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[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the SALES GAME CHANGERS Webinar sponsored by the Institute for Excellence in Sales and hosted by Fred Diamond on October 21, 2020. It featured Business Development leader at the Cooley Law Firm Carl Grant.]
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EPISODE 281: Law Firm Business Development Star Carl Grant Details His Strategies for Success for Growing Impactful Relationships Right Now
CARL’S ‘ TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “Do good to yourself and do good to others and when I say do good to yourself, take care of yourself. I don’t look as old as I perhaps am because I take care of myself. Feed yourself well, exercise, have healthy habits and then you’ve got to have healthy relationships. Go out and do good things for others and good things will happen to you.”
Fred Diamond: Carl, it’s great to see you. I tell people that you are one of the top business development guys that I’ve ever come across, you get a lot of people who believe that as well. We’re going to be talking about some things that you’re doing in the current environment to continue building your networks, building your relationships and growing. First of all, it’s great to see you. You’re now down in Austin, Texas, I’m still here in Northern Virginia. How are things going in Austin, Texas?
Carl Grant: Things are going great in Austin, Texas. Traffic is back up to 80% of where it was pre-COVID and people are getting back out, at least they are here in the suburbs. You go to the gym and other than a few masks, you wouldn’t even know there was a pandemic going on.
Fred Diamond: Be well and stay safe anyway. Carl is a fountainhead of knowledge on relationship building and business development and we’re going to get deep into some of the things that he’s doing today and also recommending for his teams. Carl, let’s get right to it. How are things going for the business? And again, just tell a little bit about what you do. I mentioned Cooley but tell people what Cooley is, tell people what you do specifically and then tell people how the pandemic has affected your efforts.
Carl Grant: Cooley is a global law firm, it was just a west coast law firm when I joined. Since then we’ve added many offices around the world and around the country and we’ve added a billion dollars’ worth of revenue to the company. I lead the business development team that helps to bring in that revenue, it’s a 13-person team, we’re growing to 16 and we’re starting to move towards more of an industry-focused than a geography-focused, that’s a new thing. We’re doing it gradually over time as people move on, rather than replace geographic positions we’re placing those with industry-focused positions and they may be in specific geographies, but does it even matter where we are today? I’m dealing with people in the UK, in the Middle East, all over the place. I literally go from country to country by Zoom and it really doesn’t matter where I am.
Fred Diamond: That’s true, I was on two conference calls today with people in the UK and with people all over the country. Actually, they weren’t conference calls, they were Zoom calls. Explain business development as well, you said you’re leading a business development team, Cooley is a law firm so just to give us a little bit of context, what exactly does business development mean? You’ve been doing it for 20 somewhat years, you mentioned, you now lead a team of 13 people but what is it? What do you get judged on? Then we’ll go from there.
Carl Grant: Fred, it’s nuanced. As we talked about back when we spoke before, I’m essentially doing sales but it’s different in professional services. I’ve actually – partly by your inspiration, Fred – started a podcast about business development, it’s called Rainmakers. I think but there’s people out there who also have other ways of doing business development, attracting customers without selling. That’s the key right there and I find it fascinating to interview some of these individuals who are top in their game, I have them referred into me by other guests or other people who are listening to the podcast as I’m sure you do and I get to know these people. This is one way I’m expanding my network is I’m getting to know these individuals and I’m learning about how they do what they do. It’s fascinating, not everybody is wired to go out to a networking event and exchange business cards like we used to or go into a virtual event and befriend people. Other people have different approaches and if you’re interested in hearing some of those approaches, I encourage you to listen there as well.
Fred Diamond: We’ll put a link into your podcast in the show notes. Let’s talk about your priorities right now, it’s October 21st, we’re in Q4 and you mentioned that you’re on the phone with people all over the world so what are your priorities? Tell us who you try to spend time with as a world-class business development expert and tell us right now, October-ish, who are you trying to meet with? How are you trying to meet with them? What does your daily roster of important things to get done look like?
