The RainmakerVT Story

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The RainmakerVT Story
(so far)

mikeohoro@rainmakervt.com


I never set out to train lawyers to market and sell.

Like much of many of our careers, it was serendipitous. If
David Falk hadn’t left ProServ to set up his own sports
marketing agency, taking with him Michael Jordan and a
stable of other NBA stars and, therefore, a big chunk of
ProServ’s cash flow, with him, I might never have done any of
this.

In 1991, while working at ProServ, a prominent sports
marketing agency of that era, I sold a tennis sponsorship to
then-ascendant (now-defunct) Howrey & Simon, through a
Washington, DC law firm marketing consultant who was
rebranding the firm. Shortly after Mr. Falk’s departure for
greener fields, many of us recognized the impact of that and
saw that it would soon be time to find something else to do


for a living.

Over lunch, the consultant said to me, “Here’s a problem you
might be interested in. The managing partners of all these
law firms I work with tell me that they have partners who
know everybody, who have Golden Rolodexes, but don’t
bring in business.”

Astonished, I clarified, “You’re telling me that these people
can get their calls returned at the top, can get in the right
room, and don’t bring in business? This is too easy. We can
fix this by tomorrow.”

I interviewed a number of his clients to get a handle on the
cultural “look and feel,” then built my training mousetrap and
we went to market.


From the beginning, it was a very intimate, customized one-
on-one coaching relationship that produced dramatic results.

Over the years, as I became much more familiar with what it
meant to practice law, my training philosophy evolved,
becoming much less corporate and much more akin to law
practice.

Eventually, I got to where I based everything on a litigation
analogy. It got so simplified that we declared that the lawyers
didn’t have to learn any new skills; in their law practice they
already had mastered every skill needed. All they had to do
was apply those skills to the business acquisition challenge,
i.e., before they got hired, in exactly the same way they
applied them after they’d been hired.



Sidebar: I’ve always been a process-oriented person, so I
created standalone process modules for many of the
solutions I devised in real-time in response to a lawyer’s
immediate challenge during a coaching call. During the dot-
com boom of the late ‘90s, I heard Cisco’s John Chambers
describe e-learning as “the killer app that will make email
look like a rounding error.” This aligned well with my
modular, process-orientation. With the help of some local
distance-learning developers, I built my first e-learning
prototype using coaching avatars, decision triggers, etc.

The conceptual architecture of that early effort is visible in
RainmakerVT. Unfortunately, while Chambers’ rosy
assessment may yet prove true, in 1997 the legal market
wasn’t ready for e-learning.



Two casual remarks by clients initiated the thinking that
ultimately led to creating RainmakerVT.

The first, perhaps 15 years ago, was made by the marketing
director at a huge Chicago law firm, who said, “Mike, I love
your training, but we have 1000 lawyers. You can’t train
1000 lawyers.”

The second occurred more recently, when, after hearing my
answer to what I did for a living, my new acquaintance
casually quipped, “Oh, you make rich lawyers richer.”

That one stuck with me.



Don’t get me wrong; I’m proud of the results we produced
together, but the ignoble truth was that helping a lawyer raise
his or her annual pay to $800,000 from $700,000, while
certainly appreciated by the lawyer in an abstract way, wasn’t
going to change his or her life meaningfully.

Fast forward to mid-2009.

Bored with the static nature of BigLaw, and the paucity of
strategic discourse (despite the industry undergoing the most
wrenching, seismic change in its history), I closed my training
consultancy and, in desperate need to get myself back into
the idea stream, I set out to investigate “innovation.”



That was truly stimulating. You can’t imagine how much you
look forward to each day when you’re studying electric
vehicles, solar roadways, sustainable construction and
renewable materials, the convergence of entertainment and
mobile computing, etc.

Coincidentally, a former client, Craig Levinson, had, at the
same time left his job at JAMS to find something more
interesting to do. We’d been successful in our two previous
collaborations training partners at his firms, we traded ideas
and concepts in the hope that we could create something
worthwhile together.



In the course of my intellectual meanderings, one day
Fred Wilson (a VC in NY whose blog and comments a friend
at Google had suggested I follow in case I needed to raise
money some day) wrote a blog post about
The Monster in Your Head, a blog by Jerry Colonna, who as
a VC had been Fred’s partner, and who had since reinvented
himself as life/executive coach for startup founders and
executives.

Jerry’s post included an excerpt from Soul Dance, by Bill
Plotkin, titled, “The Survival Dance and The Sacred Dance:”



“Each of us,” writes Plotkin, “has a survival dance and a
sacred dance, but the survival dance must come first. Our
survival dance, a foundational component of self-reliance, is
what we do for a living—our way of supporting ourselves
physically and economically…Everybody has to have a
survival dance. Finding and creating one is our first task upon
leaving our parents’ or guardians’ home.

