Elise Holtzman | 3 Essential Pillars of Business Development for Lawyers

Hi, everyone. It's Elise Holtzman here, a former practicing lawyer and the host of The Lawyer's Edge Podcast, where I sit down with successful attorneys, legal marketing specialists, business leaders, and authors to talk about how lawyers and law firms can grow and sustain healthy, profitable businesses.

Hi, everyone. It's Elise Holtzman back with another episode of The Lawyer’s Edge Podcast. I want to talk to you today about business development basics. These are the fundamental building blocks of business development successful lawyers, a critical principle that stands the test of time and that you can come back to over and over again to guide your rainmaking efforts.

I call them the three pillars of business development success. I'm going to give you an overview of what they are and how you can use them to either get started in business development or amplify and refine what you're already doing.

For more than 15 years, I've been working exclusively with lawyers and law firms to help them grow thriving, healthy practices. Obviously, successful law practices rely on both attracting new clients to the firm and filling that pipeline and doing additional or repeat work for existing clients.

So a tremendous amount of the work I do with lawyers and those in law firm leadership involves helping lawyers get better at business development. I didn't start my practice with the three pillars of business development. I was working with people on many of the things that make them up, but I hadn't articulated what they are, and I hadn't really been using them to make things super clear for my clients.

I wound up developing the three pillars of business development for a few reasons. First of all, most private practice lawyers know that they should engage in business development activities.

This is not a big surprise. They know that law firms run on clients that bringing in business makes sense for them and for the firm. But they never learned about it. They report to me that they don't know how to develop business. They know how to draft a contract. They know how to argue in court. They know how to negotiate a document. But they really don't know how to develop business. The three pillars make it simple.

Another reason is that business development often feels very overwhelming to many attorneys. They'll say, “Where do I start? Who should I be talking to? I can't just walk outside and shout about my practice from the rooftops and hope something good happens, right?” So the three pillars offer you an overall roadmap of what to do and how to invest your business development time.

Because lawyers are busy, we're driven by the billable hour, even if you are working on flat fee arrangements or some other kind of arrangement, we're basically trading time for money.

So if you're going to engage in business development activities—and I certainly encourage you to do that as a private practice lawyer—you need to be able to focus your activities on the things that make sense.

Another reason, most people weren't in sales before law school, obviously. I mean, most of us never learned that sort of thing. Think about all of the law students who became lawyers who studied things like history and political science. Most people were not salespeople beforehand.

They often see business development as something that's icky, greedy, or unseemly. The three pillars don't include anything like that. There's nothing salesy, icky, or unseemly about it so they help business development feel more professional, natural, and doable.

The last major reason that I created the three pillars is this: Research demonstrates that most lawyers, certainly not all, but most lawyers have an inborn preference for structure. We have a hardwired tendency to need and want structure, clarity, organization.

We like lists. We like closure. We don't necessarily love the great unknown quite as much. We can do it, but it's not necessarily our inborn baked-in personality preference.

So if you've taken a Myers-Briggs at some point or you've taken a TypeCoach Verifier, which is the tool that I use, you get the same four letters, you may remember that you came out as an S, a Sensor rather than Intuitive, and some of you will be intuitives, but many of you will have come out as sensors. Many of you will have come out as judges rather than perceivers.

So sensors are people who really like to have information. They like details, some more than others, but they like to have information. They tend to notice information that can be gleaned through their senses. Judgers, rather than perceivers, tend to like time and structure. The judger is the one that's running down the hall because she has a meeting at three o'clock and it's 2:59.

Perceivers are a little more casual with time and structure, so they're not typically running down the hall to the meeting. We think people are late if they're one minute late or two minutes late.

We like to check off boxes. We like to have lists. Some of you will recognize yourself when I say the following, which is that a lot of people, a lot of lawyers will keep a to-do list and look at the list, realize that they just did something that wasn't on their list, and they'll write it down and check it off. We like organization, we like clarity, we like structure.

The three pillars offer a structure for business development that, as I said earlier, you can come back to over and over again. If you have these three pillars in your mind, it's very easy to quickly think through the three pillars and ask yourself the question, “Am I focusing on the things that I should be focusing on in my quest for business development success? Or am I chasing bright, shiny objects that don't make sense? Am I doing things in a scattershot way or am I focused and organized?”