Carl Grant: If you go through Cooley’s client base, we represent all of the big tech companies out there but all those big tech companies started out as startups. I want to meet those companies while they’re on their way to becoming the Facebooks of the world, I want to meet them when they’re nascent, when they’re perhaps pursuing a series A round. Now that I’m able to move around from geography to geography with quite a bit of ease using technology if we’re not doing that many physical meetings, I’m really focused personally on more of the middle of the country. I have a team that is very capable on the east coast and a team that is very capable on the west coast and our only guy in the middle of the country was a Colorado business development person. He moved on so I’m pretty much covering everything that’s not on one of those coasts so a lot in Chicago, a lot in Austin and then some of the other secondary markets.
Fred Diamond: How do you find your targets? Austin of course has a very rich technology, Northern Virginia, Boston, Atlanta, there are so many places now where there are emerging technology companies. How do you find your prospect list? I’m just curious how you figure out who you want to be talking to.
Carl Grant: Fred, to be honest with you, I have almost 15,000 LinkedIn connections at this point, I could literally never meet another person and probably still do my job just by staying in contact with people I already know. That’s the challenge, how do you keep in contact with 15,000 people? It’s hard so I try to touch each of them once a year. Either wish them a happy birthday or congratulate them on a new position or like a post that they’ve put up. In some way, I interact with every one of those individuals in my LinkedIn each year and then in terms of meeting new people, I found it almost overwhelming. When things shut down and people stopped going out, it took us about a week to figure out what we were going to do but I already had a running head start because I had been working from home 2 days a week. I find that my schedule works best when I take Mondays and Fridays as follow-up days, it’s primarily email, some calls, some Zooms but mainly emails. Then I take the Tuesdays through Thursdays and do in-person meetings. Well, it’s not in-person now, it’s via Zoom now although some in-person. I’m heading to Dallas this evening and we have a whole schedule of in-person meetings starting tonight over dinner all through tomorrow. People are starting to get back out again, as a matter of fact, people shake my hand, I’ve had people hug me. I think we actually want human interaction and I think we can only stay locked up so long.
Fred Diamond: Questions are coming in, a question here comes from Eugene and Eugene is in Reston, Virginia. Gene, good to see you again, buddy. He wants to know, “Carl mentioned LinkedIn. How does he optimize LinkedIn with 15,000 contacts?” Let’s just talk about LinkedIn for a little bit, you mentioned 15,000 contacts, you post things, I know I see that as well. Tell us a little bit about how you have optimized LinkedIn as a business development channel.
Carl Grant: I get a lot of information sent to me, I get hundreds of emails every day and a lot of it has really good information about the venture industry, about deals getting done, just about trends and business things. When I have a sense that something is of interest to my contacts – which is primarily made up of CEOs and investors and then the rest of the ecosystem that services those individuals – if I read something that I think is going to be of value to my network, I just post it. Sometimes I’ve read it, sometimes I’ve read the headline but I know that if I have the time to read the whole article, that’s an interesting article to me. I get a lot of good feedback on the things that I post, people tell me that I’m their best news source for things in this industry so that’s primarily what I do. I try to answer all the messages I get, I’ve set it up so somebody has to have my email address to invite me to connect because when they do, it’s like a snowball. Once you have so many contacts you start getting random people coming at you and I don’t like being connected to a bunch of random people even though it sounds like it’s probably random at 15,000. I’m trying to keep it as a quality network that I want to interact with each year, not some random person that I never met or never had a reason to meet.
Fred Diamond: We have another question here that’s coming in, a question from Louise in New York City. Louise wants to know, “What’s a win? Is it getting a new client or is it meeting a great referral source?” That’s an interesting question. You mentioned you like to meet the Facebooks of the world when they’re startup, a couple guys in a garage or wherever they might be, people still develop things in garages, I guess. For you, does the firm look at you as being successful when that startup is now going for its A round or something or something they need, some documents created? Do firms use one law firm? Is that how it works? Give us a little bit of context, you mentioned you’re in sales, what is the sale and what does that look like?
