Business Development

Business Development Rule #1: Only Make Enemies on Purpose

In the last six months, two people out there in businessland have said things about me (once directly in an email to me, and once in a conversation to a third party who they didn't know was a friend of mine) that have made me seriously angry. These weren't accidents, or minor gaffes. They were absolutely direct insults, and they hurt. I'm also not going to forget.

Now, I'm a reasonably big boy, and I'm not planning to buy a voodoo doll or anything. I am also, I believe, very willing to hear criticism, and the first one to admit when I've screwed something up or done something stupid. I'm not touchy, and I'm not Richard Nixon, with my own personal enemies list. However, I am not going to forget what these two people said. It was unfair, it was personal, it was cruel and oh, yes, by the way, it wasn't true. And the lesson here for anyone developing business is simple. In fact, it's not even new: if you can't find something nice to say about someone, then don't say anything at all.

It's astonishing how many people forget this.

I used to have a boss who had a saying: never make enemies by accident. In other words, if you're going to make someone an enemy, think it through and remember that revenge is a dish best eaten cold. Upon calm reflection, it almost always becomes clear that it is almost never worth it. Why not?

Because it is almost always completely unnecessary. And that goes to the heart of learning to not say anything. Being nasty almost never accomplishes anything, and it's very easy to avoid if you just don't say anything at all.

People have extraordinarily long memories for things like this, and we all live and work in smaller, more interconnected communities than we realize. in the very best case, someone you are rude or mean to will simply be absolutely sure to never do anything helpful for you or your firm ever again -- say, refer clients. In the worst case, they will spend the rest of their careers smearing you and your firm every time they get the chance.

Want a few examples? Okay:

A friend of mine was a young Congressional staffer, and  got to go to dinner with her boss, a Congressman, and Katharine Graham, the long-time editor and owner of the Washington Post. My friend arrived at the dinner, terribly excited to meet Ms. Graham, who is considered  a saint by a lot of people.

She's not.

Her boss introduced my friend to Graham. And Ms. Graham looked straight at my friend and said something cutting and unpleasant about how she didn't realize junior people were going to be at the dinner. My friend was crushed. And ever since that day, she has been telling that story, and significantly revising what an awful lot of people think of Ms. Graham. Okay, that's not necessarily a big one. Ms. Graham, after all, has gone to that great newsroom in the sky. However, the whole thing was completely unnecessary. Had Katherine Graham simply looked at my friend and said, automatically, "Nice to meet you" there would be no story at all. How hard would it have been?

Want another?

There is absolutely no way I am going to ever do anything to help either of the two attorneys who I described at the beginning of this post. I'm not going to go around and slag them, or their firms. However, I have been in this business for about five years, and am planning to be in it for another twenty. I know a LOT of people, and I meet more every day. This is how I make my living. I can, and have, referred clients, business, lateral partners and so on to firms. I have personally gotten two people jobs. I like to do it, and I'm happy to do it. Not for these guys. They will never even know about it. Things that might have happened just won't, and they'll go on their merry way.

The very best example is one provided by David D'Alessandro in his excellent book, Career Warfare. Alessandro, who eventually became CEO of John Hancock, tells the story of a consulting firm working for Hancock and was billing them around $7 million a year. One of the firm's partners wrote a memo in which he described Hancock's senior management as idiots, and then proposed a way to extract more money from them. Although this was an internal memo it, of course, made its way to Hancock's CEO. Result: the consulting firm received what D'Allesandro describes as a "gasoline enema" and lost all the business, forever.

The point is this: by being civil, you avoid creating enemies, who can create problems. And being civil is easy. Which brings me to my final story. I forget where I heard it.

Someone, for some reason, was sharing a limousine, alone, with Rose Kennedy, father of JFK and RFK, and an enormously weathly, powerful, influential woman. She was sitting in the limo when the door opened, and Rose got in. Rose looked straight at the other woman and said something like "I hope you don't mind, but I have been up since 5 AM, I did not sleep well last night. I'm very tired, and  I really don't feel like talking. I hope you understand." Direct, gracious, and clear. And it took about three seconds.

She could have been unpleasant. She could have simply ignored the other person. She could have done a thousand unpleasant things. Instead, she did not do them. It doesn't matter much what she actually did -- what matters here is that she did not make an enemy. Multiply this by a hundred thousand people you meet over the course of a lifetime, and have have a very impressive list of people.

For another splendid example, watch this. It's a clip of Barack Obama getting onto Air Force One for the first time, and meeting the pilot. The pilot is an Air Force officer, and being in command of Air Force One is the peak of his career. He is completely focused on doing his job, no matter what, and Obama could have done or said anything, including throwing up on his shoes, and it would have made no difference at all.

What did he do? Again, direct and gracious. Obama shakes his hands smile, jokes with him and says "You know what? You look like you're out of Central Casting. You look like you know how to fly this plane. You're exactly what I want the pilot of Air Force One to look like. You look like Sam Shepard, in The Right Stuff." The pilot beams.