The idea here is to understand what the three pillars of business development are and then to take them—these principles of business development that stand the test of time—and adapt them to your personal situation.

You're going to adjust them based on your practice area, based on your geography. Are you a city lawyer? Are you more of a rural or suburban lawyer? Do you have a specialty area or are you more of a generalist? Are your clients in a particular industry or did they come from all different industries?

Are you somebody who loves to go to big events and meet tons of people or are you a little more on the introverted side and would prefer to meet with small groups of people or talk to people one-on-one?

The idea is to go from the general to the specific. What happens is that people don't typically have a structure that they can hang their business development activities on.

As I said before, it gets very overwhelming. You feel like you're running around in circles. You do a little bit of this over here, a little bit of that over there, which is what I call scattershot marketing or scattershot business development. It can get very frustrating, very fast. You don't see that you're getting results.

Also keep in mind that when you don't know what you're doing, because nobody ever taught it to you, and the law school didn't teach it to you, the law firm's not teaching it to you, and something feels confusing, hard, I don't know what direction to go in, you're a lot less likely to focus on that than you are to focus on the work on your desk, because, after all, the work on your desk is stuff you know how to do.

You're an expert after all. So you know how to do it, you know that you're going to get good results from billing the hours, serving the client so you just keep doing that over and over and over again and don't pay attention to business development, which is highly important for your success as a private practice lawyer.

The three pillars of business development is designed to give you that structure. Let's talk about what the three pillars of business development are. I'm just going to run them down and then we'll dive into each one specifically.

The first pillar of business development is nurturing and growing relationships. Nurturing and growing relationships. It's all about relationships. You're not going to develop business without having relationships. No matter how many pages you have on your website, no matter how many hits you get on your website, no matter how good your SEO is, no matter what you post online in terms of thought leadership, you are not going to generate a large book of business without having relationships.

Pillar number two is becoming a visible expert. You don't want to be a best-kept secret. People have to understand what it is that you do for a living. They have to understand how it is that you can serve them with your expertise, with your experience.

If they don't see you in the community and don't interact with you in a professional way, they're much less likely to understand what it is that you can do for them and why they should pick up the phone and call you when they have a goal to achieve or a challenge to navigate.

The third pillar is what I call mastering the three Ts of leadership advancement. Those three Ts are Thoughts, Time, and Team. There are certain things that as an attorney, you can be doing to step into leadership, whether it's as a rainmaker or as a manager or leader in your firm.

The three Ts of leadership advancement are not necessarily directly business-development related. You wouldn't think of them as marketing. But I find that they're absolutely essential to be developing so that you can become that leader and free up significant time for you to be able to work on the other two things.

So let's go into pillar number one, nurturing and growing relationships. People do business with those they know, like, and trust. The way they get to know, like, and trust you is to spend time with you, to understand who you are, what you do, what makes you tick. Do you have a sense of humor? Are you fun? Are you thoughtful? Are you kind? Are you the life of the party? Are you somebody who is easy to talk to when you have a challenge?

There are many ways to nurture and grow your network. By the way, when I say nurture and grow, I mean two different things. Nurturing is really all about taking care of the relationships you've already started or already developed.

You may have a lot of people in your contacts, in your phone, or in your firm's CRM, or people that you've connected with on LinkedIn or Facebook. Do you keep in touch with them? Do you have relationships with them? Do they remember who you are? Do they know what you do and for whom?

Growing relationships is about adding to your network. None of us lives in a vacuum. Things change, old relationships sometimes will go away, not because anybody has bad intentions but because you can't be best friends with everybody that you meet throughout the course of your life.

It's important to keep your network fresh and to learn and grow by meeting other people. So ask yourself the question: Am I proactive about consistently nurturing relationships in my existing network? Am I proactive about consistently meeting new people and growing my professional and personal networks?

How do you do those things? It may be going to events, going to conferences, joining organizations. Are you deeply involved in some kind of organization, a not-for-profit organization, maybe a bar association, a trade organization, a charitable organization?

When I say deeply involved, I don't mean just showing up occasionally at the holiday party or signing up for an event and not going and doing that every month. I mean getting involved as a volunteer or as a board member.