Carl Grant: While the goal is to bring in the new clients, I don’t focus on that. If I were meeting with you, if you were the founder of a company what I’d be doing, Fred is I’d be finding out about you and about your needs and your challenges and how I can help you. It’s not about what they can do for me so I think that’s a key differentiator especially during this pandemic when people are trying to figure out how to do what they need to do and when people are hurting for business call-up and try to harangue you for referrals or business, that’s not what people want to hear. I’m reaching out and seeing what I can do to help you. If I’m introducing you to investments or if I’m introducing a potential employee to a company – and usually these employees are C-suite employees that have the ability to hire outside counsel – usually there’s something to do there. If not right away, it follows later on and if they’re not a fit to hire our firm because of whatever political forces are against us there, that person still feels good about you and they want to reciprocate. It’s human nature to want to reciprocate when somebody does something good for you. One of my podcast guests said, “Think of your life as a bank account, you can either make deposits or withdrawals.” So I like to keep deposits [laughs] and do very few withdrawal. If I need to make a withdrawal then I do but my deposits are 10 to 1 on the withdrawals.
Fred Diamond: We have people listening around the globe, Carl, you and I got to know each other in the DC area, we both lived and worked in Reston. You’ve been doing this for 20 years, you’d be on the Mount Rushmore of business development, if you will, if there were such a thing. What do you think it was about you? What are some of the traits that you have that has led you to being so successful in business development in the space that you’re dealing with? I’m asking the question not to build your ego or anything but I’m asking the question for people to think about that.
Carl Grant: [Laughs] there’s a bible verse that says a man is tested by the praise he receives. I listen to that and it’s really nice that you said that but I’m not going to believe that, it’s good that you believe that but I’m not going to believe that because I don’t want to be full of myself. You and I have talked in the past and you know, Fred, you’ve been to the prayer breakfast. Early on when I was getting my MBA – I might have said this on your last podcast – I was taking classes like power persuasion and ethics to figure out what my approach to business was going to be and halfway through getting my MBA, I became a Christian. I was an atheist previously and I realized that I had a world view that I now turned away from so this newfound faith, I had to figure out, “How do I incorporate this into this business journey that I’m about to take?” We all know the bible verse, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”, I think if you just take some of these verses and put them into practice they actually work so if you do unto others as you would have them do unto you, eventually it’s done unto you. If you just simply follow that advice, also other biblical idea is you reap what you sow. If you go and do a bunch of nasty things to people, nasty things are going to happen back to you, try not to do that. I’m not perfect, we’re all a work in progress but I try the best I can.
Fred Diamond: We have a couple more questions coming in and we’re going to get specific about things you’re doing today. We’re still technically in the shutdown world at some level, a lot of the corporate members of the IES have told their people, “You can’t go into hotels, you can’t go to networking events where there’s more than a certain number of people” so we’re still in that space. We’re going to get deep into some of the things you recommend people do in this virtual world to build their network but talk about some of your habits. You mentioned on LinkedIn you send a lot of emails with articles, if you don’t mind, give us your top two or three habits that you do to help maintain your high level of performance. I appreciate you not accepting my praise but Cooley is one of the top three or four firms in this space, you’ve been a big part in growing it and getting the reputation for the firm to attract some of the world-class tech companies with their whole process. Tell us two or three of your habits that have led to your continued success.
Carl Grant: Fred, I’m trying to pace myself. If I wasn’t disciplined about what I did, I literally could be on Zoom calls or meetings 24/7. I have the job that never ends so I shut my work email completely off on the weekends, I don’t look at it. In order to get back into the frantic pace that I operate in Monday through Friday, I need to get decompressed, I need to work on other things so I have interests outside of my work. This is not my life, if we were hanging out on the weekend you might not even know what I did so that’s important, I take vacations and when I take a vacation I shut it off. It helps me to be better when I’m on and when I’m on, I try to prioritize meetings. When you do the kind of stuff that I do, there’s a lot of people that want to meet with you and I really try to grade the individuals that I’m meeting with so I don’t waste a lot of the time that my firm is paying me to be working for them.
