Only 29% of professionals on the partnership track have been working on their Business Case for the last one to three years with the backing of key stakeholders.
Which means most people arrive at the most important commercial conversation of their career with far less runway than they think they have.
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.
This episode of the How to Make Partner podcast covers the eleventh of the 12 key indicators of partnership readiness: Business Case. This is the commercial half of the argument for making you up, and it is not something you put together over a weekend. It covers what your partners are actually buying, why growth is not the same thing as winning more work, and the evidence gap that sinks strong candidates.
In this episode you will learn:
- The two persuasive questions your Business Case has to answer that no spreadsheet answers for you
- The other levers, apart from winning more revenue, that you can pull to make your business case more attractive to your partners
- How to look at your practice process by process to find the opportunities you are currently missing
- How to build a one-page Talk Sheet, and why it is the most useful thing you will do for your Business Case
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 Business Case is where you need to focus, 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
You’ll also find resources to help you build your Business Case, including:
- You’ll also find resources to help you build your Business Case, including:
- Guide to creating a cast-iron business case
- Deck to Pitch your Business Case for Partner
- Putting Pen to Paper to start your business case
- How to Successfully Pitch your Business Case
- Identifying the Right Business Case for You and Your Partners
These resources will help you:
- Move from having a collection of clients to growing a practice your firm cannot afford to lose
- Think commercially about profit, not just revenue
- Build the evidence base your partners need before they will back you
- Get your Business Case simple enough that other partners can sell it for you
- Walk into your Partner Panel Interview with a case you can pitch in minutes
If Business Case is where you need to focus, this section of Progress to Partner will help you build the commercial argument that makes saying yes to you the obvious decision.
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
Also mentioned
Susan Heaton-Wright, founder of Superstar Communicator, on Ding Dong words (covered in episode 9)
You can also listen to this episode on Substack and on Apple Podcasts
Hello, and welcome!
Jem was a director of sales for a large US consultancy firm, with a track record of signing up clients worth hundreds of millions of dollars. He asked me to help with his pitch for partnership.
The question I put to him was this. Why should your firm make you up to partner? Because without partner on his business card, he was already winning massive pieces of client business for them.
He did not have an answer. Not straight away.
So we worked out why the firm would actually benefit from having him in the partnership, and why they should make him up now rather than in two years’ time. The chairman later told him it was the best pitch they had ever seen for partnership.
Nothing about his numbers changed. What changed was how Jem saw the situation – and his business case – from his partners’ perspective.
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 eleven in our series on the 12 key indicators of partnership readiness. Today we are talking about your Business Case.
New episodes are released weekly, so press subscribe so you never miss one.
Right. Let’s start with what your Business Case actually is, because a lot of people get this badly wrong.
Last time we covered Member of the Club, the emotional part of whether your partners see you as partner material. Your Business Case is a commercial decision. How much more money will this firm make, in the medium to long term, as a result of having you as an owner rather than an employee?
Think of it as a Business Plan for the practice you are going to grow over the next three years. With one important difference. A normal Business Plan sets out what will happen. Your Business Case also has to be persuasive. It has to answer two questions that don’t appear in a business plan document.
Why should I be the one to implement this Business Case?
And why make me up to partner to implement it this time around?
Now here is where I need to be blunt. Many lawyers, accountants and consultants think their Business Case is something they put together over the weekend before they pitch it. No. Your Business Case is where you grow a practice inside your firm, and that takes years.
Only 29% of the professionals who have completed our Partnership Readiness Assessment have been working on their Business Case for the last one to three years and have the backing of key stakeholders. Twenty nine percent. Which means seven in ten people on Partner Track will arrive at that conversation without being prepared as they need to be. And probably needing to wait longer to make it to partner.
Any well-organised partnership is identifying where there is a Business Case for a new partner years in advance. A partner is retiring. A part of the firm is growing. There is a market opportunity that needs someone with partner on their business card to go after it. Your partners already know roughly where the next partner slot is. They may not verbally state this outloud that there is a partner business case! Your job is to be the obvious person to implement the business case and the business plan underpinning it.
So let’s talk about the single biggest mistake I see in first drafts of a Business Case.
People assume that growth only comes from winning more work.