Once you have your survival dance established, you can
wander, inwardly and outwardly, searching for clues to your
sacred dance, the work you were born to do. This work may
have no relation to your job. Your sacred dance sparks your
greatest fulfillment and extends your truest service to others.
You know you’ve found it when there’s little else you’d rather
be doing. Getting paid for it is superfluous. You would gladly
pay others, if necessary, for the opportunity.”



That struck a resonant chord.

I had mastered my survival dance, but remained clueless
(and unfulfilled) about my sacred dance. That explained
much of my pattern of success-followed-by-dissatisfaction
throughout my many careers. While each venture initially
was intellectually stimulating while I figured out the new
puzzle, each also failed even to lightly brush up against
anything resembling a sacred dance.

I shared Colonna’s blog post with Craig, and was happy to
see that it resonated with him in as big a way. We decided to
make sure that during our search for our next survival dance
we would remain particularly alert for signs of sacred dance
components, or at least an evolutionary path to it.



In the course of using LinkedIn to connect with those who
might shed light on our journey, we noticed a fatal flaw in
LinkedIn’s introduction scheme, one that guaranteed that it
couldn’t work as intended.

As it turned out, one of the principles of my sales
methodology contained a reliable solution to that, so we set
out to fix LinkedIn. The potential sacred dance element was
in the form of connecting, much more effectively and
efficiently, unemployed or under-employed workers with
those needing their skills.

If we could do that, we could have a positive effect on US
unemployment and the attendant “misery index” of those
anxious about their professional- and financial futures.



While seeking a technology partner to build what we
envisioned, I visited a company who offered a robust virtual
training platform. Looking closely at their product, I realized
that we were having the wrong conversation.

I told them, “Depending which source you believe, there are
between 500,000 and 900,000 US lawyers practicing solo or
in firms of ten or fewer. They couldn’t afford to hire me, and I
couldn’t afford to sell to them. With virtual training, we can
build a scalable solution and bring proven training to them for
coffee money.”

At that moment, we pivoted, and RainmakerVT was born, at
least in concept.



The most significant event for us, though, occurred a few
months later when we hosted a focus group lunch for solos to
learn how they were going to market now, what they spent
their marketing dollars on, and how well or poorly that
worked.

During the discussion, we listened to stories of spending
thousands of dollars on radio, TV, print ads, events, etc.
Most sadly admitted that such expenditures produced few
prospects or, worse, prospects that couldn’t afford legal fees.

Craig and I made eye contact across the table and it was
clear that we both were thinking the same thing: “How sad
that these lawyers were getting so little return from so much
investment when there were so many more effective
strategies and tactics, many of which were free if you put in
some consistent time applying them.”


We felt resentful that they were being exploited so
egregiously, and unnecessarily. Since it was an intelligence-
gathering lunch, we had to resist the powerful urge to go into
training mode, telling them, “Do this, and this, and this...”
(We did, however, invite those present to call us for
complimentary personal coaching.)

At that moment, we knew that we were doing the right thing
with RainmakerVT.

I continually update research about how much money solos
make in different parts of the US. Ignoring outliers at each
end, the center of the bell curve suggests a modest-to-
comfortable living (about $75k), with little cushion for life’s
setbacks or for children’s college education.



It’s been observed that most people in the US are one
missed paycheck away from disaster. I don’t know if that
applies to solo lawyers or not, but it’s hard to imagine that
most are sanguine about their financial prospects. And that’s
in return for having to hustle for business every day.

Unlike many of their BigLaw counterparts, for solos,
“business development” is no abstraction, i.e., something for
which one gets a gold star for doing occasionally, but suffers
no immediate tangible penalty for not doing at all. For solos,
there is true immediacy; these lawyers are at the pointy end
of the stick every day.

Returning to Plotkin for a moment:



“…The first step is creating a foundation of self-reliance: a
survival dance of integrity that allows you to be in the world in
a good way—a way that is psychologically sustaining,
economically adequate, socially responsible, and
environmentally sound. Cultivating right livelihood, as the
Buddhists call it, is essential training and foundation for your
soul work; it’s not a step that can be skipped.”

Our mission is to give solos and small firm lawyers that
“foundation of self-reliance,” in the form of the business
development skill and virtual experience they need to reliably
get sufficient business to eliminate financial anxiety. If we
manage to do that, we have a decent chance of finding our
sacred dance.



My late father, a lifelong salesman not given to dispensing
advice, offered me one bit of wisdom that sticks with me:
“Conduct yourself in such a way that you can walk down the
street with a potential client, bump into a former client, and
leave them alone together for a half-hour without worry.”
Mike O’Horo
September, 2011


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