If there’s a near term revenue opportunity for Cooley, I prioritize that over a nice-to-have meeting with a venture capitalist. The VC meetings are important but they can wait and if it’s a service provider that just wants to get together, I’m booking meetings in December right now. I’m not trying to insult anyone but as a revenue generator, I need to prioritize the revenue. I grade those meetings, I have color-coding. I’ve got my assistant, that’s another thing, having a scheduling assistant is key. Not everybody can afford it and I know there’s outsource models, having somebody that can just keep your schedule in order and scheduling all those meetings, all the emails that go back and forth, it’s very hard. I try to take care of those people that take good care of me, Sabrina Morales, she’s fabulous, she was my assistant for many years. She’s promoted as a manager now and she doesn’t support me anymore but I have a new assistant, Candice Johnson and she’s a Sabrina in the making. I appreciate all she does for me and Candice is the key to my calendar and the key to my sanity just keeping everything straight. I don’t know if that fully answers your question.
The other thing I try to do is set boundaries, you have to set boundaries because people say, “I want to meet you for an hour.” An hour meeting doesn’t really work on my schedule, I can spend a half hour or 15 minutes with you, otherwise this meeting might not happen. You’re only in charge of your own calendar, you can’t let other people control your calendar so in order to be effective and touch as many people as possible within a nice way, you’ve got to pace yourself.
Fred Diamond: Let’s get deep on that because we have a couple more questions coming in about that. We’re still shut down at some level, how do you balance your schedule? How do you know that you’re meeting with the right people? Again, you’ve been doing this for 20 years so you probably have gotten to the point now where you can just meet with CEOs and you could push off the virtual VCs and the service providers off to December because they’ll…
Carl Grant: …The VCs don’t wait till December [laughs]. VCs are pretty high on the food chain, don’t get me wrong, they’re kind of top of the food chain so I make time for them but if it’s just a nice, “Let’s get together and hear what you’re seeing in the market” that might be able to wait a few weeks whereas if there’s a CEO who’s closing around a financing right now and wants to talk, I’ve got to be on that.
I just got introduced to a guy who raised $25 million dollars and he wants to meet, he gave me some dates so I’m going to go with his dates, and if there’s somebody that I don’t need to meet with, they can be moved out. It’s just prioritizing.
Fred Diamond: Have you gotten rigorous about that over the years? You mentioned you have an assistant but is that something that you’ve learned or did you know that from the beginning 20 years ago? Just as you built the reputation and you grew.
Carl Grant: Fred, I think we talked about this last time. When I started out doing this I was earning myself out running ragged. All the things I’m telling you I do now, I didn’t do then. I would go to an evening event, be there until 9 o’clock at night, I’d go to my office and stay there past midnight doing emails and then I’d be at a 7:30 morning breakfast meeting the next morning and that was day after day. Over time what I started to do was say, “Alright, no more evening events up against morning events.” That gave me some quality of life, I started to take those vacations and decompress, I started to play around with when my follow up time was, is it in the afternoon, the morning? Now I do two full days, Fred, because if you don’t follow up, all this activity is worthless. If I meet with you and I say, “Fred, I’m going to do this favor for you…” I’ve got lists of things that I promised to do. I was working feverously on a list when we were getting ready for this, it’s a follow up that I’d promise somebody I would do and I try to use every second I have to get caught up with all these things because there’s always more things.
