differently. You're seeing yourself as a partner to your clients, as opposed to a service provider.
18:27 Norm
I think you the big mindset change is that you have to see yourself as a value provider. The question is how you provide value and each case will be a little bit different because each need will be a little bit different. But your clients have to see you as providing value to them. If they see that, they're not going to leave you and if they see that they'll do you little favours, like be connectors for you to other prospective clients.
18:54 Sandra
Right. I'd love to pick up on something you said earlier about lawyers who are at earlier stages in their career, mid-level, maybe even earlier and how it's really not as common for them to be digging into their business development plans. But actually it's a good idea to get started as early as possible. Could you just share a little bit about your own experience with that concept?
19:30 Norm
Yeah, well I'll start with something that later in my career. A consultant, and it was it was a famous consultant, said, that I took to because it kind of reinforced what I'd always thought. He was saying that in practice about 25% of your time needs to be devoted to the work you're going to be doing three to five years from now. So put in harsher terms, there's a lawyer in Toronto by the name of Perry Dellelce. He's the lead partner in the firm Wildeboer Dellelce. So it's basically Perry's firm. Perry told me his goal was to create one new contact every single day. His goal was 365 new contests over the course of a year, which is a number even by my standards insane. He's like one of the best business developers I think I've ever met. He puts all the rest of us to shame. But the point is you need to be spending a portion of every single week not working on your files. It could be with the same clients. It's just going out figuring out okay what am I going to do? How am I going to network? Who can I get them to introduce me to? Who can I introduce them to? I've made fun a couple times of handing out your business cards at cocktail parties. I gave one mentee who just reached out to me on LinkedIn a few weeks ago, we had a Zoom session. I said to her, I said listen you're at the state where you're probably going to a lot of these events, whether it's industry or law related or whatever it is. You're handing out your cards and you have no idea what you're doing or why you're doing it. You just know you have to do something like that. I said stop wasting your time. If you have an event that you need to go to, you go to that event knowing there are two people in the room you need to connect with. So before you get there decide in advance who they are. Find them. Have your interaction with them and then go home to your family. Don't waste two hours at an event where you feel the way I used to feel when I went to these events, particularly as a junior lawyer. Like I need to be here because everybody thinks I need to be here. If I don't go, I'm a failure. But the reality was, I'd hang at the outskirts of the room, waiting till I could finally leave. That's just that's a waste of your time. Go home to your family. But instead don't just go to events. Go to events knowing here's why I'm going and here are the two things I want to achieve. It could be as little as a five minute conversation with a particular person or somebody you actually want to meet. Your mission is to meet them and not exchange your business card, but come in thinking about okay what's my Line going to be? Who can introduce me to that person? More important, what's the follow-up going to be as a result, if I want to meet you? It's not so that I can meet you and then see you at the next cocktail party in six months. So I can meet you and I can say have you thought about this? Have you thought about that? The best way to show your expertise is to ask questions like that. But, ultimately, don't just go. Do everything, you know and it's part of the mindset change, everything with a purpose in mind, in terms of the business development.
23:40 Sandra
But when we were chatting before we got on this call, you said something to me about how at your previous role you set the expectations very early for anybody that you hired that business development would be part of the role. I encounter lots of owners, not just law firm owners, but owners of other professional services, who actually hesitate to do that. It's really not helping them right? They hesitate to put that onus on their team. I think that they're losing out on a really big opportunity. What would you say to those owners like to shift their view of this and to find an easy way of inviting their team into the business development plan?
