Covering clients is a learned skill; it's not an innate skill. 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 salespeople. 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 copies 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 strategies with prospective clients and clients, and they worked. And so, to this day, a good portion

A good portion of the skills and strategies I use with clients came from this man, and the rest I've added over the years. So, find someone who's really good, flatter them, and say, "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—make coffee, get lunch, Xerox—whatever it takes."

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're not innate, they're learned skills.

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

What I mean by that is they don't take the opportunity, while working with the client, to advise the client on matters outside of what they've been hired to work on.

Let me give you an example to illustrate this advice from my world. If you were a merger banker—someone hired by a company to help them go through a merger, let's say to buy another company—let's say you're a merger banker hired by Company A to buy Company B.

Your client is Company A. You'll spend a ton of time with the CEO—six months to a year—working on that deal. You'll spend all-nighters with the CEO, be sequestered in conference rooms, and get to know that CEO extremely well.

I'm going to build, hopefully, a very good relationship with them. Most bankers do that, and they do a great job at it.

In a merger transaction, and then the transaction comes to a close, they have a nice dinner; they raise a glass to the closing.

At the dinner, they'll toast the CEO. The deal closes, and then they go away. Then, five years later, there's another

merger mandate. Company A is going to buy Company C, and the banker calls up Company C and says, "Hey, remember me? We spent all

that time together. I did such a good job." See, I was sort of like, "Uh, no, get in line.

We're going to have a bake-off; there are 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 advisor 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, "You know,

I know a large portion of your revenues come from Japan—$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 $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...

Don't you know about 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 a debt financing team? We can have a discussion

about that. And then, I'm not just 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 an '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 this mistake time 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's

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 advisor. 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 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 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 to fix my knee." Right? So you box out the

competition; no one can get in. And then, thirdly, 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 in everything—everything banker, everything lawyer—to a client, you

smooth out the cyclicality of 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, etc. 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

Relationships, after a little while, don't make that mistake. 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,

questions that don't lend themselves to yes/no answers. So you don't say, "Is it sunny outside?" 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 'no, that's not possible' doctor. 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

Those who take my corporate strategy class know that often 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,

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

overpaying; there are hidden issues—whatever it is. You will establish an enormous amount of credibility long-term because the

client knows that it'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, for the long-term, better for the relationship, to put yourself in a position where

you're advocating for a position that is against your interest. So put the client first. 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 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 or she 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 have to work hard. I think of work-life balance more long-term than short-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

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