In this episode, Steve Fretzin and Simon McCrum discuss:
- Effective business development in law firms
- Enhancing client loyalty through service
- Standing out with unique differentiators
- Building trust and collaboration internally
Key Takeaways:
- Authenticity and trust, rather than sheer volume of connections, are the cornerstone of effective business development, as demonstrated by prioritizing fewer, deeper introducer relationships.
- A well-defined “service promise,” crowd-designed and rigorously delivered, creates a memorable client experience that sets a firm apart from its competitors.
- Revisiting underutilized existing client relationships can unlock significant growth by exploring untapped legal service opportunities and addressing overlooked needs.
- Implementing transparent client feedback systems, like real-time service ratings published publicly, builds credibility, accountability, and fosters long-term client trust and satisfaction.
“Business development isn’t goodwill development; it has to be about money and profit.” — Simon McCrum
Got a challenge growing your law practice? Email me at [email protected] with your toughest question, and I’ll answer it live on the show—anonymously, just using your first name!
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About Simon McCrum: Simon McCrum, a Management Consultant, helps law firms strengthen and grow their businesses. A solicitor and former Equity Partner and Managing Partner, he has decades of leadership in law firms and legal teams.
Qualifying as a lawyer in 1990, Simon moved from fee-earner to roles like Marketing Partner, Director of Business Development, and part of the Management Team at a £50m turnover UK law firm. In 2007, as Managing Partner of a Top 200 UK law firm with a £6m turnover, he led the firm from a trading loss during the Credit Crunch to its most successful year in 2010, becoming the UK’s fastest-growing law firm.
After the firm’s 2016 acquisition, Simon launched McCrum Consulting to boost law firm performance and growth. He developed “The Perfect Legal Business” model, which inspired his bestselling book, The Perfect Legal Business, followed by The Perfect Lawyer. His upcoming book, The Perfect Partner, completes the trilogy.
Connect with Simon McCrum:
Website: https://www.mccrum.legal/
Email: [email protected]
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simonmccrum/
Connect with Steve Fretzin:
LinkedIn: Steve Fretzin
Twitter: @stevefretzin
Instagram: @fretzinsteve
Facebook: Fretzin, Inc.
Website: Fretzin.com
Email: [email protected]
Book: Legal Business Development Isn’t Rocket Science and more!
YouTube: Steve Fretzin
Call Steve directly at 847-602-6911
Audio production by Turnkey Podcast Productions. You’re the expert. Your podcast will prove it.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Steve Fretzin: [00:00:00] Hey everybody, before we get to the show, wanna just do our q and a for today’s episode. We’ve got John from Quebec, Canada and he’s asking, I wanna invest in a coach, but it’s so expensive. How do I rationalize this when I’m cash poor? Wow. That’s a great question. I love that you use the word invest.
I don’t like that you use the word expensive, but that’s just me. I think if you’re cash poor obviously you have to put food on the table and take care of the basic necessities. If you’re deep in debt. It’s going to be very difficult to hire a coach in that point. I say, become a student of the game, read and execute and, and everything you can.
But if you have some money to invest. And you, I would say, you know, research the coach, talk with the coach get references and find out if they can work out a payment plan for you that allows you to get in without five grand down or 10 grand down or something like that. But I think, you know, investing in a coach, if that’s what you need and want to be more efficient and get better results.
You’re going to want [00:01:00] to do that right away. Most people that I talk to say, I wish I had done this five or 10 years ago. So hopefully that’s helpful, John, and good luck and enjoy the show, my friend.
Narrator: You’re listening to Be That Lawyer, life changing strategies and resources for growing a successful law practice. Each episode, your host, author and lawyer coach, Steve Fretzin, will take a deeper dive, helping you grow your law practice in less time with greater results. Now, here’s your host, Steve Fretzin.
Steve Fretzin: Hey everybody. Welcome to the Be That Lawyer podcast. I am Steve Fretzin, the host. Been doing this for a while, Simon, about five years. I’ve been doing this show. We’re hitting, I don’t know, in the 475 episodes, something in that range.
Simon McCrum: Wow.
Steve Fretzin: Yeah. How are things across the pond?
Simon McCrum: Well, they’re just fine. It’s a pleasure to be joining you firstly, Steve.
