NICHOLAS T. GEORGE

2006 Business Plan Competition Keynote Speech Transcript 

I am honored to be here this afternoon among you, the best and brightest at this competition and awards banquet.  Congratulations to all award recipients today! 

Thank you to President, Luis Proenza, Dr. Todd Finkle, and all of you in attendance for this opportunity to share my thoughts. And a special thank you to my long time friend, Tom Costigan for inviting me to speak to all of you today.

Also, thank you for your vision in seeing an attorney as an entrepreneur.

It has been said that “the entrepreneur is essentially a visualizer and an actualizer . . . He can visualize something, and when he visualizes it he sees exactly how to make it happen.”

Today what I visualize are students that want to hear something of value, and you will see if I make that happen.

I would like to share with you my journey from the son of immigrant parents, who drove his father’s meat truck to pay for college and law school to a CEO driving a regional law firm, (pause) and lessons I have learned along the way.

Very simply, I became a lawyer by process of elimination. By the time I was 16 I had been a caddy, a stock boy, sold shoes at the mall, flipped burgers and worked for my Dad’s meat packing company.  I knew I didn’t want manual labor for my life’s work.

The sight of blood made me queasy and math wasn’t my forte, so medical school was not an option. In the corporate culture of the 70’s, I didn’t think I could have autonomy in business.

When I chose law school I assumed I would be a trial attorney and the next Clarence Darrow or go into politics and be the next president.  . .  of the United States.

Let me share with you the high points of my academic history. In my senior year of high school my counselor told me not to bother going to college since I really wasn’t college material and slammed the door in my face.

While I barely squeaked into the University of Akron School of Law with a very low LSAT, I was first in my class when we graduated. I had the highest accumulated grade average in the history of the law school at that time.  Which taught me to be careful of judging yourself and your potential by the artificial standards that others may choose to judge you by.  Like you who are here today, I knew I had drive and intelligence. 

I graduated law school after driving my Dad’s meat truck through undergraduate and graduate school. My Dad was a great salesman and a not so great businessman.

One thing I knew was that whatever I did, I would approach it from a basic business standpoint, money in - money out.

Whatever your business plan you can’t be concerned about your product, board presentation, or the client sitting across from you if you are worried about paying your rent.

After law school I knew I wanted to go to a firm to benefit from the experience of more seasoned associates and partners. Just as many of you have already benefited from student interaction as well as professors insight and perhaps some apprenticeships.

Five years later, the law firm imploded.

I joined several individual lawyers who got together to start their own firm and I began my experience in the business side of the practice of law; mainly what not to do! Especially the lack of understanding the importance of building a team!  These lawyers either didn’t get it or they didn’t care. They all wanted to be one man shows.

On top of this I was frustrated because I wasn’t able to make important firm decisions or control my own destiny. So in 1979 I started my own firm. I had a wife, a family, a mortgage, and one employee. In front of me I had challenges as far as the eye could see. I had a bank roll of $40,000 and a small line of credit with a local bank and a lot of  worries: pause   will I be able to sustain myself, my family and my one employee? Will I be able to pay my bills and my mortgage? Will I attract enough business to do all of this? Early on I learned that worrying about it didn’t make it happen, it just gave me indigestion and loss of sleep. These challenges did make me an early riser and a late worker, but I always managed to have quality family time, which is much more important in life!

I guess when I went on my own, that was when I became the entrepreneur . . . when I knew I needed to control my own destiny.

My father, my meat purveyor father who taught me so much about ethics, integrity, and honor, passed away 11 months before I went out on my own. Ironically, it was as if I had wings. I was now the oldest male and in charge of the extended family. I soared.

I was president of my own law firm from 1979 to 1997.

In ’97 my entrepreneurial spirit took a new turn.

I took on a new challenge. And so began again the cycle of an entrepreneur: challenge, risk, and opportunity.

I accepted the challenge to take my entrepreneurial spirit to the established law firm of Buckingham.   My practice had grown to where I needed a bigger platform, which Buckingham could provide. 

There was risk: risk of my clients not making the transition with me from boutique law firm to a regional law firm.

There was challenge, taking this established law firm and its established attorneys into a 21st century entrepreneurial mindset.

There was this incredible opportunity.

The second year I was at Buckingham, I was the biggest rainmaker. Think about it, a firm then almost 90 years old and the new guy produces more revenue than any other attorney. Why?

Although I may not have looked like an entrepreneur, I didn’t invent, imagine, or innovate in the tangible sense.