When you do those things, you meet other people. You get to know them. You roll up your sleeves with them side by side to work for an organization's mission. That's how people get to know, like, and trust you.

You also have the opportunity to connect other people for their benefit. You can be a people connector. That's the gist of pillar number one, nurturing and growing relationships. Pillar number two, become a visible expert.

I have a really bad joke about this, but I think you'll get the idea. If an expert falls over in the forest and nobody knows about it, is your expertise really serving you? Right? We all know the old joke that if a tree falls in the forest and nobody's there to listen to it, it doesn't make a sound.

The same can be said for expertise. You can be the world's biggest expert in your area of practice, but if nobody knows about you, is your expertise really serving you? Keep in mind that somebody could be less of an expert than you. You’re the better lawyer. You're going to take better care of the client. But they're out there getting known for their area of practice.

As I said earlier, you don't want to be a best-kept secret. Toiling away in obscurity in your office may get you the billable hours but it's not going to get you the clients. So who is the expert? How do you become that visible expert?

An expert is the speaker, the author, the person who gets quoted, the person who gets interviewed. Somebody who's on podcast, somebody who gets quoted in the legal press or trade publications on a particular topic, someone who is on panels or does keynotes, someone who gives webinars.

It could be the person who writes a blog post for her law firm's website on a fairly regular basis or rights for a publication such as Law360 or Law.com or your state's law journal.

The idea here is that the visible lawyer is the credible choice. If I'm looking for a lawyer, I want to know that this person knows what she's talking about. Rightly or wrongly, we tend to view authors and speakers as having more expertise than other people.

Think about all of the books on the shelf at the bookstore, if you even still have a bookstore around you, or all the books on the virtual shelf at Amazon or Barnes & Noble. Does every one of those authors know more than everybody else about the topic of their book? The answer to that is absolutely not.

But they have credibility because they wrote the book. They have credibility because they gave the TED Talk or the TEDx talk. Ask yourself the question: Do I have significant experience speaking for groups? Do I have experience writing or co-writing articles or blog posts? Is there an opportunity for me to be a guest on a podcast to talk about my area?

When you go to conferences and you see other people speaking on panels, why isn't it you? There's no reason that it shouldn't be you. I'm willing to bet that you know as much, if not more, than the people who are speaking on those panels.

A quick note about the intersection of pillars one and two, there's a Venn diagram there. I know we're not mathematicians, which is why we wound up in law school. But if you remember a Venn diagram, it's where things intersect.

When you are operating in pillar one and you're nurturing and growing relationships, you wind up running into all sorts of opportunities for pillar number two to become a visible expert.

You get to talk to people who might say, “Hey, I'm putting a panel together. Would you like to be on the panel?” Or you can hear about it and say, “Hey, I love speaking on panels. If you ever have an opportunity for somebody in my area, I'd love to be able to help you out.”

When you're speaking on those panels, when you get on people's podcasts, when you are writing articles, blog posts, or whatever it may be, you meet people. You start to get to know them and they start to get to know you. Those pillars work very nicely together.

Pillar number two, become a visible expert. Pillar number three is mastering the three Ts of leadership advancement: Thoughts, Time, and Team. The first is all about your business-development mindset. I've done another podcast episode on how to cultivate a business-development mindset for yourself.

We all know that if you have a rotten attitude about business development, if you've decided, “I'm going to stink at this, I'm not going to be able to do it. I wasn't born with a silver spoon in my mouth, why would anybody ever hire me? There are other people out there who know more than I do. I'm not senior enough,” whatever it may be, you're going to quit before you start because you're not an irrational human being.

A rational human being is not going to go out there into the world and try to do something that he or she thinks can't be done. Understanding what business development is and isn't and cultivating that mindset in yourself is important.

Another example of how this shows up for lawyers is that many lawyers shy away from business development because they're concerned that they're going to have to be salesy, inauthentic, pushy, greedy. Nothing could be further from the truth.

If you look at the pillars of business development, pillar number one is all about nurturing and growing relationships, showing up, and being of service to other people. Pillar number two is all about sharing your thoughts on your areas of expertise with other people who can benefit from your experience.