24:26 Norm
I'd say it would certainly help if you started that with a bit of a brainstorming session and maybe you bring an outsider in to trigger. But there's nothing like leaving an internal firm event with everybody all revved up about what they can do, whether it's a first year lawyer or a 10th year lawyer, where everybody leaves excited and motivated and leaves that internal event saying okay here is the list. I used to say come up with the business plan for the year. But normally what I'd say is, "Listen, your business plan only needs to be three things" or "You're leaving this meeting. I just want you to write down three concrete things you're going to do as a result and then do them." It doesn't all have to be on day one. You know week one, I'm going to do one. Week two, I'm going to do two. Week three, I'm going to do three. I said, "If one of those things works, you're way ahead." But I think simply telling people I want you to go out and do business development is wasting your breath because nobody knows how to do it when they're starting. I didn't know how to do it until I figured it out. What's even worse is they look at the rainmakers in the firm and I've worked with a few of them over time you know. The classic rainmaker is the person who will get into the elevator with you on the first floor and have you signed up as a client you know before you get off on the 25th. Now I've worked with one in my entire career. I think I've only known two people like that. That was their expertise. But you know probably wasn't where they started. But we see them as the extroverts. It's way more important to teach people. You could be like me, which was, you know who was and still is the complete introvert and teach them okay here are the acting skills you need or here are the techniques you need. If you can learn technique A, technique B, technique C, this will get you through. Technique D for me was like how do you survive a dinner? One of these dinners where you're sitting next to one person on each side? I used to be that person that after about three minutes I had nothing left to say to them. They had nothing left to say to me. They were both pointed in the opposite direction and I'd be sitting there all night thinking to myself, failure, failure. When can I go home? I learned a skill or two about how to get through an evening like that. It was no more than watch the evening news or CNN anytime and watch what the person behind the desk does with their interviewee. They just ask them a series of questions and every time they get an answer it triggers another question. If you do that with a person beside you, don't worry about making small talk. Ask them a question about themselves. It's usually everybody's favourite topic. You will leave an evening like that, they may know nothing about you, but they'll think you're the most interesting person they've ever met. That's a guarantee. I've heard that about other people, who are like the people who taught me how to do this. It's all about having a session where your brainstorming about stuff like this triggers something in people's brains, get them excited about doing it. But more important, it gives them direction about how to do it. I can tell you if I was a second-year lawyer sitting in a boardroom and you know the head of my practice group said, "Okay, here's what we're going to do. We're all going to go out and develop three new clients. All right, let's go." I can pretty well tell you that meeting is going to lead to nothing happening because the people who know how to do it don't suddenly know how to do it. So really I think what you need to do is help them along with skills. You know I used to take my associates for lunch or for coffee. We would just talk about who they knew, who they'd like to meet, maybe who in the firm could help them meet the people they wanted to meet. If you're training people, you have to train them to think differently, to change the way their brain works about this stuff. Nobody comes to it naturally. You come to it by trying 10 things and you find out three of them work for you. So what works for me won't necessarily work for you Sandra and vice versa. But what we each need to tap into is what works for us based on our personalities. If you can do that, there's nothing like a win, like a single win to get somebody motivated to do it again.
29:29 Sandra
I love that. It's this mentoring on business development, not just on the technical side of law. Right from the beginning. So that they don't even see that as a level they need to graduate towards. It is part of the job.
29:47 Norm
Yeah. I had a few partners who even when I was still just very Junior, like I may have been a first year lawyer, they would drag me along to the meetings so I got to watch them in action for how to handle a client meeting. I didn't get the benefit of it for another few years. But I was watching. The other thing that I was learning in some cases was how not to do it. I'd watch somebody and watch the client's reaction, see it wasn't working and say okay I'm not doing that right? Which sometimes can be just as valuable.
30:24 Sandra
Yeah. So you use this little phrase which is one of my favorite phrases: what works for you... as opposed to what works for anybody else. I've heard that there are some law firms who have metrics when it comes to business development. They just sort of slap the same metric across the board. We want this many blogs or we want whatever, phone calls, whatever it is, events from everybody. That's very awkward because as you just said some people may be less comfortable with speaking. Some people may be more comfortable with writing. Whatever it is, if they're given a little bit of wiggle room, each individual may actually find a more sustainable way of doing business development, if they're able to do it in a way that fits with their character, with their interests. So I just wonder, you know between the two extremes like one extreme is let everybody go do whatever they want inside a firm and the other extreme is they all have to do the same thing, maybe somewhere in the middle is a happier place where we have some cohesion between the two you know? Do you have any experience with that idea?