I was an entrepreneur at heart, I was the one who organized my business and assumed the risk. Now I had the opportunity to re-organize Buckingham and encourage new risk.

In life, risk sometimes masquerades as challenge.

You may have seen the poster that says:

You can't cross a chasm in two small jumps.

I always looked at the profession of law differently than many of my peers, and took a big jump. I looked at it as a business, not a profession.  It’s a risk to look at the same thing that your peers do and see it differently than your peers do.

In 1970 most small law firms did not bill by the hour.  It was a risk to change the billing expectations of clients.

Most attorneys’ guess-timated how long a case

Would take and guess-timated their fee. 

And sometimes they guess-timated when to send the bill!

To me it made sound business sense to charge by the hour and bill regularly. At the heart of any business, an entrepreneur needs to make fiscal business decisions.

As much as things change they stay the same.

As a law firm we can’t turn on a machine and grind out a product. Yet like any entrepreneur or any one

Of you, we have to attract work, do good work, and bill work regularly.

When I started out I wanted to specialize. I didn’t like many areas of the law, so referrals in general would often send me more kinds of work that I did not like.

It is a risk to specialize.

To specialize is to willingly sacrifice a large part of your potential market. I specialized at a time when many did not. I specialized in real estate. In fact 90% of my practice was real estate and 75% was with one client!

Shortly after I started my firm, the real estate market went north, south, east, or west . . . But it certainly didn’t stay here in Northeast Ohio.

That’s when I learned about the importance of diversification. The challenges of building a solid practice led to diversification. I then built my practice specializing in business/corporate law.

I learned that I liked smoothing out business transactions, building consensus and getting people off their roller coaster. When real estate came back, I was ready to combine business and real estate.

It’s never a risk to be prepared.

Pro football Hall of Fame quarterback Roger Staubach said, “spectacular achievements are always preceded by painstaking preparation.” 

It is incumbent for an entrepreneur to see opportunity when opportunity is not apparent.

To further complicate things, opportunity does not always materialize overnight.

Your job is to be prepared for opportunity.

I did not start out with the goal of becoming the president of a large law firm. I started out with the goal of being the best lawyer I could be:

Learning the most I could learn,
Liking what I do,
Leading with character,
And being prepared.

When the opportunity came to go to Buckingham, then to lead Buckingham, I was prepared. From running my own firm and practicing law, I learned that you need to be dedicated to your work, have a strong work ethic and continue to learn and improve.

There will be opportunities to lead with character, or hide your character.

There will be opportunities to select the people you work with and opportunities to select your clients.

There will be opportunity to enjoy what you do, to do what you enjoy.

There will be opportunity to continue to learn. “talent is only a starting point in this business. You've got to keep on working that talent”. Said Irving Berlin. 

There will be opportunities every day to display award winning business acumen: return phone calls, admit mistakes, admit it when it can’t be done.

At Buckingham we have a no-jerk rule, if you are a jerk you can’t work here. Every day you will have the opportunity to be a good guy.

Although you are not in the practice of law, although you probably didn’t drive a meat truck, although you’re entrepreneurial spirit may be more high tech or high touch,

Perhaps you can benefit from these 10 lessons I learned along the way.

1. Nothing happens overnight.
2. Preparation is the best stress reliever, it reduces risk.
3. You have to like what you do.
4. There are too many good people… to do business with bad people.
5. Work very hard-remember that even though your balance may look different from others there needs to be mind and body balance.
6. Learning is never over.
7. You will have setbacks, that’s how you learn.
8. Lead with character, when in doubt do the right thing.
9. Look at what you do as a business, not a profession.
10. Make your business user friendly – at Buckingham clients call their attorney on a direct line, email addresses are on our website.

Citigroup is now airing a commercial where you are guaranteed that you can dial 0 for a human. How can you make your business user friendly?

And a bonus #11, no one is self made. “lean on me” are not just words from a 1972 hit song.

In the introduction, I shared a quote: an entrepreneur is essentially a visualizer and an actualizer . . . he can visualize the finished product, and when he visualizes it he sees exactly how to make it happen.

I submit to you that there is a third component. The ability to make it happen.

There are those who visualize. And stop there.

There are those who can actualize. And stop there.

And we see examples of people with those gifts all the time.

Then there are those who assume the risk, see it, see how to do it, and make it happen.

With this fine education now added to your individual gifts, you will all soon have opportunities to “make it happen”.

You have the business components, recognition, and the awards, now go out and soar!

Thank you.