Speaker 1: Hey there. My name is Tom Singer, and I want to welcome you to this, which is my first in a series of five videos for lawyers on how to conduct better business development. I spent several years working inside two Amlaw 100 firms as their director of business development, and I loved working with attorneys. Over the past 15 years, I have actually coached several lawyers on how to improve their business development, and I have spoken at countless partner retreats for firms all over the United States. I think that when lawyers really focus on business development and give it the same level, the same level as importance that they give to practicing law, that's when the magic happens. So today's tip is how to network with people. Now let's face it. We know that the practice of law is a people business. You are the product. Therefore, how you connect to other human beings in your business community, no matter what your practice area is, is going to make a very big difference in how you grow your business over the long haul. If you look at the attorneys who you admire most, those who have reached the highest levels of building a book of business in your practice area, in most cases, you're going to find somebody who has developed an amazing personal brand and reputation in the business community. Now often when I talk to lawyers, they want the results that that great lawyer has, but they don't want to put in the time to build relationships. You see, networking isn't a verb. You don't get to go networking like, oh my gosh, I don't have enough clients. I'd better go networking. Nope, that's not the way it works. Networking is not a verb. Networking is a lifestyle. If you want to be able to build a practice that's admired by others, you're going to have to put in a lot of time in getting to know the key people in your business community. Now this is going to be different depending on what your practice area is. However, when you get committed to realizing that every single person you interact with can have a long-term effect on the growth of your business, you're going to treat everybody different. You know, in the law firms I worked for, and this was 15 plus years ago, there was often those lawyers who were a little gruff. Let's face it, they were asshats. Everybody looked the other way because they had a $3 million book of business. Those people were the outlier to begin with. Second of all, firms aren't putting up with that anymore. If you're running through an assistant every six months, if you're treating associates like crap, you're going to get fired. I've seen many of the lawyers who really didn't care, who didn't think their personal brand or how they reacted to people, they didn't think it mattered. If I'm a good lawyer, that's all that matters was sort of their motto. Well, those days have gone. Those days are no longer here. You have to relate to the people who you work with. And I talked to one attorney recently who told me, no, because I'm a trial attorney, I need to be a jerk to everybody because they want to know that they're hiring a jerk. I don't think so. I don't think that that's the norm for why people hire a trial attorney. And it's certainly not the reason that you're going to hire somebody to be your business attorney or your HR attorney or any other practice area. So let's put that aside. You've got to really treat people with respect. And when I work with lawyers, one of the main things we work on is how do you build those relationships that are going to matter? So the first thing you need to do is you need to identify who in the community are the best people for me to network with, and then identify what organization and groups should you get involved with. Here's the thing. You can't join too many groups because you're busy. You've got, you've got a lot of hours to build. So therefore find two organizations, whether it's a business group or a civic group or something else, maybe depending on your practice area, maybe it's the bar association, but find two groups where either clients or referral sources are going to spend their time and then get committed to going to that group, put their lunches or their happy hours on your calendar and make it an A-level priority. Something I've found very interesting in working with lawyers over the years is they'll put a networking event or a lunch with a potential client or somebody else on their calendar. But the second anything else comes up, they'll cancel it. However, if their number one client was in that same hour on their calendar, they wouldn't client, they wouldn't cancel it. They would work around it. Well, that's what you have to do with your networking. Don't overschedule yourself. But if you commit to go to something like the association for corporate growth, then every month you show up at that luncheon. So you want to decide what are the organizations I should belong to and then join them and get involved. The next thing to do is join a committee and volunteer a little bit of your time because it's through shared experiences that we build relationships. You know, joining an organization and showing up on their membership roster isn't going to get you any business. And just being a random member who barely ever comes, nobody's going to know who you are. If you really want to grow business, you've got to be looking long-term. You've got to be thinking about your career three years from now, five years from now, 10 years from now. And if you're not willing to do that, then you're never going to create the type of career that you want to. You've got to have a long-term focus and be thinking clearly about how do I build relationships with the right type of people so that five and 10 years from now, I am the go-to lawyer in my practice area. So think about those organizations, get involved in those organizations, and then start meeting people. Now, meeting someone once does not make them part of your network. I don't care how many LinkedIn requests you have sent to people. If they don't really know who you are, it's not really a relationship. A like, a link, a share, or a follow is not a network. It's not a series of business relationships. So therefore, you're going to have to invest in people. Because here's what networking is. It's not showing up at some chamber of commerce event, passing out business cards, eating stale cheese, and drinking boxed wine. That's not networking. Networking is the creation of long-term and mutually beneficial relationships between two or more people where everyone involved in those relationships is going to find more success because of it. The part you have to remember is it has to be mutually beneficial, which means as you're building your network, you've got to find ways to help people. You have to take an interest in them, introduce people to other people, help people find clients. The more you do that, the more business you're going to get. Sometimes people push back and they go, I'm too busy to do that. Great. If you're that busy and you're never worried about running out of clients, then why are you even watching this video? But most people come to me to work with me when they're at a part where they're like, uh-oh, my career is having ups and downs and ups and downs, and now there's too many downs. We're going to take a long-term approach if I was to be your coach. So my call to action for you is reach out to me. You can email me at tom.tomsinger.com and set up a 10-minute discovery call. We'll talk and we'll see what you're trying to accomplish, and we'll find out if I'm the right fit to help you build the type of practice you dream of having. Thank you.