So cultivating this idea and having the thought that business development is all about serving other people that you are fully capable of learning anything—you wouldn't be where you are if you weren't capable of learning anything and that you get to do it in a way that aligns with who you are, if you're an introvert, you can do things in a way that aligns with your personality, if you're an extrovert, you can do the same—cultivating that mindset is going to power you through the consistent efforts that are required in order to be successful as a rainmaker.

Then we've got Time, the second T of leadership advancement. Time is huge for lawyers. Lawyers will say to me all the time, “Elise, you don't understand. I'm so busy. I don't have time for this.” You know what? You are busy. Lawyers are ridiculously busy. We're billing ourselves into oblivion to some extent.

So I get it. But as I like to say, when I'm in person with groups, I'm going to offer you some tough love with an emphasis on the love. That's this: You have the same 24/7 that everybody else has. Mother Teresa, Bill Gates, Oprah, world leaders, whoever it is that you admire, whoever it is that you think has achieved something, has the same 24/7 that you do.

So it's really about creating the time, protecting the time, prioritizing the time to engage in business development activities. That may mean setting aside business development power hours or power blocks on your calendar.

That may be making sure that you calendar conferences well in advance so that you don't accidentally schedule over them and then say, “Oh, bummer, I can't go to that thing that I should have gone to because I wasn't paying attention.”

Making time for business development is critical. People say, “Well, I just can't find the time.” You're never going to find the time. I wish we could all find time. That would make me unbelievably happy, and I know it would do the same thing for you, but we're not going to find time. We've got to create the time.

That often means respecting your own calendar, respecting your own time, understanding that if you don't invest in building your own practice, somebody else down the hall is investing in building his or her practice or somebody at another law firm is investing in building his or her practice. You may feel left behind if you don't prioritize it now.

I often say that business development is one of these things that's always important but never urgent. Nothing horrible is going to happen to you if you don't develop business today or tomorrow. The firm isn't going to fall apart if you don't develop business today or tomorrow. But over time, you will miss opportunities that you otherwise could have had if you put business development on your calendar and make time for it.

The third T of leadership advancement actually helps with the second T. That's Team. We often don't use the term team in law firms. We talk about practice groups and we kind of think of the word team as being in the realm of corporate organizations.

But when you build a team around you, whether it's other attorneys, whether it's associates, people junior to you, people senior to you, people who are on a parallel track with you, whether it's paralegals, legal assistants, marketing and business development professionals, professional development professionals in your firm, you are going to be able to free up time for the highest and best use of your time.

What's the highest and best use of your time? I believe that when you're a private practice lawyer, assuming you're not a very junior associate, the highest and best use of your time is doing the high-level legal work and focusing on business development.

When I say the high-level legal work, I don't mean all the legal work. If you have someone to delegate to, you should be delegating to that person. Now, In the beginning, especially, building a team requires a significant investment of time.

It may feel like it's not freeing up your time, and in fact, it's doing quite the opposite. But I think we all know logically that if we put in the effort, if we teach people, we train people, we help them revise things, we let them understand how it is we want things done, and we also give them the opportunity to try things out on their own, that we do over time develop people who can be exceptional team members.

There's an upfront investment of time and energy that has to be made in order to build that team around you. So whether you're acting as a mentor, whether you're acting as a sponsor, whether you're just working occasionally with somebody, you have the opportunity to build that team around you.

Pillar number three is mastering the three Ts of leadership advancement: Thoughts, Time, and Team. Now that you know what the three pillars are, how are you going to use them in order to grow and advance as somebody who can become a consistent business developer or a rainmaker?

Keep that structure in mind. Ask yourself the question: Am I operating in these three pillars or which of the three pillars am I operating in now and which pillar do I need to do some focusing on?

One of the things that you can do is create a little business development plan for yourself using the three pillars. I know a lot of law firms simply want lawyers to create a business development plan and execute on it.

I've recently heard a managing partner at a law firm say, “Well, we don't need any business development coaching and training.” He did change his mind, by the way, but “Let's just get everyone in the firm to create a business development plan and implement it. What's the problem?”

Obviously, we know it's not quite that simple. For starters, people need to understand what the elements of business development are. We've just talked about what the primary ones are.

Once you know that, you could look ahead at the year and say, “Okay, what am I going to do in pillar one? I want to make sure that I, on a quarterly basis, have lunch with X number of people and I want to meet Y number of people.”

