You’re on Partner Track in a small satellite or regional office. The partners who will decide your future sit together at HQ and see each other every day, whilst you’re one of the boxes at the bottom of the screen.
There isn’t a lot of resource in your office, local clients push back on your firm’s rates, and there may only be room for one or two partners in what you do. So how do you make partner from there? That’s what this episode is all about.
Working away from HQ doesn’t stop you making partner, but it does mean you can’t leave your visibility to chance, and it’s your job, not your firm’s, to sort it. Your partners need to know what you bring to the whole firm, and not only to your office, long before your name comes up at the partnership table.
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 . Here are 5 ways to work with me.
In This Episode You Will Learn:
- Which people at HQ to spend your time with, so the right partners know what you do
- How to make your days at HQ count
- How to build a Business Case that doesn’t depend on a partner vacancy opening up in your office
- How to protect your rates and build a team you can rely on
If you find this episode useful, don’t forget to like it and then subscribe so you don’t miss another episode.
What Help Is Out There For You?
For more advice from me about building your internal firm network, read: 6 reasons why you shouldn’t neglect your internal firm network if you want to make partner
If you’re thinking, ‘That’s all very well, but my office only needs one partner in what I do, and they’re not going anywhere’, our Progress To Partner Academy can help you.
I’ve popped a link to our Progress To Partner Academy, which contains our Game Plan – How to Raise Your Profile and the courses How to become known as the Go-to-Expert, and How to Build a Cast-Iron Business Case for Partner.
You can also listen to this episode on Substack and on Apple Podcasts
Hello, and welcome!
You’re on the monthly call for your practice group.
Most of the partners are sitting round the same table at your firm’s HQ. You’re one of the little boxes at the bottom of the screen.
Someone mentions a big national pitch going out next week. You didn’t know it existed. But apparently everyone else seems to have been briefed and part of the pitch. Whilst you are still wondering why you didn’t get to hear about it.
Nobody meant to leave you out. You just weren’t there when the lead came in, or the partners got together around a physical table to plan the pitch.
So how are you ever going to make partner when the people making that decision barely see you?
Today’s episode is about how to make partner when you’re based in a small satellite or regional office, away from your firm’s HQ. It came out of a conversation with a fellow executive coach about a partner development programme we run for an international law firm, and it’s a challenge I hear from people on Partner Track in regional offices all the time.
This is the How to Make Partner podcast with me, Heather Townsend. The author of Poised for Partnership, and co-author of How to Make Partner and Still Have a Life. In this podcast, I will be highlighting some of the great stuff in our Progress To Partner Academy. New episodes are released weekly, so press subscribe so you never miss a new episode.
Right. Let’s talk about making partner from a small office.
When you work in a satellite or regional office, you usually have three challenges that your peers at your firm’s large offices or ‘headquarters” don’t have.
First, you often don’t have a lot of physical resource in the office. Your ‘team’ may literally be based all over the country or perhaps in different countries.
Second, the local market rates may be less than what your firm wants as a charge rate.
Third, the real power brokers of the firm don’t see you on a day-to-day basis.
In a small office there may only be a need for one or two partners in what you do. And for you to be that partner you either need to create a business case about where a decent stream of new business will come from. Or you need a partner to leave or retire. And the difficulty maybe that the local marketplace is such that a stream of new profitable business, such as a new service line or sector specialism isn’t easy to create.
If you don’t look carefully at the dynamics of your firm and how your office works, you risk getting stuck as a ‘nearly partner’. The senior employee who is not a partner but who heads up your area of team in the office. But whilst you are highly regarded and the firm says you are needed, the partner conversation never seems to come around.
I know what you’re thinking. “But my clients are here. My market is here. That’s why the firm has an office here.” That feels completely logical. The difficulty is that if your partners see you as the person who looks after the local clients, you’re reliant on the size and strength of the local market to create your business case. Whereas if you are someone which the whole firm knows about, rates highly AND wants to act for their clients your business case is no longer as susceptible to the volatility of the local market place.
When you are based in a regional office your challenges are to build your visibility with the people who matter in your practice group or service line, plus the stakeholders, build a Business Case, and maintain good enough rates whilst securing the resource you need on your projects. Let’s take each in turn.
Let’s start with visibility.
Now here is where I need to be blunt. It can be really easy to get into the us vs the big office grips that are par for the course for a small regional office. Of course they often nick the best people, and often have nicer offices and resources. But you need to act, think and feel like a partner. That means acting like a ‘one firm’ citizen and remembering to not indulge in the local bug bears and moans at the bigger offices.
Your biggest challenge is you are not going to be regularly bumping into the heavy hitters in your firm in the corridor. You may find that they are in a different office or possibly even a different country or time zone. That means you need to be deliberate about who you get to know. As you can’t rely on corridor conversations, map out four groups of people at HQ.
The Key Client Relationship Partners – your firm may have a different name for these people – who look after the firm’s biggest accounts. Winning a small slice of work on one of those accounts can be worth far more than chasing a string of small local deals.
The national sector and practice group leaders, who often influence significant numbers of other partners AND maybe your route to generating high quality work via your firm’s internal network.