31:44 Norm
Well, I mean it doesn't make sense for everybody to be doing the same thing. So for example, some people are really, particularly these days, just to show I'm not completely over the hill, but I'm a firm believer in social media. I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn. I'm trying to develop a YouTube presence. What I would say is you need to experiment to see what you're good at, what you're bad at, so some people are particularly good in front of a camera. To them, I would say, you can do a lot of social media marketing on video. Just put out your podcast, even go on YouTube, if you want go on LinkedIn live, do a you know once a month you know three minutes on the law or three minutes on something you didn't know or six minutes on something you didn't know. It doesn't take a lot to produce that. Just get it out there because the key is brand recognition and these days it's building audience. These are things that you know 25 years ago we didn't even know what that was. Even 10 years ago I didn't believe in any of this stuff. I thought it was a complete waste of time. I've changed my mind. For others, it may be blogging. You may be a really good writer. You may be very thoughtful. So you know start a blog and try to figure out how to build a presence. There was one lawyer who, a couple of the young lawyers online who I've met through Linkedin have become heroes to me in terms of what they did. One was, he was starting his first day at a major firm and had no idea where he was going, what he was doing, he was scared out of his mind. He broadcast from his car because he arrived at work half an hour early. So he did a little broadcast in his car, just talking about the feelings of day one. It was a complete experiment. He'd never done any of this before. It went out and of course it went viral because he had tapped into an entire generation's angst about starting. I asked him, I said, "So ultimately what's the net result of all this?" He said, "Believe it or not, I started doing it on a pretty regular basis. Now I do something every day, aside from my practice. You wouldn't believe it," he said. But he works at an international firm. "I get referrals from all over the world now because everybody knows me." He was a junior lawyer, not even a partner. But people know I'm here because they've heard of me. If you don't think that doesn't get the attention of the partners, well guess what? So I would say you know experiment. But don't do something where you look at it and say I will fail at this. I would say actually try it. Do some videos. See how you look and practice a few times. You may find out that what you're terrible at today, three years from now you're the world expert at knowing how to do. So a lot of it is just figuring out how to do it. But I'd say young people come with the technological skills already. An old fart like me had to learn it. Believe me that was not easy. But I didn't feel I had a choice. So you take it on. You make a hundred mistakes. You'll eventually figure it out. But ultimately when you're starting, play to your strengths. If you write well, blog. If you show up on camera well and are very comfortable speaking, go out and share your legal life, share your personal life, share whatever you want. But ultimately, it's about building following. That's the present version of building practices. It was name and reputation in the old days. In the very old days like when I was starting out, it was about what conference can you speak at, what paper can you publish, is the journal esteemed enough to get you some notoriety? And the big word now which is repurpose has always been a big thing, like repurposing material rather than writing things from scratch all the time. Take something you've written, see how you can repurpose it for something else, see how you can cut it up. Now they talk about you know doing a 30 minute video and then repurposing it into a whole bunch of shorts and then you know repurposing it again and releasing it at different times and building audience that way, audience and expertise. So it's doable. Certainly for the young people coming up, I'm not telling them anything actually that they probably don't already know about or how to do. If you're hesitating, don't. It's going to be useful to your career and possibly in a way that you can't even imagine today.
37:11 Sandra
So one of the big messages here today is about trying to do these things early in your career and don't stop at the first sign of failure.
37:17 Norm
Yeah, never stop. Just keep going. That's the point. You're never too old to learn something. I mean the big problem most practitioners face is we all start knowing nothing. So we're not embarrassed to say we know nothing and the more expertise we pick up in a particular area, the more worried we become about people finding out we don't know anything in the areas outside of our narrow expertise. The more you can push that out, obviously, the the more valuable you become. But some of us as we age, or as we become more senior, become way more embarrassed about the things that we say to ourselves I should have learned this by now and I haven't. So I'm just gonna hope nobody ever asks me.
38:11 Sandra
Yeah. I run into this all the time you know with all levels of professional practice. It's this idea of not wanting to say I don't know. One of the things that puts people at ease is understanding that it's okay to say, "I'll get back to you on that" or "I know somebody who's an expert. I'll connect you with that person". That also is added value. You don't need to know everything right?