“In the next year, I'm going to attend this conference and go to these particular events so that I am nurturing and growing relationships. I'm going to always make sure that I follow up with at least two people for every event that I go to.”

That gives you some structure. Again, you don't have to meet 87 people in the next month to be successfully engaged in business-development activities. If you give yourself numbers and you give yourself a time frame and you're operating in a particular pillar, then you know you're getting things done. You know what's expected of you. You know what to do and you know with whom to do it.

Make a reasonable plan based on what you think is going to work for you and then reevaluate it. If you over-committed, back it off a little bit. If you under-committed and you realize that you're kind of enjoying yourself and you can do more, then maybe the next quarter you do more and you put more people on your list that you want to reach out to.

For pillar number two, you could say, “Okay, in the next year, I want to write one blog post for our law firm's website and I want to write one article for a legal publication or a trade publication for the industry in which I operate.”

You could decide you want to be on one panel next year, do a keynote. Maybe you decide you want to be on two podcasts next year as a featured guest. I'm just putting a lot of possibilities out there, you're going to decide for yourself what you want it to be. But again, this gives you structure. You now get to make a list of the things that you want to do and then execute on them.

Then for pillar number three, make up your mind that you're going to start delegating more. You're building that team and you're creating time for yourself. It's going to take a little while to get the wheels of the locomotive moving until you're running down the track at a nice consistent speed.

There is that investment of time and energy in other people. But leaders, managers, senior attorneys delegate to other people. They don't do everything themselves. They don't say, “If I want something done right, I have to do it myself.”

As far as the Thoughts piece of the three Ts of leadership advancement, ask yourself the question: Am I psyching myself out? Am I making myself crazy? Am I talking smack to myself and telling myself that I'm not going to be able to do it or that it's icky, salesy, and disgusting?

People need lawyers. People need you. You don't have to sell to them. You don't have to do the equivalent of, in some greedy way, suck the money out of their pockets. If you share with them what you know, that would be helpful to them, if you develop a nice relationship with them and you're curious about what they need and curious about what they care about and try to help them, whether it's something as simple as making a restaurant recommendation in your city because they're visiting or something more complex like really helping them on a particular matter, you're going to find that people view you as a trusted resource.

When they view you as a trusted resource and they understand what you do, you will be much more likely to be hired. Those are the three pillars of business development. I encourage you to now take them and apply them to your situation.

Sit down, create a power hour for yourself, a power half hour for yourself. Go through your contact lists and see who you want to connect with in pillar one. Go through your organizations or your topics and see where you might like to write or speak for pillar two. For pillar three, ask yourself the question: Could I be delegating more? Who can I have helped me so that I can free up my time for the highest and best use?

Those of you who are subscribers will know that there's a question I ask all of my guests at the end of the show. It goes like this: There's a phenomenon called the curse of knowledge where experts sometimes forget that what is so obvious and natural to them is not at all obvious to others.

When it comes to your topic, what's a principle or piece of advice that may seem obvious to you but is important for people to hear? The piece of advice that I want to share with you when it comes to business development success is this: Thinking about it, worrying about it, wishing you could do it, wondering why other people can do it is not going to get you where you want to go.

You can do this. Some people say, “Oh, it's only for extroverts.” Some people say, “It's only for people who grew up with a silver spoon in their mouth or have a great little black book full of names.” None of that's true.

Some of the most prolific rainmakers I know didn't grow up with any of that. They're not necessarily all-natural networkers. But they made a plan. They decided to do it. They did it over and over again. They were intentional about it and they were consistent about it. So get out there and get started.

Are you going to get it all right right up front? No. Are you going to have a million-dollar book of business tomorrow morning? Probably not. I wish you could, but probably not. It's going to take time. It's going to take some effort. It's not necessarily easy. But it is simple.

The three pillars of business development lay out the simplicity for you. Give it a go and let me know how you do. Thanks so much for being here today. If you've enjoyed today's show, please subscribe, rate, and review us at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. In the meantime, be bold, take action, and make things happen. We'll see you next time.

Thank you for tuning in. If you've enjoyed today's show, please subscribe, rate, and review us at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. In the meantime, be bold, take action, and make things happen. We'll see you next time.