You’re a legend, a legend in my own mind. I’m flattered. I’m flattered [00:02:00] that,
Steve Fretzin: I can, I made the cuts. Well, listen, if you if I want to not feel like a legend, I can talk to my teenager. He’ll knock me down a couple pegs real fast. But you and I are both big Manchester City fans, and I don’t know what’s been going on with them lately, but they seem to do well, and then they seem to kind of choke at the end.
So I don’t know if that’s, is that just a this time of year thing?
Simon McCrum: I’ve no idea. I sat, you know the other night there were three nil up with, I think, 75 minutes to go. And we were in my family looking around each other thinking, thank goodness, we’re back in the old city. I hear 15 minutes later, it was three old.
Oh, I don’t know what to make of it. I could
Steve Fretzin: be, could be a real you know, hard flipper. But I just enjoy the premier league over here in the U S we have so many other sports that compete against, you know, watching, but thank God for YouTube. I’m able to watch all the top premier league games in about seven to 10 minutes each.
So I’m really thrilled. But since we’re not going to talk about premier league soccer for the time, we’re going to talk a little bit about business development and law and you go way back with [00:03:00] that. And let’s start off with the quote of the show, which I love to do. And this one comes from a client of yours, which I find fascinating that it’s not a famous quote other than the fame of someone saying this to you.
And it includes an expletive, which is wonderful. It’s a, the difference is you give a shit. And so tell us about that story. Tell us how that quote came about. And then we can get into your background a little bit. It was a short
Simon McCrum: quote, which culminated, brought together everything I tried to achieve in my law firm.
And that was the proof that it worked. And what it came from was a highly sophisticated, big spending client. And he said, I’ve used law firms around the world. Every lawyer in your firm that I touch in every team gives a shit. And he said, that didn’t happen by accident, did it? Yeah. And that was it. And that’s, we’ll get onto it.
That was, that is the key to business development.
Steve Fretzin: Yeah. I think the client loyalty myth, and you tell me why you think this is a myth used to be, if I do, if I provide good service at a fair [00:04:00] rate, right, that I will have this client forever and not necessarily the case anymore, right?
Simon McCrum: It’s not the case. In fact, if you just bear with me, I’ll go against some of your wording.
It doesn’t even have to be a good rate client. There’s a, there’s cars out there. I always, I talk about Ford, Audi, Ferrari. There’s enough Audi buyers out there. They’ll pay a good rate for a good service. You don’t need to be competitive. I always, in my consultancy work, I always comb law firms websites before I go in there and I’ll just give them a list of words to remove from their website.
And one of them is always, we’re competitively priced. Take it off.
Steve Fretzin: Yeah. You know, talking about money and rates and competitively price, you know, it’s not the way to go. And I, you know, I also find like it’s things that you say that aren’t really a differentiator aren’t necessarily things you need to talk about and put up front.
Simon McCrum: Yeah. You’re right, Steve. So many law firms websites are just hot air to put it mildly and wouldn’t make me use a law [00:05:00] firm and all this, we put you center of everything. We’re client focused. I’ve used these firms. It doesn’t happen.
Steve Fretzin: Yeah. Well, we need to take a step back to get into your background because you have one of the most extraordinary backgrounds of anyone I’ve had on the show.
And and obviously you guys have picked up on the accent. We’re talking to Simon McCrum Managing Director of McCrum Consulting. And before you got into that, you were like an absolute rockstar business developer. Do you want to take us back to that?
Simon McCrum: Yeah, I will, Steve. I’m a solicitor. I’m a lawyer. I qualified in 1990.
I showed all the skills. I had a managing partner who seized on that. Why don’t you do more of that and less of that? And the more was more business development, the less was legal work. And I moved, I ended up becoming an equity partner in a 50 million turnover firm, 50 million sterling doing only business development.
And that was because of results that I obtained.
Steve Fretzin: Yeah. And it’s hard for some lawyers to kind of wrap their heads around that because it’s so [00:06:00] rare that you have someone that just does business development and doesn’t build the hours or doesn’t necessarily manage all the client relationships and things like that.
So how does, how did that structure work for you in another question that lawyers are going to want to know is how did you turn the business over? Because it’s one thing to, you know, to make the sale and to get the business in, but then to say, Oh, and by the way, it’s not me, right? You’re going to be working with these strangers over here.