The key people in the practice management departments in your firm, such as the Learning and development manager who is responsible for partner development (future partners or new partners), the business development manager responsible for your sector, office or service line.
And your peers at HQ: the senior managers, directors and newly made-up partners who are building their own client portfolios right now. They’ll be your main source of work from the internal firm market place for the next five to ten years.
Next, make your trips to HQ count. If you make it work practically, spend a day or two a month there. This was the exact advice I gave to a private coaching client who is up for making director in his big 4 firm in the next few months. Your aim when you are in the HQ is not to do the client work you could have done from your own office. But to fill up your diary with in person meetings with the movers and groovers that you have identified. For example, who can you have a coffee, lunch or a drink after work with? Which team meetings are you normally the ‘box’ on the screen that you can now do in person?
In Poised for Partnership I talk about the smaller things that help too, such as making friends with a partner’s PA so you know when’s a good time to catch them. (I’ve put a link to the book in the shownotes.)
Now, you are going to need a business case for partnership. When you are in a regional office there are not going to be many partners retiring or moving on. So the likelihood is that you will need to create a business case by growing your own practice within a practice.
For example, a delegate on a now to make partner programme has done just that. Their skill set was M&A and financing. However they noticed an untapped source of work. Which their client base needed but no one in the firm was currently servicing well. But succeeding in a regional office isn’t just about being a very niche specialist. Although that can work. You may find you need to be a generalist AND a specialist. For example you may be the firm’s ‘person in your marketplace’ and more of a generalist. I once had a delegate on our How To Make Partner programme that was in a small regional office but based out of New York City. Whilst they had built a few specialisms as a litigator, they ended up being their firm’s first port of call for any litigation work in New York City.
By the way, if you struggle with building a Business Case when your office only has room for one or two partners, there is an on-demand course inside our Progress to Partner Academy called How to Create a Cast-Iron Business Case for Partner. I’ll come back to it at the end.
Finally, rates and resource.
The trap in a regional office is giving in to local price pressure, and taking on low-rate work just to keep your billable hours up. It damages your margins, and it gets you known as someone whose work doesn’t make the firm much money. Is that the reputation you want when your name comes up at the partnership table?
Many of the big international firms we are working with are very clear with their international offices. They want the regional offices to be able to maintain the firm’s chargeout rates by generating work from the international network.
So treat the firm’s existing big clients as your main market. They’re already used to paying the firm’s full rates, and your expertise can sit alongside what the firm already does for them.
The key is to be choosy with local clients. You may find that you have a big enough local market place to not need to find clients outside of these. However, when it comes to local clients only take them on if they fit the office’s strategy in the local market place, the firm’s strategy for having an office in your location AND support your business case for partner. Pass the lower-margin, commodity work to your juniors, or decline it.
When you do pitch locally, try not to compete on price with the local boutiques and competing firms. This isn’t easy as many local market places are incestious. Where everyone knows everyone else and the local market can be very price sensitive. A good way to differentiate you and your firm in the local marketplace is to Pitch the depth of a national firm, delivered locally. If a client only wants a cheap local provider, they’re probably not the right client for you. In the early days of building up your own client portfolio it can be tough to say no to any potential new client. But saying yes to these types of clients keeps you busy without helping your Business Case.
And then resource. The complaint I hear most is, “The partners have nicked the best people, so how am I meant to service my work?” Did the partners start with the best team? No, they developed their team. You will probably need to build up relationships with potential resource from other offices. That’s the nature of working from a regional or satellite office. That means thinking of your team as more than the people who sit in your office. How can you build your team across the firm so you always have people who want to work on your jobs, instructions and matters?
Your partners at HQ are never going to bump into you in the corridor. So it’s down to you to make sure they know what you do for the whole firm, and not only for your office, long before your name comes up for partner.
Now, if you’re thinking, “That’s all very well, but my office only needs one partner in what I do, and they’re not going anywhere”, that’s exactly what our How to Create a Cast-Iron Business Case for Partner is designed for. It takes you step by step through creating a Business Plan using the STAGe model, then adapting it and pitching it as a Business Case for partner.
I’ve popped a link to our Progress To Partner Academy, which contains our Game Plan – How to Raise Your Profile and the course How to become known as the Go-to-Expert, directly in the show notes for this episode. Also in the show notes, you’ll find links to my books, Poised for Partnership and How to Make Partner and Still Have a Life, so you can easily find them on Amazon. And as a thank you for listening, there’s also a link for a 10% discount on annual membership for our Progress To Partner Academy using the code PODCAST10.
That’s all for this episode of the How to Make Partner podcast. What’s your action for this week? Look at the list of your firm’s biggest clients, pick one where what you do would be useful, and message the Key Client Relationship Partner for that client asking when you could next catch them, whether that’s a call or a coffee on your next day at HQ.
If you have enjoyed this episode please leave us a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or give us a comment on Substack. This helps us get the word out to others who may need this advice too. Remember to hit subscribe so you don’t miss next week’s episode. Thanks for listening!
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.
What help is out there for you
If you’re thinking, ‘This all makes sense, but I don’t have the time or the data to work any of this out properly,’ our Progress To Partner Academy can help you.
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.
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.
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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
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