Let me show you why that is expensive thinking. Say you billed £200,000 last year at a gross profit margin of 30%. That is £60,000 of gross profit. Now increase that margin by five points, to 35%. Perhaps a price increase, perhaps getting more of the work done by cheaper, more junior people. Your profit goes to £70,000, and you have not won a single new client.
Now streamline how you work so you can bill 5% more with the same amount of people. £210,000 rather than £200,000, at that same 35% margin. Your profit is now £73,500. So you have gone from £60,000 to £73,500. A 22.5% increase, and almost none of it came from winning new work.
Your role is not to grow a practice. It is to grow a profitable and sustainable practice that supports the firm’s strategy. A Business Case that is just “I will win more work” tells your partners you are not thinking commercially enough. Perhaps even that you are not ready for partnership?
So stop looking at your practice as one big lump, and look at it process by process. There are five and a half of them. Creating leads. Converting them. Delivering the work to clients. Delivering it through your people. Getting paid for it. And cultivating your existing clients for more. Go through each one and ask where it is leaking, and what could be better, simpler or cheaper.
Which brings me to Jessica. She was stepping into the role of a retiring partner, and before that transition she spent a long time streamlining how she ran her projects, so she could handle more work at a higher margin than the retiring partner had.
So her Business Case did something unusual. In year one, she held revenue flat and grew profitability instead. Only in years two and three did she go hard at revenue growth, scaling from a foundation she had already made solid. That was one of the reasons she made partner.
Now let’s talk about evidence, because this is where good candidates lose the room.
Far too many Business Cases read like this. I am a good person. I have done some good work. My clients like me. And I have lots of great intentions about what I want to do, if you would just give me a chance and make me up to partner.
Your partners are doing due diligence on an investment. They want evidence that your Business Case will make them money, and evidence that you are the right person to deliver it.
Take Jay. After talking to some of the equity partners in his firm, he discovered he did not need a junior partner-sized client portfolio to get recommended for partner. What he did need was several strong Referral Networks. But having those networks was not enough on its own. He had to prove they were already feeding him, and the rest of the firm, new profitable client business. In his business case he was able to show that he could point to the right type of work the firm wanted coming through his network.
Two more things that weaken a Business Case.
Hedging. In your day job you manage expectations and flag risk, so you write in carefully chosen words. Such as: Hopefully. Possibly. I hope. This doesn’t inspire confidence. You need to be assertive but not arrogant in your business case. What will you achieve and how will you achieve it?
And too much detail. When you are trying to prove your worthiness it is tempting to include every scrap of evidence you have, and it has the opposite effect. It dilutes the strong evidence. Your partners have the attention span of a gnat, and that is on a good day. Your Business Case needs to be simple enough that an intelligent fourteen-year-old could explain how you plan to grow your practice. And the simpler it is, the easier it is for another partner to sell it for you in a room you are not sitting in.
One more thing.
If you take one practical idea from this episode, make it this. Build yourself a Talk Sheet.
A Talk Sheet is a single side of A4 giving the high-level overview of your Business Case. Four or five visuals and a small amount of text. That is it. In our Progress To Partner Academy is a template to help you build your Talk Sheet
It does three jobs. It gives you something to talk partners through when you are testing your Business Case with them. It works as a handout in your Partner Panel Interview. And the discipline of getting it onto one page forces you to work out what actually matters.
If you cannot get your Business Case onto one page, it is not yet clear enough to pitch.
That’s all for this episode. Your action for this week: write down the premise of your Business Case in a single sentence. Is a partner retiring? Is your part of the firm growing? Is there a market opportunity that needs a partner to go after it? If you cannot name the premise, that is your starting point, not the financial modelling.
If you have enjoyed this episode 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. Remember to hit subscribe so you don’t miss next week’s episode, which is the last in this series, where we will be covering the twelfth key indicator: the Partnership Admissions Process.
If you want to understand how you score on Business Case, and where you sit across all 12 key indicators, the Partnership Readiness Assessment is the place to begin. It takes 10 to 15 minutes and gives you a personalised report. The link is in the show notes.
Inside our Progress to Partner Academy, the resources are curated by key indicator. If Business Case is where you need to focus, you will want our on-demand course How to Create a Cast-Iron Business Case for Partner. It takes you step by step through building a Business Plan for your practice using the STAGe model, and then how to adapt it and pitch it as a Business Case for partner.
Use code PODCAST10 for 10% off annual membership: https://www.howtomakepartner.com/get-progress-to-partner/
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.
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