Simon McCrum: Yeah. So the, one of the most underused, it’s a great question, Steve, one of the most underused tools in business development is the truth. Hmm. Hmm. You know, if I can use the word bullshit is used a lot. Just let’s start with the truth. And I used to start my conversations off on the first minute was I’m part of a great team.
We have people who do all sorts and they do it in a certain way. You know, that was my language. So as soon as somebody said We need this. So I can think of a great example. I was out one night, I met some accountants. It was nine or 10 o’clock at night. And I, I know I wasn’t selling me. I was selling us and that’s a BD tool that I like using selling us.
[00:07:00] And the following morning, nine o’clock, I got a call from that accountant. Frankly, it had been a drunken evening, so I couldn’t remember. And he said, I’ve got a client with me now. It’s Friday morning. We’ve got a massive problem and it’s going to properties being sold on Monday. We need to stop something.
I said, I’ve got just the team. I brought them in 10 o’clock. We had a meet 10 a. m. Friday. We had a meeting. They had a meeting funny enough, Steve. I then went home because I was so hung over and in the, in the, over the weekend on Saturday and Sunday, I came into Manchester city center and all the lights were on in our offices because of this case, the lawyers were running around and I was able to think, you know, I’m not doing any of the billing work, but if it wasn’t for me, that wouldn’t be happening right now.
We, we build a million pounds. Wow. We’ve built over a million pounds on that.
Steve Fretzin: Man. Well, so I think what we’re getting to is the key to success in business development is to be out late drinking.
Simon McCrum: No? Yeah. Well, interestingly, when I was, if you like persuaded or off [00:08:00] invited to switch from filling to legal work, that’s what everyone thought, including me.
And I have a book of stories that involves going out, networking, either drinking or not drinking, but whatever, just being somewhere. I’ve got a book, it works, but it’s really hard work. And the real skill case, for me anyway, where it became exponentially more valuable as a contribution, was generating work when I was asleep.
And that I don’t mean during the day get helping other people to generate work, setting up schemes that generate work. One of the questions is that when you and I were kicking this around, what is BD? Most people will say it’s going out and meeting people and getting a case. I think BD’s much broader than that, and I’m sure you do as well.
Yeah, well, give me your take on it. Okay, what’s BD? It’s developing business. Not you going out, Steve, or me going out. You know, by goodness, that can work amazingly. There’s all sorts of things. Introducers. Having an honest relationship with an introducer that sends work [00:09:00] back. Most BD people will say, Yeah, yeah, yeah, we do.
Reciprocity, as it’s called. I bet you don’t. Because all too often, those accountants will say, Yes. Yes. All those bankers that you’re having lunch with, they’re having lunch with your competitors tomorrow. So the key is authenticity to me. Don’t have 15 lunches, have three relationships where you give, where you’re watering the plant and they’re watering yours and you trust each other that, you know, less do I have a firm believer having done tons manically.
Do less better for more. And that kind of works. Another form of BD. When you, my, some of my biggest results, Steve, were, I mean, off the top of my head, I can think of a national brewery. In the UK. We had a small debt recovery case for them. 2, 000. No one wanted to touch it. It was getting ignored. I said, give it to me.
I went to see the finance director. Because I was allowed to buy my firm. I didn’t need to bill every minute. I didn’t have a billing target. I sat down with FD and I said, tell me about [00:10:00] this debt. Oh, he told me 2, 000. It was nothing in their multi million pound stuff. But boy, it annoyed the directors.
Because they drove past this hotel every morning on their way to work, and the guy was, had a new car and stuff. So I said, have you got many of these? Oh, he said loads. I said, gimme them all. I’ve got a team chasing them. But then I briefed him on how he could avoid this happening again. Next thing you know, I’m saying to him, what?
Who run? Who looks after your property estate? Who looks after your employment? Who looks after your C? Boom, boom, boom. We got it all. You know that. So business development, that’s not going out and meeting a new guy or a new lady that’s looking after a client that was being ignored. Every law firm you that you deal with, Steve, they will have thousands of them.
Steve Fretzin: Yeah. Are ones I call them. Simon, the hidden gem. And so this is the way I describe it. All right. And this is how I pick up business, by the way, as a coach, right? There’s a table in front of lawyers that is piled with millions of dollars. It’s right in front of them, and they’re walking [00:11:00] around it day after day after day.