Simple as that.

Worst. Business. Development. Strategy. Ever.

There's a post in today's Wall Street Journal Law blog that reads like something out of The Onion. If I sat down, and as an experienced professional, planned out a strategy to completely wreck any future business development hopes for my firm, it would look like this:

Here’s the way it’ll work: All those first and second year associates who, as of June 1, were on pace to bill fewer than 1600 hours for the year will have 20% of what they stand to make over the last half of the year withheld. (In other words, the firm will hang on to 10% of the year’s salary.) For third year associates who fall beneath the threshold, the firm will withhold 15% of the July-December pay (or 7.5% of the full-year salary).

If, at the end of the year, the associates have hit 1600 hours, they’ll have their full pay restored.

Okay. Let me get this straight. First and second year associates have absolutely no chance of ever bringing in business. They just can't. Their job is to learn to be lawyers, and to do the work they're given as well as possible.

Unless they're incredibly lazy, and want their careers to explode on the launching pad in a recession, the number of hours they bill is a direct result of the work they're assigned. Which someone else has to bring in. Like, say, a partner.

Now, the firm has decided to hold them financially responsible for something they have no control over. This is bad, but it's not uncommon -- every time associates take a pay cut, it's because, usually, of the inability of partners to sell enough work to keep them busy, which is something they can't control. Fine.

However -- and this is the really great part -- the firm is creating an incentive structure in which the key metric for new associates is whether or not they're profitable. If they bill enough to make the partners money, they can keep their salaries. If you don't, through no fault of their own, the firm will cut their pay to guarantee that they're profitable. And this is for partners who are already making several hundred thousand dollars a year. One way or another, new associates must make money for the partners. This is the ultimate in short-term thinking. The firm is willing to invest absolutely zero, and has no interest in the future, either. To quote Willy Wonka, they want it now, and they're going to make sure they get it.

In this situation, no associate in his right mind is going to make any effort at all to bring in business, or even learn how. They're going to either look for new jobs, or do whatever it takes to bill their brains out, right now. Just in case they didn't get the message, their employers have spelled it out -- their job is to bill. And that's it. Because the partners want to make money. Right now.

And in three, or five years, when the possibility of becoming a partner begins to become real, these lawyers will have no pipeline, and no book of business, because they've been unable to invest the time or develop the skills to do so. And the firm has done absolutely nothing to help them learn.

If there is more to this story, or if I've missed something, I'd be glad to hear about it. But based on what I've read, this sounds like an excellent way to make it as hard as possible for associates to learn to bring in business.

Bodine's Right: Twitter Is a Shiny Object

Larry Bodine, agent provocateur extraordinaire, has written a couple of posts recently about his belief that as a marketing tool, Twitter is going to have a very short life. I agree, and his most recent post provides what seems to be a lot of evidence in support of his position. For the evidence, read his most recent post. For some thoughts on what it means, read this one.

Everyone and his brother just loves Twitter. I find it sort of entertaining, but as someone who has been in the tech/marketing world for more than a decade, which is an eternity, like Larry, I suspected that Twitter was just a shiny object.

Let me explain that. I have worked with, and am, an entrepreneur. As a species, we absolutely love the new, the cool, the different, the interesting. Twitter is all of these. However, sometimes we fall so in love with the New Thing that we don't really stop to consider how much, in the long run, it's actually going to matter. And in the cold, hard light of reality, the answer is "not much." The "shiny object" metaphor refers to a crow's tendency to be attracted to shiny objects, to pick them up, then put them down, then pick up another one. The net result is zero. Twitter seems to me to be another bright, twinkly object.

A former colleague of mine, Russ Fradin, wrote once that a viable business idea is one which solves a real problem that real people are willing to pay real money for. Although the people using it may be real, none of them are paying real money, and Twitter doesn't solve a real problem.

 Any kind of successful communications medium has to deliver a certain amount of experiential richness. Maybe it's design, or beautiful photography, or long copy, or in the case of Facebook or blogs, the opportunity to create and populate your own digital world. However it's done, the medium has to offer at least some of the elements of actual human contact.

Twitter does none of that. It's only 140 characters long, for crying out loud, and it's all text. The upside is that it's easy, thin, and quick. The downside is that it has about as much impact as the proverbial butterfly landing on the proverbial enormous bronze bell -- not much. It's fun, and interesting for about two weeks. Then people move on. Which, apparently they're doing.

I don't know Larry, but I've read a lot of his stuff, and he seems to specialize in coming out and saying the things that everyone knows or suspects is true, but doesn't say. He says it. Good for him.

Help for the terminally boring

"We have appointed Peter "Craze" Sheridan, a world-class berserker, as the advance man for the crew. This is a truly deranged idea, but fun! You never can tell what might happen when you let a gin-soaked, acid-addled yahoo from Chevy Chase, Virgini, loose on an unsuspecting world, but you know it's going to be interesting."

