Only 31% of professionals on the partnership track can articulate the narrative of their Business Case and explain why they should be admitted to the partnership this time around.
Given that most firms cap how many partners they admit in a year, that is the question which separates two credible candidates competing for one slot.
This episode covers the twelfth and final key indicator of partnership readiness: the Partnership Admissions Process. It is not a long job interview. It is a two-way due diligence process where your partners decide whether to let you buy equity in their business. This episode covers what they are really assessing, how to prepare for the assessment centre and the interviews, how to build and pitch your Business Case to the panel, and what to do in the weeks after the vote, whichever way it goes.
In this episode you will learn:
- The questions the Partnership Selection Committee asks itself about every candidate, which appear nowhere in your nomination pack and are never scored
- What actually happens in a Partner Assessment Centre, and the two things that stop most people panicking about it
- How to build a one-sentence and three-sentence pitch for your Business Case, and how to storyboard it for the Partner Panel Interview
- What to do in the first few weeks after the vote, whether you got through or not
Take the Partnership Readiness Assessment
Free to complete, 10 to 15 minutes, and gives you a personalised report across all 12 key indicators. Take the assessment here.
Buy Poised for Partnership
To buy a copy of Poised for Partnership, click here.
What help is out there for you to progress your career in the professions?
The Progress to Partner Academy is curated by key indicator. If the Partnership Admissions Process is what is in front of you, you’ll find everything in one place.
The course to start with is How to Create a Cast-Iron Business Case for Partner. This on-demand course takes you step by step through:
- Building a Business Plan for your practice using the STAGe model
- Working out the critical moves that will grow your practice profitably and sustainably
- Adapting that plan into a Business Case for partnership
- Answering the ‘Why me’ and ‘Why now’ questions your partners will be weighing up
- Pitching your Business Case to your partners
Under the indicator you’ll also find a set of Video Hub sessions and downloadable guides focused on the admissions process itself:
- 9 Differences of a Lateral Hire Partner Business Case
- Acing the Partner Admissions Process
- The Importance of Your Business Case Narrative
- Guide: How to Elegantly Handle Challenging Questions or Open Conflict
- Guide to undertaking your own Due Diligence
- Partner Panel Interview Timeline
These resources will help you:
- Understand what your partners are really deciding when they discuss your name
- Walk into your interviews with your answers prepared rather than improvised
- Get your Business Case down to a pitch you can deliver in the time you are given
- Handle the question and answer session without arguing yourself out of a partnership
- Know what to do in the weeks after the vote, whichever way it goes
If the Partnership Admissions Process is what is in front of you, this section of Progress to Partner will help you go into it prepared rather than hoping.
Use code PODCAST10 for 10% off annual membership. Click here to join.
Books mentioned
Poised for Partnership by Heather Townsend – https://amzn.to/3ETEYk3
How to Make Partner and Still Have a Life by Heather Townsend and Jo Larbie – https://amzn.to/4iLxugM
You can also listen to this episode on Substack and on Apple Podcasts
Hello, and welcome!Hello, and welcome!
At some point, a group of partners in your firm will sit down and decide whether your name goes forward as a possible new partner. In front of them will be your Partnership Nomination Pack. It will likely include Your Business Case, A report on your financial performance, plus Three years of performance and development reviews. Potentially even psychometric reports and client feedback.
And while they are working through all of that, they will be asking themselves a completely different set of questions. Can I work with this person? Am I comfortable letting them know the inner secrets of the partnership? Can they be trusted with the dirty laundry? Will the most influential partners back them in the vote?
None of those questions appear anywhere in your nomination pack. They are not scored, and nobody will ever tell you they were asked.
But very often, the answers to them are what decides whether you go through to the Partnership Vote. Which means the people on that committee are assessing something you cannot see on any form you have been given to fill in.
This is the How to Make Partner podcast with me, Heather Townsend, author of Poised for Partnership and co-author of How to Make Partner and Still Have a Life. This is episode twelve, the last in our series on the 12 key indicators of partnership readiness. Today we are talking about the Partnership Admissions Process.
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Right. Let’s start with the biggest mistake I see people make about this whole process. They treat it as a long, drawn-out job interview. A promotion panel with more stages than usual.
It is not. The Partnership Admissions Process is a two-way due diligence process. Your partners are deciding whether to let you buy equity in their business, and in the larger firms they may be paying out a considerable amount of money on the promise that you will deliver your Business Case. They are not going to do that on a hunch. So they are working out whether you will put the interests of the business above your own short-term agenda, whether you think and behave collegiately, and whether you will more than pull your weight commercially.
As a rule of thumb, the bigger your firm, the more hoops you jump through. In the largest firms the process can run for six to nine months. In fact in some of the european Big 4 firms such as PwC this is a 2 year process.
Here is where most people are underprepared. There is normally a limit on how many new partners a firm will admit in a year, so the committee is frequently choosing between candidates who are all credible. And only 31% of the professionals who have completed our Partnership Readiness Assessment can articulate the narrative of their Business Case and explain why they should be admitted to the partnership this time around.
Which means roughly seven in ten people walk into that process unable to answer the one question that separates them from the other candidate. And the consequence is not usually a flat no. It is being told you are a valued member of the firm and to come back next year.
By the way, in most mid to large firms you will know one to three years before you are actually eligible. So the window to prepare properly opens long before anyone officially tells you the process has started!
So let’s talk about what you will actually be put through, and how to prepare for it.