Part of the reason is not that they don’t know it’s there. Part of the problem is it’s uncomfortable. They don’t have a system. They don’t know the language. So it’s like asking a client to a general counsel for an introduction to another general counsel or asking in addition to the intellectual property work we do, what else could we help you with?
It’s those kinds of conversations that aren’t happening at the level that they need to. And that’s where I think a lot of that low hanging fruit business is, and lawyers just don’t feel comfortable going after it. Maybe you could shine some light on that. Yeah,
Simon McCrum: they don’t. So here’s the first thing that I thought about when you were speaking there is not only do they not feel comfortable, they just won’t because they’re not rewarded for it.
Well, some of the, some of them,
Steve Fretzin: I mean, again, in the U S for example, they have originated well, if it’s not your own client. You may not, but if it’s your own client and you get introductions or you get more business in the U S we have, what’s called originations, which is basically what business did you originate?
What did you bring in? So they [00:12:00] would get credit. So they know it’s there, but it’s amazing that they know it’s there, but they still don’t go after it because of the discomfort.
Simon McCrum: Okay. Now, where does the discomfort come from? Sometimes it comes from lack of trust of their colleagues. And I, even today I have law firms that say, well, you know, if we’ve got property work, there is no way I’m sending it to real estate work.
No way. I’m sending it to our team. They don’t return calls. They overbill. So you need trust. And the other thing is actually. It’s quite hard selling something that you don’t powerfully believe in. Well, yeah. Yeah.
Steve Fretzin: That’s definitely a pro. I thought you were going to say something else. It’s like that you don’t know as much about, but when you say what you said, I was like, Oh my God, you’re right.
If you don’t believe in your partners, if you don’t believe in the firm that you work with and for, then yeah, you’re not going to sell more business. You’re going to be afraid to bring it in because it could, it could light on fire.
Simon McCrum: Now, if I tell you my law firm in the UK became the fastest out, there’s 10, 000 law firms here.
Mine was the fastest growing [00:13:00] because if you think most law firms, when they try and grow their business, they look out the window. Okay. I closed the curtains. I bricked the windows up and we looked inside, looked after our clients. And we got that powerful belief by delivering across every team, a service promise.
An absolute guarantee that we will, we, you know, It will, or the client would think it was an amazing service all the time. Sometimes I tell you back at the ranch, it was chaos, but the client never didn’t get it. Once you’ve got that belief, then what you’re actually, you’re not asking your partners to sell.
Now, what you’re instead doing is checking with, why don’t you all check with your clients that they’re all getting this from their other lawyers that they use. Because they absolutely not. So we now had something powerful we could boast of. It was called a service promise. Literally a brand. And we believed in it.
And we wanted our clients, our real estate lawyers, wanted their clients to have that in employment terms as [00:14:00] well. So it was all, you can’t make partners introduce people. You’ve got, they’ve got to want to.
Steve Fretzin: So there’s a culture element to this, but I also think there’s a relationship element. Meaning even if my firm doesn’t have the best culture from a standpoint of it being is, you know, all focused on service, you still may have to know the three, four or five attorneys at your firm that you do trust and that do provide high level of service and quality and maybe focus on just selling them.
To the clients that you engage with, maybe not the whole firm because not all lawyers are created equal in their competency, level of service, level of care. So you have to be very particular about who you refer. Your clients too, because of one burn could lose it all, which I think one of their, one of their fears.
Simon McCrum: Yeah, and of course, and can I add to your list, Steve? Personality. Downright personality. You know, chalk and cheese sometimes does work, but often it doesn’t. So if you can pick the right people as well, but they, but the main thing is trust. If you’ve spent years [00:15:00] building this client up and you send them down the corridor to the employment team who don’t return the calls, I mean, I had that thousands of times in other firms.
But so when I had my own firm and I was able to pull it all together into a service pledge. With
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So like, let’s get into what you, cause you had based on my conversation with you and the research, like one of the largest books of business of anyone in the UK. And that didn’t happen by accident. So what were the two or three things that you did that made the difference between building an enormous book and someone who’s still at the firm billing hours?
Simon McCrum: So I had that situation where I, I was still billing hours, but then the managing part, a magnificent lady called Joy Kingsley just said, listen, why don’t we just take that all off you? You can do even more of this. And then I moved on. But, but even
Steve Fretzin: before, but even before she approached you, you were doing things well enough.
on the BD front to get noticed and to get that offer. What were you doing to bring in the business that allowed her to approach you and make
Simon McCrum: that offer? So a lot of BD you go, [00:17:00] I mean, this kind of goes back to one of your earlier questions as well. One of the best ways to BD business develop is do a good job.