38:40 Norm
You just need to know who to know or where to look for the answer. As much as it sounds like they want it immediately, they would actually prefer a little thoughtful reflection before you text back the answer you haven't even checked yet. One of the challenges of technology now, we are so trained to you know be doing this with our devices and you know tap, tap, tap, tap and we get it. It triggers something in our brain that we need to respond immediately. And it's particularly when the client does it at two in the morning, which is a whole other subject we could talk about one day. But ultimately it's about taking a little bit of time to reflect or saying let me get back to you on that. I may have some additional questions. But I want to think about it for a few hours and always finish with what's your timeline on this? It comes to are you doing this to get it off your desk? Are you doing this because it's an emergency? I shouldn't be guessing whether it's an emergency.
40:02 Sandra
So I love all these ideas and how they sort of make the old version of what is business development which the idea that comes to mind for me is the person who just picks up the phone. Okay that's the only thing that they can do. But today we have so many other things that you can do. It doesn't mean don't pick up the phone. But you can do all these other things so that by the time you pick up the phone, people already know you. They've seen your LinkedIn post. They've seen your video. They attended your event. Whatever it is, they feel like they know you.
40:51 Norm
The other thing is, and particularly with lawyers more than any other professional, is we are as a species far more brittle than the average population. We feel rejection easily and sometimes we'll even assume it. The real reason why you won't make the call is because you're afraid of rejection. You're afraid that whoever it is you're reaching out to is going to say "no thank you", which you translate into "I don't like you" because we're lawyers we tend to do that. We see it all so personally. The reality is, and you know this, I certainly learned as an author, but I also learned it as a professional, it's not a bad thing to get a "no" or to get a "let me think about it". "Let me think about it" usually means "no". But the the person who's going to succeed, the entrepreneur who's going to succeed isn't going to give up with one "no" and sometimes "no" turns into "not yet". I had one client, I still remember I was trying to get them for five years as a client. I had contacts there and they were a client of you know a very good firm. So it's not like it was going to be easy for me. But I just felt like I should be getting them as a client. I couldn't. I did everything I possibly could. I learned the insides and outs of the company and, I was a pretty senior lawyer at the time, but I was failing and failing and failing. You know sometimes I think about it, I'd say like this is almost embarrassing, the degree to which I failed. One day I got wind that someone was looking, an american was looking at investing in the company. So I ran down to Los Angeles again, through a network of somebody who I knew, who knew the person who was leading the investment group and I said "introduce me please". We met down in Los Angeles and the plane ride and the hotel were going to be on me, although I although I arranged to meet with some other clients while I was down there.We started talking. After about an hour, he said "Listen will you shut up?" because I just kept asking him questions. You know, "do you know this about the company", "do you know this about the company", "do you know this about the company" and he realized after a very short period, I knew he wanted to invest in the company and I knew way more about that company than he did. So I got hired. That became you know a seven figure client of the firm for over 20 years.
43:29 Sandra
Wow. I love that story. This is persistence and determination and, I don't know, reframing failure.
43:41 Norm
That's it. You just can't give up. If you think you're on the right track, don't give up. But the worst thing we can do is you know somebody puts us off and we say okay forget it, never calling again. Why? Because we don't like rejection. You want to learn rejection. Become an author for a while. Then you can really learn how to deal with rejection. But that's just part of it. Most professionals aren't willing to hang in there. If you can train yourself not to see it as rejection. You have to see it as an investment. Everything you do is an investment. We started with everything you're doing is for three to five years from now. Why is that? Once you become a partner what you'll find out is every five years or so you're going to lose a significant client. They're going to get bought or they're going to go bankrupt or any one any one of a number of things. Or the chief in-house counsel is going to change to somebody who has a friend in another firm and suddenly you've lost the client. You need to always be assuming that's going to be the case. You always need to be planning out for who's the client that's going to replace him in five years. I can tell you it happened to me. I lost pretty much every single major client I ever had.
45:00 Sandra
So it's just a practical tip when it comes to business planning that you should put that into your projections. That takes some of the guess work out.
45:15 Norm
Yeah. The good news is when your contact switches firms, like you know the key person at this firm may move. That puts your current relationship at work. But what you're going to do is help that person find their next position. So you can translate it into something else and maybe it'll even be better. But I think you have to walk around assuming you know somebody's trying to plant the knife in your back.