Living With The Dead, by Rock Scully and David Dalton

A lot of professional services people, particularly attorneys, are incredibly boring. Granted, I'm pretty easily bored, but if your profession, temperament and circumstances result in a career in, say, administrative law, you're not going to put a lot of importance on being entertaining. Professionally this makes lots of sense, but when it comes to marketing and business development, it can be the kiss of death.

Unlike in law, in marketing, people do not have to read your writing or listen to you speak. This is a seemingly obvious point, but it often goes directly against the basic nature of a lot of my clients. If you write and file a brief in a legal case, the other side has to read it and respond to it, even if it's 900 pages long and the written equivalent of 20 milligrams of Ambien.

In marketing, it's just the opposite. The vast majority of people exposed to what you have to say will simply ignore it. Unfortunate, a little hard to take, perhaps, but absolutely true. Consumer advertisers know this, of course, and hire armies of creative to figure out what will capture people's interest. Sometimes the results can be fascinatingly silly and seemingly completely pointless-- consider Burger King's "Subservient Chicken" website, featuring an obedient life-sized chicken in a sleazy-looking hotel room. It's not easy to understand what the point is, but it's definitely not boring.

A nice post in yesterday's Copyblogger (my new favorite blog) does a great job of addressing this problem. First, it refers to a recent post by the mighty Seth Godin about how being boring can completely wreck a marketing program, and second, it also refers to another Copyblogger post with the unsubtle title "How To Be Interesting". Although the post is specifically written to help people write better blog posts, its recommendations are also applicable to any kind of marketing writing. As example:

14) Be irreverent: Want to stir people up? Make fun of their god, their politics, their family — anything they hold dear. Yes, they’ll be offended, but lots of other people will think it’s hilarious. If you can’t stomach being hated by a portion of the world and loved by another, then you don’t deserve to have a blog.

All of this advice should be applied judiciously (i.e., one recommended way to be interesting is "show a (half) naked woman." Uh, maybe not. Still, if y ou thin you might need some tips on how to zip up your marketing, especially your writing, take a look.

What really matters to you?

Whatever it is, developing business is the way to get it, or to protect it, or to build it. There isn't any other route.

Yesterday I was watching a DVD of the final movie in the Lord of The Rings series, The Return of The King. In one of the climactic scenes of the film, Aragorn, King of Gondor, is rallying his troops before the final, ultimate battle. He's wonderfully portrayed by Viggo Mortenson. In the film, this is really Armageddon, the decisive battle between good and evil. His men are facing a vastly bigger army, and every one of them is going to die. They're frightened. And Aragorn screams out this speech:

Hold your ground! Hold your ground! Sons of Gondor, of Rohan. My brothers. I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me! A day may come, when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of Fellowship, but it is not this day! An hour of wolves and shattered shileds when the age of men comes crashing down! But it is not this day! This day we fight! By all that you hold dear on this good earth, I bid you, stand, men of the West!

And I was thinking about that last sentence, the one I've emphasized, and the phrase "By all that you hold dear on this good earth . . . "

What do I hold dear? What really, really matters to me? If I had to decide or say that my life, that I, was about something, for something, what would that be? For me, and I suspect for a lot of people, it would be my children. It might be something different for you. It doesn't matter.

I want my children to be safe, to be secure, to be happy, educated, protected and to have the chance to grow and thrive and live good lives. My parents gave that to me, and I want to give it to my children. Again, I doubt I'm alone in this.

And I cannot provide this -- I don't have a prayer -- if my business doesn't do well. Whatever else I do or don't do, if the business isn't strong, and profitable, and growing, I'm not going to get much of anywhere, and neither are my children.

Every time you think about doing something to strengthen your practice, to move you forward on the professional road towards a higher income, security, independence, even if the step is tiny, it's a step towards whatever really matters to you.

These are scary times, particularly for the legal profession. I exchanged emails with a contact who told me that membership in the ABA had declined 40%. That's astounding. I have no idea if it's true, but a lot of people are facing the loss of their incomes, their savings, their careers, maybe their famiilies. I had a telephone conversation yesterday with another colleague who was called into her boss's office on Friday and summarily fired. Out of absolutely nowhere. Another colleague owns several very heavily mortgaged properties here in the Bay Area. He's underwater, and has to figure something out, quickly, or his home, his children, his wife -- all are in trouble. This is a long list, and everyone's got one.

For a lot of people, the things they hold dear on this good earth are in real, serious danger. To protect them, to safeguard them, to reach them, you need a strong, healthy, vital professional practice -- a lot of contacts, a pipeline full of prospects, and the momentum all that brings. When you decide to do nothing, and hope that everything will just work out, or depend on the status quo to keep things as they've always been, you are risking a lot more than your income, or your career, or your professional reputation. You're also risking the things you really, really care about.