Some firms run a Partner Assessment Centre first, which is one to three days of exercises built around real business situations. If yours does, remember this. One bad exercise matters far less than you fear, because each competency is assessed in more than one. And you are not competing against the other people in the room.
But the interviews are where the real preparation pays off. Expect a competency-based interview, possibly a risk and quality interview, and a Partner Panel Interview. In a Big 4 or large international firm, expect several panel interviews. And your interviewers are not only assessing what happens if they make you partner now. They are considering what happens a few years down the line.
Have a go at answering these, out loud, before anyone asks you:
If you are admitted to the partnership, what will it help you do that being a senior associate or director could not?
What would happen to your practice if your top two clients or referrers stopped sending you work?
And one of the difficult ones: Why shouldn’t we admit you to the partnership?
Paul was going for a partner role in a Big 4 firm, and he spent a large proportion of his preparation time sitting with his Sponsoring Partner going through his answers to questions like these. For each competency in his firm’s competency framework he had prepared a number of stories that demonstrated him delivering on this competency. He even took his sheet of stories with him into the interview. That way if nerves got to him he’d still be able to answer the questions.
Writing down this stories and answers to the questions and practicing them made him succinct. It stopped him waffling and going off-topic. And on the day he was relaxed enough to actually hit the points that scored well in his competency-based interview.
So do not just read those questions and assume you would be fine. Write your answers down, then say them out loud to your Mentor or Sponsoring Partner and let them tell you where you waffled.
Now let’s talk about the Partner Panel Interview, because for most people this is the biggest presentation of their career so far.
You will typically be pitching your Business Case to the Partnership Selection Committee or your Management Board, followed by questions.
Start by getting your Business Case down to one sentence. Just one. It will not be easy, and that is exactly why it works, because it forces you to be clear about the message you need to land. Something like: my relationship with the Tesco account will grow into a partnership-sized portfolio, and help the firm fulfil its strategy of having a strong retail sector team.
Then expand that into three sentences and put the numbers in. What the account is worth now compared with two years ago. What pipeline you have built off the back of it. What the wider market opportunity is worth to the firm. Those three sentences are your pitch, and everything else in your presentation exists to support them.
Then storyboard it. Take five to ten slides and write only the titles, so the titles alone tell the story. Your three-sentence pitch. Three reasons supporting it. And then the slide most people leave out, which is the risk to the firm of not promoting you this time around. Only once the titles work should you fill in the detail, and then go back and cut twenty percent of the words.
And practise the first three minutes and the last three minutes, at least ten times, out loud. That fixes the words in your head so that however nervous you are on the day, you deliver the two parts that matter most properly.
In the question and answer session, whatever your partners actually ask, they are really testing three things. How robust and sustainable is this Business Case? Are you the right person to deliver it? And are you someone we can trust as a role model for the firm?
And if a partner does not like your argument, check first whether you have been misunderstood. If you are still not convincing them, agree to disagree. Do not argue for the sake of it, even if you are a lawyer! Nobody is trying to trip you up. Your partners are doing due diligence on behalf of the whole partnership, and their own reputations are on the line if they fail to ask the difficult question.
If you want help building and pitching that Business Case, our on-demand course How to Create a Cast-Iron Business Case for Partner in the Progress to Partner Academy takes you through it step by step.
The vote happens, and then most people have no idea what to do next. So here is what to do with each outcome.
If you get through, congratulations, and please do not sign anything immediately. Ask for the sensitive partnership documents and do your own due diligence, because you are about to invest a chunk of your own capital in this business. Sort out your finances, because on the day you are made up you resign, become self-employed, and lose every employment right and employee benefit you currently have. And when you thank the people who helped you get there, ring each of them individually. Do not send a mass email.
If you do not get through, it is going to feel raw, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But it is common not to make it first time. Some firms, particularly the Big 4, deliberately put people through before they are ready, so that they are better prepared the second time around.
Get formal and informal feedback from your Mentor and Sponsoring Partner on what was actually weak in your Business Case and Personal Case. Keep your head up and behave with dignity, because you want the door open for next year. And resist the urge to immediately start planning your next assault on partnership. Your emotions have been on a rollercoaster for months, possibly years, and this is not the moment to make an irreversible decision about your career.
That’s all for this episode, and that is the end of our series on the 12 key indicators. Your action for this week: write the one sentence that sums up why your partnership should make you up to partner. Just the one sentence. If you cannot write it yet, you now know exactly what you are working on.
If you have enjoyed this series please leave us a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or give us a comment on Substack. It helps us reach more people who need this.
And if you have been recognising yourself in these episodes, the Partnership Readiness Assessment is where to go next. It is free, it takes 10 to 15 minutes, and it gives you a personalised report showing where you sit across all 12 key indicators, so you know which one to work on first. The link is in the show notes.
Inside our Progress to Partner Academy, the resources are curated by key indicator. If the Partnership Admissions Process is what is in front of you, start with our on-demand course How to Create a Cast-Iron Business Case for Partner, which takes you through building your Business Plan using the STAGe model and then how to adapt it and pitch it to your partners.
Use code PODCAST10 for 10% off annual membership: https://www.howtomakepartner.com/get-progress-to-partner/
Thank you for listening to this series!
I’m Heather Townsend, author of Poised for Partnership and co-author of How to Make Partner & Still Have a Life. I’m the leading global expert in what it takes to move from senior fee earner to partner – and when you get there, stay there. Here are 5 ways to work with me.
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