45:46 Sandra
What a lovely visual. So I feel like we had a wonderful discussion. But Norm is there anything you want to say that we haven't touched on?
45:56 Norm
Nothing jumps to mind. But if you even said one word I'd be off and running.
46:02 Sandra
Here's the word: synergies.
46:08 Norm
There you go. That may wrap everything up. Most people don't understand but they throw the word synergies around. But the reality is you're going to do your best with people who you connect with. Those people are ultimately your biggest assets. It could be a partner in your firm. It could be somebody who sends you referral work. It could be an accountant you deal with. It could be a particular client contact or a series of client contacts. I can guarantee you in 10 years your core group at a single company could be at 10 different places. That's why personal relationships are key. One or two of those people could be your next big break. That's why. So bringing it back to the point where we started which is you know how do you teach business development? How do you go from where you are, which is nothing to someone who's the rainmaker? The short answer is it's a combination of two things. One you have to build your expertise. You just have to get smarter at something than everybody else. The wonderful thing about these days is that with the pace technology is moving and that the world is changing, something new is coming up on a regular basis. The nice thing about something new is for all the experts at what exists now, we have no more knowledge about the new thing than you do. So it's your opportunity to become the expert at that new thing if you're interested in it, on the same basis as me who's been at it for 35 years. So if you can get there among the first, if you could build your expertise up quickly, it helps. Whatever it is that you're into, that creates immediate opportunities for, frankly, better opportunities for younger people than older people. So that's one of the things you need to be focused on. What's changing. The one thing I learned through my own practice, which was in film finance on the tax side, when I started out was in the entertainment industry. Nobody was doing it. Because nobody thought it was the least bit valuable. Every time I had to research something, there was no answer. So after five years of training on all these things for which there are no answers, guess what? I was the expert. Which didn't mean I was right. It just meant I was the only person who was putting out an answer to something. So it became the answer. Then and you know that makes you the go-to person. So you know, find your niche. That's what I'd say as part of your business development plan. Find your niche. Push it. Believe in yourself. Keep pushing it. Keep expanding the niche and your expertise and that's where to start. Everything after that is about how well you connect with people.
49:23 Sandra
Yes and I love that message. I think it's again empowering. But also there's an underlying message in there, which is you don't have to do it the way others have done it. That can be a real obstacle when people get it in their head that oh they have to copy somebody else in order to be successful, either their leadership style or their rainmaking style or whatever their business development plan, whatever it is. You don't have to copy what someone else is doing. You can do something no one has done before and be tremendously successful.
50:00 Norm
Yeah. What you have to do is fit it to your personality. That's what it is. But accept as well you know that who you are today isn't going to be who you are 10 years from now. The worst thing you can do is box yourself and saying I am this. I can tell you that Norm at the end of four years was I am this. Just put me in a corner, let me do some research and I'll be fine. Norm as little as two years later was - how do I get out there, what's my message, who am I going to, I'm going to speak in front of a crowd of 50, who are my targets that I'm going to follow up with afterwards? Once you start changing the way you think, you start changing. The worst thing you can do is box yourself and say I'm too quiet. I'm too shy. That was me until I was 28. Then you know something changed and I said - okay I know I can learn how to act. I can that's the one thing you know. If you don't have the skills, if you're afraid to get on stage, take improv classes, take some acting lessons.
51:15 Sandra
Toastmasters.
51:16 Norm
Toastmasters that's it, just get some practice. Then watch some people who are really good at it, whatever it is you want to do, and just break down what they're doing. Watch what they're doing, then practice. Then guess what? You're going to get better.
51:29 Sandra
Yeah, very good. Wonderful. Well thank you, Norm for your time and insights. This was a very fun conversation. To our listeners, if you are interested in learning more about Norman Bacal, please go to Normanbacal.com. You've been listening to Get in the Driver's Seat, stories about leadership moments in small to mid-sized professional practices. I'm your host Sandra Bekhor, Practice Management Coach at Bekhor Management. Take care everybody.
