Random acts of kindness

Its Friday at 5:00pm, time to Blog. I have had some good days and bad days this week. Today was a pretty good day. I had a meeting with a potential client. This was a former work colleague that is now a managing director of a small start-up. I reached out to him about 6 weeks ago and he said he would keep me in mind and just this week invited me down to meet with him and his CEO. I put on the gabardine pants, polished shoes, pressed shirt, official looking leather briefcase and headed out to battle. I opted not to wear a suit or tie, I knew they wouldn’t be wearing one, it was too hot anyway so I skipped it (I think the best practice is to always error on the side of wearing a suit . . but I felt I could get away with it on this run). We had a good meeting, it sounds like I will get some work out of them (although not as much as I had hoped, it could develop into something more in the future). The whole thing was a nice affirmation that my strategy may work, that there is a need for this kind of service among start-ups out there. We didn’t discuss my billing rate, they didn’t ask and to volunteer it would have seemed a little presumptuous.

Lessons learned: Perhaps this is obvious but do not expect an immediate pay-off from networking contacts, you are really planting seeds some of which will come to bloom over time and some will not (did anyone catch Ari’s speech on Entorage about planting seeds all over town?). I have a tendency to wait until I am ready to do the work (e.g. open for business) before reaching out to people and I think the better practice is to get the word out there early and expect that it will not generate any leads for a while. Another lesson is that I need to work on my elevator pitch. It was a little rough, not as succinct as it could be. I also need to distinguish how I present my self as a solo lawyer to a client versus how I presented my self interviewing for a full time job. It occurs to me that they are different situations. On a job interview the hiring people tend to want to hear your story, what jobs you have had, where you went to school, why you made the career choices you did. In my case it’s a long and painful road to navigate, so the good news for me is that on a client interview you don’t need to go through your whole history, just hit the relevant skill areas, some examples of how you applied those skills etc. (I found myself giving a job-interview-style summary of my background this morning and that was a mistake). I would be curious to hear how other people handle this kind of thing, it may be different depending on the type of work and client you are meeting with.

After the meeting, I had some time to kill so I stopped by the continuing legal education bookstore. I asked how much one of the slimmer books was but it was way too high although the woman that worked there said they were going on sale in August. I started chatting with her she was complaining about computer problems at home and I told her a quick fix, she was nice and appreciative. I continued to browse for about 15 minutes, they also had a rack of older books that were marked down to $10. She then asked me which books I was interested in and I told her, a little wink, wink, nod, nod and the three books I wanted made their way to the discount rack (saving me about 90% of the total cost). That put me in a good mood, a little boost for a low income solo practitioner.

I then had an eye exam, at 40 the eyes are starting to go south (no glasses need up to now). And then to the office. I spent the afternoon reaching out to old contacts. I have stepped up that effort as my part-time job appears to be coming to an end (much to my surprise, more on that later). Feeling pretty good, after some depressed days earlier this week.