covering clients is a learned skill. It is not an innate skill. And I remember when I was in your shoes, I was worried when I started at Goldman Sachs that when I looked at the people who are really good at covering clients and really good at bringing in clients, the so-called rainmakers, I was worried that maybe they were just born that way.

Maybe they were just natural-born salesmen and saleswomen. And what I found was that wasn't the case.

I have found over the years and early on, actually, that these are skills that you can learn if you're willing to learn them. And what you should do is you should find somebody at the firm in which you work, whether it's a consulting firm, a law firm, an investment bank, accounting firm, whatever it is, find somebody who's really good at bringing in business, at covering clients, and learn as much as you can from that person.

Be an open book, put your ego aside, and learn as much as you can.

I was fortunate in that I found somebody like that at Goldman Sachs, and for the first two years, I did everything I could to observe this person, to be with him.

I worked on every transaction I could with him. I carried his bags around, I made Xeroxes for him.

I did whatever I could to help him. And I said, "I just really want to learn from you." And I would watch him sometimes in meetings, and he would do things that I thought were wrong or that didn't make sense to me.

But I put my ego aside. I said, "There's got to be a reason why he's doing this." And as time went on, I realized there was in every case.

And I started using the same the same strategies with prospective clients and clients, and they worked.

And so, to this day, a good portion of what I do with clients.

A good portion of the skills, a good portion of the strategies that I use with clients, came from this man. And the rest is, you know, things that I added on of my own over the years.

So, find somebody who's really good. Flatter the person. Say that to them, "Look, you're really good.

I want to learn from you. Is it okay if I just sit in on meetings with you? Is it okay if I work with you on some transactions?

I'll do anything. I'll make coffee for you or get lunch or Xerox or whatever it takes." And then be an open book.

Put your ego aside. Approach it from the perspective of a clean slate and learn, because you can learn these skills. They are not innate; they are learned skills.

So, first piece of advice. The second piece of advice I would give to you is the most common mistake that client coverage people make when they cover clients is that they don't become strategic advisors to their clients.

So what I mean by that: they don't take the opportunity while they're working with the client, they do not take the opportunity to start to advise the client on matters outside of the matter that they've been hired to work on.

So let me give you an example. It's best to illustrate this piece of advice by giving you an example from my world.

So if you were a merger banker—so a merger banker is someone who's been hired by a company to help them go through a merger, let's say to buy another company.

So let's say you're a merger banker, you've been hired by Company A to buy Company B.

Your client's Company A. You're going to spend a ton of time with a CEO over a 6-month to a year period working on that deal.

You're going to spend all-nighters with the CEO, you're going to be sequestered in conference rooms, you're going to get to know that CEO extremely well and you're going to build, hopefully, a very good relationship with them.

Most bankers do that, and they do a great job on that merger transaction. And then the transaction comes to a close.

They have a nice dinner, they raise a glass, a closing dinner. They'll toast the CEO, the deal closes, and then they go away.

And then five years later there's another merger mandate. Company A is going to buy Company C. And the banker calls up the CEO and says, "Hey, remember me?

We spent all that time together. I did such a good job." The CEO was sort of like, "Uh, no, get in line.

We're going to have a bake-off. There's five firms coming in. You can be one of the five. You know, we may hire you, we may not." The relationship is gone because what the banker did was they didn't take the opportunity while they were intimate with a client to become a strategic adviser to the client.

What I would do is I would start to engage that merger client on other matters. I would say to the client while we're working on the merger transaction and say, "You know, I know a large portion of your revenues come from Japan.

You know, $2 billion of your revenues come from Japan.

The Japanese government has said that they are going to devalue their currency, so that money that's coming into you in the form of yen is probably going to decrease in value.

Have you ever thought about maybe hedging your exposure against the yen? Because if it goes down by 10%, you lose two billion, $200 million on that $2 billion of revenue.