Yeah. And boy, did I do a good job on my cases. I never went home without ringing, returning all calls. You know all clients want is to know push and tell, push the case, tell the client that’s it, push and tell. And that is your ticket to BD because then if they’re using other lawyers for other areas of work, other firms, you can rest assured.
One or two things ago, they’re not pushing the case and the clients think it’s a black hole. If you offer a different, and I was, I was very good looking after clients. Even as a junior client, this is a lesson for us all. Even as a junior lawyer, clients were giving me cases. I was delegating upwards. All they want is to be, they’re paying a lot of money.
They want to be looked at as if they are my only clients and I managed to succeed. You know, I wasn’t a great lawyer technically, believe me.
Steve Fretzin: But you, okay. There’s referrals that can come in from being a [00:18:00] great lawyer and being responsive. Were there other activities that you engaged in, networking or making calls, sending out emails, like proactive things that you were doing, conversations you were having that other people weren’t having?
Simon McCrum: Yeah. So this was a unique role. There was no one I could copy. There were no books on it back in the nineties. I had to make this up. So I started off doing what everyone thinks you do. So I had a billing target that was reduced. To allow me to learn, frankly, at this stuff. So I remember one example, I opened the local paper, the Manchester Evening News, and I saw it said tonight Bolton Wondrous Football Club.
So it’s a football stadium charity dinner sponsored by, I can’t remember the name of the company, PLC. Public limited company. So I rang their marketing department and I said, I see you’ve got a dinner tonight. Could I come please? And they said, yeah, absolutely. A table. I said, I haven’t got a table. They said, we’ll put you somewhere.
I said, thank you very much. I get to it. [00:19:00] It’s a charity dinner, black tie dinner. I don’t know a single person there. And they say, sorry, ladies and gentlemen, we’ve got a slight difficulty. The guy comes on the microphone. We’ve got a slight difficulty. The charity auction can’t take place tonight. It’s.
Because the auctioneer is stuck in traffic. Unless of course, ladies and gentlemen, we’ve got an auctioneer here. And you’re an out, were you actually an auctioneer or no? No, I haven’t
Steve Fretzin: done it in my life. You son of a gun. I
Simon McCrum: ended up on the stage. Oh my God. Taking bids for, you know, prizes, Manchester United shirts and having a love.
And of course I got the, not of course, but I got the PLC as a client. Yeah. Now you make your own luck. Now that story, much as I’m proud of it, that’s the kind of story that makes people switch off and think. Oh, I can’t do BD
Steve Fretzin: then. Right, I’m not, I’m not, I’m not the party person with the lampshade on the head of the party.
Simon McCrum: Yeah, yeah. They couldn’t be more wrong. I always say to people, you can all do BD. Just be [00:20:00] authentic. Don’t try and be me. Yeah. Just be yourself. Yeah. But if you haven’t, you know, you can’t, this is the problem. Law firms say to everyone, we expect you to do BD. Why doesn’t the law firm give them some tools and the biggest tool of the lot that everyone could be armed with?
And they were in my firm when I was the managing partner, everybody was armed with the tool. was called our differentiator. And we had, I remember one Monday morning, the receptionist came in and said, Simon, I was at a dinner party on Saturday night. There was a businessman there. I told him about our service pledge, great service.
Every lawyer, every time told he would, he’d like to talk to you. Sorry. That’s called BD. We, the business expects too much from lawyers. It should give them a differentiator. They can all use, then they can just be themselves.
Steve Fretzin: Do you have a feeling about, and I teach differentiators, how do you find a differentiator, leverage a differentiator, but I would love to hear your take.
Do you have like a [00:21:00] secret sauce type of way of like, all right, so I’m X kind of attorney, this is, you know, like a situation or maybe an example of one that you came up with for your firm or for yourself or someone else? Yeah, that’d be helpful.
Simon McCrum: So what I do, so this is what I do, Steve, with, with, when I work with my law firms now because they have these differentiators now and they use them.
