My Big Break: How Knocking On Doors Helped Me Go From New Kid on the Block to CEO

Everyone has to start out somewhere. Sometimes it’s easier, particularly when expectation, or (in my case as a young lawyer in the 1980’s starting over in the travel business) the “bar” is so low, that whatever you do to the business, it can only improve. That was the situation I faced when I agreed to leave my law career to help turn around my Dad’s struggling travel agency back in the mid-80’s. Business was so bad that no matter what I did to it, it could not get much worse. What I had going for me was a strong desire to succeed, the willingness to work long hours doing so and a commitment to “pound the pavement” in order to acquire new customers in the new niche that we had created: providing travel services for lawyers.  

Many people, particularly my immediate family who had helped me invest in my legal career, questioned the wisdom of leaving law to start over in travel, but my instinct has always been to take risks. Plus, my background in law proved itself to be a great inspiration because I concluded that there was no travel management company dedicated specifically to fulfilling the special needs of law firms: nothing like a “market need” waiting to be fulfilled! At that time, law firms had very unique travel needs relative to other industries, with more changes over the course of a trip, a greater need for detailed expense management and other special requirements. Those needs were not being served in any organized way by my direct competitors. So I had the idea for a specialized brand that I knew would resonate with this niche market and I had the name Lawyers Travel (then Lawyers Travel Service). The only thing I didn’t have were actual law firm clients.

At the time, we were only a handful of employees, and we had very little (actually zero) budget for marketing and sales. So I researched law firms where I thought we would be a good business fit, and I started knocking on doors. I’d follow up with phone calls and was, above all other things, persistent.  After countless doors were shut in my face, and many “no’s,” I finally got an in-person meeting with a partner at a major law firm, and I didn’t waste the opportunity. I used a laser-like focus to learn all I could about the firm, including a SWOT analysis of what their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats might be. Then I had a blueprint to work from, and used those findings to determine exactly how Lawyers Travel could add specific value to that firm.

By the time of my meeting, I was well prepared and it showed. I was able to convince this partner that we understood lawyers and that our services reflected that. The truth was that he took a liking to me and ultimately became a mentor. He gave me a chance and saw the potential in Lawyers Travel’s services, and helped to sell the idea to his partners in the firm that they should take a chance and hire us. And so, after two years and a countless number of rejections, I had finally hooked a big fish. In 1987, Lawyers Travel opened its first onsite travel department for a major law firm. In fact, the travel consultant who serviced them is still with us today.

Many times in sales, there’s a bit of a herd mentality where someone will say, “if this service is good enough for my peers, it’s good enough for me too,” and that was certainly true for us when it came to law firms. That first large client became our calling card; instead of walking down the street, knocking on doors, and having them closed on me, I was starting to find more and more of them opening up. Suddenly, major firms were saying, “Oh, so you handle travel onsite for them? You must know what you’re doing.” And then the ball really got rolling, and it became easier to have conversations with other firms as well.

After a while, momentum picked up even more. When a business grows and understands the needs of a particular clientele, you can put more focus on providing the best tools and services. In the case of Lawyers Travel, we have a number of proprietary programs geared towards the unique needs of law firms. For example, over 20 years ago we developed our national recruitment travel program in order to assist law firms in reducing these non-billable travel costs, and it’s still going strong.

So that was how it all started: a small amount of experience, a new and innovative idea and then a boatload of persistence. Lawyers Travel, which eventually evolved into the Ovation Travel Group, a billion dollar company of which Lawyers Travel is now the flagship brand, is ultimately a startup success story. And I believe the key to that startup success was persistence. Today, Lawyers Travel serves over 200 of the world’s largest law firms, including 40 of the AM Law 100, but we haven’t forgotten where we came from. We still work hard to understand our clients, and look to their needs and pain points as the basis for our new programs. Just this year, we introduced a proprietary mobile app (a technology I never even dreamed of in my days of pounding the streets and knocking on doors) and with each expansion to our service offering the experience and understanding that we bring to this important market also grows.

Because while there is luck in getting a big break, you have to continue to earn success. As the saying goes, opportunities are what you make of them.

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