That's an interesting point, Jim. Why don't I put together the currency hedging team, and we'll have a discussion with you about what other clients have done and found helpful about hedging currency exposure overseas?

I might engage the client on, I don't know, a financing mandate. Have you noticed that your competitors are raising financing in the debt markets right now because interest rates are so low and it's very cheap, rather than using equity financing?

Why don't we, have you ever thought about using debt financing?

Can I put together the debt financing team? We can have a discussion about that. And then I'm not just a merger banker.

I'm a merger banker, I'm a currency hedging expert, I'm a capital markets banker. And over the course of the six months that I'm intimate with a CEO, my job is to become an everything banker to them, right?

Start advising them on as much as possible.

And over the course of the relationship, if I do a good job, I'm not even just a financial advisor.

I'm everything advisor. If they hurt their knee, they're calling me up and saying, "Hey, if you have any good doctors you might recommend to fix my knee." That's ideal.

Or, "You know, my daughter's applying to college. Where do you think she should go?" You know, that's that's becoming a strategic advisor to your client.

Lawyers make this mistake, bankers make this mistake, accountants, consultants make the mistake time in and time out.

I cannot tell you how often I see it. So if you're a lawyer working on an antitrust matter, do a great job on that antitrust matter.

But use the opportunity while you're with the client to start to engage them on other things: what their competitors are doing. Use that opportunity to build a relationship.

It is very helpful for three reasons. One, you give the client better advice the more you know about the client, right? You become a better adviser.

So the more stuff you're doing for the client, the more you know, the better advice you can give them because it's all intertwined.

So you're going to be able to give them better holistic advice the more you know. Secondly, you box out the competition. So in my case, when this when the CEO gets around to thinking about whether they should hedge their currency, they're not having a bake-off, they're not bringing in 10 currency hedging firms to to help them.

No, they're like, "Oh, Jim's doing that for me because he's doing everything for me, including helping me find a doctor that fixed my knee," right?

So you box out the competition. No one can get in. And then thirdly is you smooth out the cyclicality of these different practice areas that you might find yourself in.

If you're a merger banker or a merger lawyer, you know, it's very exciting to be a merger banker right now or an M&A lawyer because interest rates are very low, money is cheap, there's a lot of activity going on.

Guess what? It doesn't stay that way, right? You feast or you starve.

And people are feasting right now in that area, they're starving in other areas. If you're an everything banker, everything lawyer to a client, you smooth out cyclicality of those those individual business segments. So when mergers are dead and interest rates are high, you're working on, I don't know, maybe some bankruptcy work, maybe you're working on more hedging work, maybe you're working on financing work, because financing becomes much more nuanced when you have high interest rates, et cetera.

So secondly, become a strategic advisor to your clients. Don't make the mistake that most people make, which is work really hard on the mandate they have, do a great job.

When the mandate's over, you leave the relationship and then it decays over time and you don't have a relationship after a little while.

Third piece of advice is to listen and ask open-ended questions. The most important quality in covering clients effectively is empathy, the ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes.

So how do you achieve empathy? How do you become empathetic? You ask a lot of questions  and ask open-ended questions.

So questions that don't lend themselves to yes/no answers. So you don't say, you know, is it sunny outside, right? You say, how do you like the weather outside?

And you'll get the client to talk more. The more the client talks, the more you learn, believe it or not, the better they feel.

Fourth piece of advice is be creative. Um, you don't want to tell them they should do things that they shouldn't. That's fine. Say no, give them honest advice.

It's good advice, but don't stop there. Come up with an alternative. Come up with a creative way where they could accomplish what they were trying to accomplish or if it's not possible, accomplish something else.

Even if you don't think they might want to, at least it looks like you're trying.

So don't be a doctor. No, that's the fourth piece of advice: be creative. Uh, fifth piece of advice is put the client first.

Now, a lot of people say that. A lot of people talk about that. What does it really mean? It really means two things in my opinion.

