Reflecting On My Habits That Outlasted the Firm

By Mitchell Schuckman, PCC | Founder, The Schuckman Group

Fourteen months ago I sat on my couch with my laptop creating my first to-do list for The Schuckman Group. By the way, that to-do list is still running. I needed a system to track client work, project plans, contracts, every email. I needed a way to run payroll and pay contractors and keep my finances well organized. I needed a bookkeeper, an accountant, an attorney, and a bench of people I could call when a project needed more hands than mine. I was on LinkedIn and on my phone posting, texting and calling everyone I knew to tell them I was starting a business.

I thought all of it would happen fast. It did not. But the part that surprised me was not how long it took to build the systems. It was that everything I had learned about growing a business over four decades inside a large firm, much of it while leading substantial business development initiatives, held up perfectly once there was no organization behind me anymore.

There Is No Finish Line Anymore

Inside a large firm, there is always a next milestone even if nobody says it out loud. Make senior manager. Make partner. Grow your book of business. Save money and retire well. The whole career has a shape to it, with checkpoints built in along the way.

Running my own firm removed every one of those checkpoints overnight. What replaced them was not a new set of milestones. It was a continuous game with no finish line at all, just relationships to keep building, work to keep doing well, and a next conversation always worth having.

The Filter That Kept Me Honest

Figuring out what to charge was one of the hardest things I did in the first few months. There were no margin goals handed to me, no committee setting my pricing. I landed on my own pricing filter instead. Price it in a way that stays true to what I believe the work is worth, while also making it hard for the client to say no. Do good work and more work will come. My whole approach to growth has become one big land and expand.

This is the same discipline I have been writing about all summer in this series. The archetypes, the pursuit habits, the listening, the relating, all of it comes back to one thing. A builder has habits and plays that make the business expand because they have set the stage for it, long before they need it to.

Meeting People Without an Agenda

The networking mattered just as much, and it looks nothing like what people picture when they hear the word. It means talking to people and building relationships with no expectation of a client or a project on the other end of the conversation. Most of it produces nothing you can point to. Some of it produces opportunities you would never, ever have imagined.

Writing this article series was part of that. So was my book. So were a handful of speaking engagements I took at a fraction of what I would normally charge, because the room was full of people I wanted to know. None of it came with guarantees. All of it came from the same instinct that used to make me pick up the phone and call a client for no reason other than curiosity.

That instinct is not a firm's asset. It is a builder's asset, and it works exactly the same whether you have tens of thousands of people behind your name, or just yourself.

Building Is Not a Job Description

What I have come to understand is that being a builder was never actually about the firm I worked for. It was never a role assigned to me, a line on a business card, or a phase of a career that ends when you hit a certain title.

It is a way of paying attention to people and to opportunities with empathy and curiosity. The big firm gave me a place to practice for almost four decades, and I'm still practicing as an entrepreneur.

The professionals I have coached who struggle most after a major transition, a retirement, a layoff, a firm change, are rarely the ones who lost their technical skill. They are the ones who let the firm's structure do the building for them, and never built the habits for themselves.

The Habit That Outlasts Everything

This series started with a war for clients that professional services firms are only beginning to understand. It moved through the types of professionals every firm has, the muscle of curiosity, the discipline of listening, the difference between a resume and a story, and what it actually takes to keep a client once you have won them. Every one of those articles was really about the same thing.

The war was never about firms. It is about individuals who never stop building, in any job, at any firm, at any stage of a career.

Having an everyday business development mindset is just how I live in business, and it will be how I live in business until I decide I am done playing the game. Builders don't retire. They just keep building something new.

Mitchell Schuckman is the Founder and CEO of The Schuckman Group LLC. He is a Professional Certified Coach credentialed by the International Coaching Federation and the author of I'll Tell You a Great Story. theschuckmangroup.com

Note on privacy: Names and identifying details have been changed. The experiences described are drawn from multiple client engagements and do not represent any single individual.