Fred Diamond: We have a question here coming in from Geraldine and Geraldine is also in New York City. Geraldine wants to know, “Who are your most trusted referral partners?” That’s an interesting question, I’m actually reflecting back, you and I first met in a “lead share group” back in 2003-2004 and we would meet once a month Tuesday from 4 to 6. Eventually that group got up to 30 somewhat people, that group is long gone. But just curiously from the referral side, now the firm has grown so much, your reputation has grown so much. Back to the service provider referrals, who do you try to spend as much time as possible with and who have you decided to deal those relationships with?
Carl Grant: Fred, I don’t want to call them out by name.
Fred Diamond: Generically.
Carl Grant: There are certain individuals in like positions at other firms, accounting and insurance, banks, even VCs and some of them I introduced to their jobs, I can think of two business development people I introduced to their positions. They’re pretty good referral sources, that’s how it works because you helped them get their job so some of my best referral sources are people I helped get jobs, to be honest with you. Also, there’s people that I genuinely become friends with. Not everybody is going to fall into that category but if I’m hanging out with you on the weekend, you’re a friend of mine. I can think of a person I met here when I got to Austin, Texas and he had an important influential position here. He took me out to do a meeting on his boat, that was the coolest idea ever, I’m going to copy that. One thing I do is I copy good ideas and that was a good one. I enjoyed so much going out on his boat that I wanted to introduce him to an entrepreneur I know who did really well and we did a triple double day [laughs] I don’t know how you say that. We all took our wives, went out on a boat, went out for dinner and just had a blast. These guys are my friends, we may do business together but it’s beyond and that individual has sent me a ton of referrals since I’ve been here.
Fred Diamond: Let’s talk about that for a second because we talked about that in one of your first Sales Game Changers podcast episodes. Let’s talk about relationship and you just mentioned a couple times you got people jobs. You and I have traded those kinds of things over the years, somebody who’s looking for a marketing position or somebody’s looking for a sales position and I know a lot of people reach out to you. If you think about it, 20 years, a guy or lady who was a COO, she may be on her third or fourth company.
Carl Grant: Are you still doing outsourced marketing?
Fred Diamond: Not really [laughs].
Carl Grant: Because I just got a request for a referral yesterday and I didn’t write it down, I’m talking to you now thinking about what you were doing when we met and I’m like, “Maybe I have a referral for Fred” but I guess I don’t.
Fred Diamond: That’s funny, we’re always looking for sales VPs, that’s who we’re looking for these days to build relationships with. But let’s talk about the concept of relationship from the BD perspective. If you’re in sales, we talk about that a lot, relationships but at the same time salespeople have quotas and a salesperson is not going to keep their job if they don’t reach their quota on a continual basis so their viewpoint on relationships, even though they might be valuable over time, a lot of times it’s focused on, “What do I need now? How do I need to grow my accounts?” etcetera. Give us some examples of value that you see in relationships. You mentioned found people jobs, it might not always be about getting the person a gig at Cooley to help run their funding rounds or to get them to the IPO or a sale, an acquisition, whatever it might be. What are some things that you have found to be the most valuable relationship points along the way that we could throw out here to the people listening to the podcast and watching today’s webinar?
Carl Grant: No matter what you’re selling, people want to buy from people they like. You can call somebody up and sell them software and it’s a transaction, I’m relation, not transactional. That’s the kind of work that comes into a firm like Cooley’s, it’s relational work. I get to know somebody who’s a serial entrepreneur and is going to do five companies over the span of his life, I want to work with those companies so you’ve got to look at the person that you want to cultivate the relationship with and say, “What can I do for that person? How can I be of value to that person?” A CEO of a merging company, he or she is going to have to raise money somewhere along the way, he or she is going to have to hire a CFO somewhere along the way, there’s a lot of things that person is going to need, position yourself. I know what these things are now because I’ve been doing this a long time, I’m your guy when you need this, when you need outsource developers, when you need the whole myriad of things. I become their trusted adviser on those things. You need a venture capitalist, they’re going to do deals, they want deal flow, they also are going to raise funds too so they need limited partners. Knowing that food chain of value creation is helpful so if you operate in a particular space like I do and you spend your time while you can building up those relationships, putting those favors out into the marketplace, then when a pandemic hits you’re in a good spot. Here I am, I’m shut in my house just like everybody else. If you’re a CEO who has not been out networking and building up relationships with investors, you need to capitalize your company and you’re shut in your house, what are you going to do now? I tell you what a lot of them do, they reached out to me, it became overwhelming because when you know people that individuals need to know, you get inundated so that’s what happened.