The first thing is, be prepared to give the client advice that is not in your interest. There's no better way to establish credibility with a client than to give them advice that is not in your interest.

So in my world, if we're advising, an example I used, if you're advising Company A to buy Company B, we really only get paid if the transaction goes through, right?

People who take my corporate strategy class know that oftentimes it's not the right decision for Company A to buy Company B.

In fact, more often than not, it's not the right decision.

So if you go to Company A, your client, and you say, you know what, you shouldn't do this deal. As a lawyer, you're going to get paid more the longer the deal goes on, right?

All the way through consummation, you get paid by the hour. You shouldn't do this deal.

It's a mess. They're you're overpaying, there are hidden whatever it is. You will establish an enormous amount of credibility longer term because the client knows that's not in your interest to give them that advice.

You're going to get paid less. You're going to stop getting paid that day if they listen to you.

Advocate hard for positions regardless of what is in your interest. In fact, it's even better to put yourself longer term, better for the relationship to put yourself in a position where you're advocating for a position that is against your interest.

That's the first aspect of putting the client first. The second aspect is one that's probably going to be less popular for all of you to hear, but you need to work really hard and to convince the client that you're there for them all the time.

Now, a lot of people talk about work-life balance, and I'm a fan of work-life balance, right?

I didn't have a lot of it when I started at my firm until I made partner and even for a period of time after that.

But it's not a bad thing to have work-life balance, it's a good thing.

But it's also a very competitive world, and if you're not there for the client on the thing that he hired or she's hired you to do, which is very important to them, somebody else is going to be there for them.

And there's plenty of people willing to pick up the phone at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning if you're not.

So you, you, you have to work hard. I think of work-life balance more longer term than shorter term.

So I don't achieve work-life balance on a given day, maybe not in a given week, although I'm senior enough that I try and have work-life balance on a weekly basis.

But at your stage of your career, when you're just starting out, think about it in terms of maybe monthly work-life balance or yearly or until you make partner, whatever it is.

You can, you can think about it in different ways with different, different periods of time.

But you've got to, you've got to convey to the client that they are the most important thing in the world to you, which means you want to respond as quickly as possible.

What I tell people when I started at Goldman Sachs through the first 10 years I was at the firm is I would say to clients, "Look, you can leave me a voicemail anytime.

Unless I'm dead or asleep, I check it every 10 seconds and that resonated with people.

And by the way, some people would try to test me on that, and I always did. So you need and I don't sleep very long either.

So, you know, they're getting a lot of responses back from me. So you, you got to do that.

That's not a popular, maybe correct thing to say, but it is important to have work-life balance, have maybe a longer-term perspective on that, but you got to be there for the client when they need you because you're being hired to work on something really important to them.

Number six, this may sound obvious, the most obvious piece of advice I've given, but be upbeat.

I cannot tell you how important it is to be upbeat. So if your life is a mess, don't tell the client that, right?

Don't let the client know that. If you're just, if you're having a bad day or a bad week or a bad year, don't let the client know that.

Don't share that stuff with a client. You may be tempted to, particularly if you get close to a client.

Better not to. Better to be upbeat because it's contagious. People want to be around happy, upbeat people, right?

So be upbeat, be happy. You, if last piece of advice is for all of you, this is a unique piece of advice, is take classes in the law and business section here at UVA.

And the reason why you want to take these classes is there are, there is twofold. There are two reasons.

The first reason is so that you understand business, you understand your peers in business, why they make the decisions they make, how they were educated, what motivates them, how their companies work.

It'll make you a better lawyer or consultant or banker or whatever it is that you're going to be.

the second reason, which I tell my students often, which is a goal in my class, a goal that I put out front is it will demystify the jargon and the language of the business world, the world that I operate in.

Like the world that you operate in if you're in law school is mystified in language, right?

성공하는 자세 (짐도노반 of 골드만삭스)

성공하는 자세 (짐도노반 of 골드만삭스)

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