So I call it so if I use the, the auto name Bentley, I call it, let’s do Bentley law and Bentley law is about the technical brilliance and the service excellence, that’s Bentley law. Then we’ve got to sell it at Bentley price. So we’re developing business, but it’s going to be nicely priced. Don’t do Bentley law and sell it at Ford price.
Right. So how do we get to Bentley law? The answer is you get the whole firm together and we look at, and I throw, I give them a scenario and I said, here I am. Let’s say I give two examples depending on the firm, but I’ll give you, I’ll use the, I’ll use, let’s say I’m a husband. And I get home at night and there’s a letter on the [00:22:00] mantelpiece.
And it says from my wife, I’ve met someone. I’ve met a skiing instructor in France. I’m leaving you with the children. I’m taking the children with me. Okay. Now that happens all the time. And I ring a lawyer and I say to everybody around the room now, tell me how here I am in my emergency need it’s five o’clock on a Friday night, it’s weekend.
The kids are about to be taken away. Ruin my life, please. What would you do? Tell me how you would make my predicament worse. And obviously, Steve, they come up with, we wouldn’t take your call, we would give it to a beginner, we would give you a 10 page letter that you didn’t understand, we would make mistakes, we would miss deadlines.
Sorry, that happens all the time. That’s not, that’s the worst things you can think of. It’s happening every day in the people using lawyers. So let’s do the opposite. What shall we do? Right. We won’t take cases on that. We can’t deal with, we will not give anything to a junior. We will ring you back every day.[00:23:00]
We will blah, et cetera. They will design. The differentiator, you can’t email them and say, hi, here we go. They’ve got to design it. Then they believe in it.
Steve Fretzin: Yeah. Crowdsource within the firm. Exactly. It’s a lovely word that crowdsource. Yes. Yeah. And I also think there’s something to be said about surveying clients, right?
I mean, if clients know that you’re great at something and I’ll give you a quick example. There’s one firm in Chicago here. That surveyed their clients and they said the most important thing and the thing they did better than any other firm was responsiveness. So they focused on the differentiator being nobody responds faster than we do and it was employment law.
So it’s like really critical. You need it fast. You just have a sexual harassment claim. You better call XYZ firm. So I think there’s a lot of different ways to do that. Your point, I think, is that when you have a differentiator that is sticky and that people remember, it’s something to fall back on and help you with your [00:24:00] BD.
Yeah, so for,
Simon McCrum: it’s center stage in your, you don’t sell, they buy. It’s a complete game changer. But here’s the thing, there’s plenty of law firms have got stuff on their website saying we’re great at service and all that. The difference is the design, but then the delivery. The, the deliver on your, it’s a promise and you’ve got to deliver on your promise.
And we were, you know, my big saying my law firm was when there was 200 of us, when we were all in a room together, I used to say, if anyone in this room thinks we sell t shirts, please leave. We change lives. That’s what we do. And we return, and we make the experience. It’s not always enjoyable for them.
It’s the biggest stuff in their life. Let’s make it an okay experience, as good experience as possible. We’re going to deliver on it. What we did, Steve, because I was, I deal in concrete, not hot air. We designed a system. Now you can buy this stuff. It didn’t exist when we designed our own. Every two weeks, [00:25:00] we texted the client automatically.
And all it said was, are we A, B, or C? Excellent, okay, or poor? A, B, C. All that ABCs came in, we published it internally, we put it live, real time, on the front page of our website. To this day, I’ve never seen anyone else do that. And if anyone said, any client from any team said C, I rang them. The chief exec. I can’t tell you what that did to clients.
Number one, crikey, something’s happened. And who are you? I said, I’m the chief exec. You’re who? Oh my goodness. And I saved, you know, it was all part of it. No one was in trouble because everyone was trying hard. It just allowed us to show that we meant it. That’s a differentiator. Steve, my biggest mistake though, I didn’t charge a Bentley price for what was.
undoubtedly Bentley service. And I, I now I help law firms avoid that now.
Steve Fretzin: Yeah. I think that’s sometimes the [00:26:00] problem is people have a hard time sort of swallowing their own value because they want to keep their ego in check. So they charge what they think it should be when in reality, their education, their experience, their performance, their service is Bentley and they’re, they just can’t, they can’t see it, but clients would.