I met CEOs via Zoom in a lot of different meetings and ways all over the country and I remember one guy – I won’t mention his name – he had quit his good paying job to do a startup and he hadn’t built it yet, he didn’t have any customers and he was just out of work and in no man’s land. I was able to introduce him to developers who could develop mostly for equity, I just made a lot of connections for him. Is he still going to make it? I don’t know, it’s a tough spot that he was in but he’s better off today now that he’s met me and I’ve made some of those connections for him.
Fred Diamond: Carl, we have a question here that comes in from Nelson and Nelson is in Palm Beach, Florida. Nelson, good to see you again. Nelson wants to know, “How can I develop new relationships right now?” Again, Carl, you’ve established yourself, you’ve been doing this for 20 years, you’ve been known as The Cooley Guy for a long time, you’ve developed a reputation. Let’s say for people who don’t have these relationships yet, again we’re working from our homes and things are opening up but not really, people are still working from their homes. Everybody here who I see, we have a couple dozen people who are watching today’s webinar, I’m pretty sure that everybody is at their home because I know a lot of their companies haven’t let people back into the buildings yet. You’ve got a lot of people coming to you because of your reputation. Today it’s October 21st, people are going to be listening to this and I’m sure we’re going to be at some level of the pandemic. What’s your advice for outreach, for reaching out to new people to be in your relationship for people who are in the business development profession?
Carl Grant: There have been endless online events and I get invited to so many of these things every day but if you’re not getting those invitations, you’ve got to go out and find them. I don’t know what business you’re in, Nelson, but…
Fred Diamond: He’s in software sales.
Carl Grant: There have got to be some associations around your customer base or your industry and you start to go out to these events and they have a little chat room right there. If it’s a camera on event, turn your camera on, be seen and I try to figure out how to make people want to get to know me. If I introduce myself in the chat room and I take my LinkedIn profile and I put it with my post, I will say, “If I could do this, this or this for you, reach out to me.” I give them a reason to want to come to me, I’m not going to go chasing them, I just put the bait out there and let them come to me. Now, I have to be careful because sometimes I get overwhelmed. If I hold myself out as the guy who knows money sources and you need to raise money, all of a sudden I’m absolutely inundated. The reason the VCs take these referrals from me is because for every hundred companies that come through my funnel, only a few make it out. I try to be as nice as I can to the 98 who don’t make it through because they might come back with something good but only a few make it through and those few that make it through often times get rejected. It’s a tough business.
Fred Diamond: Just curiously, what’s something positive that’s come out of this? Again, you moved, you said things are starting up again, you’re getting a lot of people reaching out to you. What’s been the biggest positive result or surprise that has come out of the last 6-7 months for you specifically as a BD professional?
Carl Grant: I could pick up and move across the country and it didn’t really matter. It might have been a big deal if all of a sudden we were in the office and then I wasn’t around the office as much. I’ll still go back, I’ve got an office in Washington DC. I will go to my office occasionally but my job isn’t in the office so for somebody who wanted to move, a lot of people have just done that. In fact, taxes, I can’t believe how many people just moved here from California and New York. I was quizzing the women at the DMV when I went to get my driver’s license and they said everybody is either from California or New York. That was a good positive. Then this podcast I launched, you’re sitting around doing your work, doing your stuff and I might have been planning this podcast for a year and I finally pulled the trigger. Having some extra time at home was a way to do that and there’s some other non-profit related things that had been really good but I don’t want to bore everybody with all the good things that have happened. There are some things that have happened that wouldn’t have happened if we weren’t in a pandemic.