Gobble it up. Yeah. Yeah. And
Simon McCrum: in their own life, they’re happy to pay, but you know, Audi price for an Audi quality, but just not me because I, you know, I can’t, but actually here’s the rub business development. It’s not goodwill development. It’s busy. It has to be about money and profit, which brings me to one of the, one of the question marks I always have over law firm BDN marketing.
It’s only worth it if it increases the number of billable hours that are being done. If it doesn’t, if the lawyers are going to do the same number of billable hours with or without your work, all you’re doing is you’re improving storage levels [00:27:00] in your firm. Works being so BD, if you’re doing BD, you need to do recruitment as well.
Give yourself more vessels to fill, more lawyers, then more billable hours are being done. Otherwise it’s cost, not an asset. And as you say, millions of pounds are piling up on desk.
Steve Fretzin: You got to feed the machine and the machine’s got to have output and it’s got to be as equal as possible. With that, Simon, we’re going to wrap up now.
I want to share that you sent me so kindly The perfect legal business and the perfect lawyer, right? These two books and your books are the game changing books of the show. So 30 seconds or less or a minute, like what, tell everyone about these books and why you wrote them and what’s in them.
Simon McCrum: Okay. It’s a trilogy.
You’ve got two there. The third is the perfect partner. It’s coming out in Christmas. They’re only available on my website which is mccrumb dot legal. That’s it. They are my confession. I have sold thousands of them in 55 countries, managing partners tell me, and [00:28:00] lawyers and partners and team leaders around the world, told me that’s changed their life.
And the reason I don’t do e copies, I don’t do a podcast of it, it is for you to write all over. And the best thing I can tell you about those game changing books, Is beyond number lawyers have said to me, did you write that book about our firm? I noticed a story that was very similar to what we went through with you, right?
Steve Fretzin: It’s
Simon McCrum: a simple book. It takes one bottle of wine to read each book and i’m told that people love my style
Steve Fretzin: Yeah, and they get better as you get through the wine Maybe. I can do it. So let’s wrap up with our thanking our sponsors. The law, her podcast check that out. How are women to be their best selves and live their best lawyer lives?
Of course, rankings IO top player in the marketing space in around the world. helping law firms bring in business. And I also just want to mention everybody that I’ve been writing for above the law for around six months now, I’ve got four or five, six [00:29:00] articles up. So check me out. You can go into the magnifying glass on their website, type in my name and you will get some of my best articles.
The most recent one was about how to create content for LinkedIn or just for social media. So check that out, everybody in Simon. If people want to get in touch with you, you already mentioned, was it mccrumb dot legal? That’s it. Okay. Any other, any other things that they should check you out on?
Simon McCrum: Now, if you Google me, there’s tons of stuff there and like, you know, webinars I’ve done for the UK law society and conferences around the world.
It all gets recorded, doesn’t it?
Steve Fretzin: Yeah. Well, I want to thank you for coming on the show, sharing your wisdom. This has been an absolute joy. My intention is to keep in touch with you to stay in line with you. I think there’s more that we can collaborate on. So expect to for me to kind of sneak around behind you.
And if I definitely want to come out and go to some premier league matches. So, and I’m, I’m a fan of, of the. of Premier League more so than a particular team. I just like watching and Kevin DeBoerner is one of my favorite players of all time, by the way. Who [00:30:00] is? Kevin DeBoerner. Oh, oh, legend. Legend.
Here’s my water bottle. Oh my God. That’s awesome. All right. It says Manchester City at the moment. Yeah. And the funny thing is I know so many international lawyer coaches and friends that, you know, they like the Reds or they like the Spurs or they like, you know, it’s just so wonderful because I like all, I love all those teams.
So anyway, we don’t want to bore people though. All right, Simon. Thank you so much, man. I appreciate you coming on the show, sharing your wisdom. I thoroughly enjoyed my dealings with you, Steve. Well done. Thank you. All right. All right. Thank you everybody for spending some time with Simon and I today on the Be That Lawyer with Fretzin podcast.
We’re here twice a week, every week to help you be that lawyer, confident, organized and a skilled rainmaker. Take care, everybody. Be safe. Be well. We’ll talk again soon.
Narrator: Thanks for listening To Be That Lawyer, life changing strategies and resources for growing a successful law practice. Visit Steve’s website Fretzin. com for additional information and to [00:31:00] stay up to date on the latest legal business development and marketing trends. For more information and important links about today’s episode, check out today’s show notes.