Fred Diamond: How have you changed in the past few months? Again, you moved from Virginia to Texas, I actually lived in Houston for a couple years and considered moving to Austin in the late 90s, it’s a beautiful part of Texas, it’s thriving. How have you changed? Some things that you’ve noticed about yourself as a business development professional that have changed over the last couple of months.
Carl Grant: I realized how adaptable I could be because you would think that somebody doing what I do could just die and lose this job in a situation like this, it was the opposite for me, I thrived, I loved it. I have a broadcast journalism background, Fred, so the idea of being on camera during the day was exciting to me and it’s too much now, that’s another thing I figured out is you can’t do Zoom all day, you can’t check your emails, you can’t even go to the bathroom – at least you shouldn’t, there’ve been some disasters [laughs]. What I have done is if I’m meeting somebody that’s local to me and I haven’t met them before, I’ll go meet them in person. I think I’ve already had this thing which I’m not worried about so I’ll go meet them in person. If they’re not up for a personal meeting I’ll respect that, I’ll do a Zoom meeting with them so I can see them and get to know them a little bit. If I’ve already met you, I don’t need to be on Zoom talking to you. I want to stay in my pajamas and do a cellphone call so I have specified that with my assistant when she sets them up, just like she prioritizes those meetings, this is when I met in person, this is when I Zoom, this is when I do a voice call.
Fred Diamond: Carl, I have one more question for you and then I’m going to ask for your final thought, something to inspire us today. Carl, what would be your recommendations for people who are senior at BD, they’ve been doing it for 5, 10, 15 years, maybe they’re of a certain age and what would be some of your recommendations for people who are junior? Maybe they’re just getting started either in sales or BD. Let’s talk about the seasoned people first, people who have been 10, 15, 20 years, what would you recommend to them right now to get going on with?
Carl Grant: I would say step up your game, learn from others like what I’m doing. I’m pretty senior, I’m way up there and I’m out there talking to other business development professionals and learning what they do so that’s a way to get some more tools in the tool kit. For somebody just starting out in this, Fred, it’s harder because going back to the whole reason for me launching that podcast is when I started out, nobody told me what to do. Literally the guy that hired me at PricewaterhouseCoopers said, “Carl, it’s like I’m leading you into a dark room, I’m not giving you a flashlight and I’m not showing you the way out.”
For some reason that excited me so I had to figure out how to do this. I was making it up as I went along, I realized when I learned who we audited at PricewaterhouseCoopers, the idea of selling somebody an audit seemed like a horrible thing to have to do but I didn’t make it about selling an audit. I made it about, “We represent these companies that could be your customers, we represent these investors, they can be your investors” and I just became the matchmaker. By the way, one day you’re going to need an audit, usually after you raise the money. Remember us and it works, nobody ever got fired by hiring PricewaterhouseCoopers, the same thing with Cooley. It wasn’t the brand name it was when I joined but it is now, we’re the gold standard in law firms. I hope that answers your question a little bit, Fred.
Fred Diamond: Carl Grant, I want to thank you again. We miss you here in Northern Virginia but it really doesn’t matter because everybody’s working out of their homes but I’m sure we’ll be seeing you around when we see your teams. Thank you so much again for all the great insights that you’ve given to tech sales professionals and BD professionals and service providers over the years. Carl, give us one final thought, give us one action item for today. You’ve given us plenty but give us one that people can latch on today October 21st to take their career to the next level.
Carl Grant: Do good to yourself and do good to others and when I say do good to yourself, you’ve got to take care of yourself. I don’t look as old as I perhaps am because I take care of myself, Fred, you’ve got to feed yourself well, you’ve got to exercise, you’ve got to have healthy habits and then you’ve got to have healthy relationships so go out and do good things for others and good things will happen to you.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo