Hi there,
As I write this, our PERSUIT team is finishing up our second annual go-to-market off-site, this time in Miami. 🦩
And as we culminate the past 72 hours spent together — mostly in a windowless conference room caffeinating ourselves through jet lag and the tire of travel (and also enjoying the heck out of being together!), it takes me back to our humble beginnings here at PERSUIT.
When we also had a windowless office in far away Melbourne.
All 300 square feet of it for our team of five. 😣
Our meager self-funded runway about to run dry. 😨
With self-doubt, sky high.
Not a day went by without that little voice in my head asking:
“Did I make the right move by starting PERSUIT?”
But yesterday, here’s what I told my team.
It’s advice I’d give to anyone, whether our insanely talented PERSUITers, my adult kids (even if they roll their eyes), or the legal leaders that I’m privileged to speak with daily in my work.
You’ve gotta try.
Whether it's founding a startup, or trying to sell attorneys on change, if you knew in retrospect how hard it was really going to be…well, you’d probably never start.
But of all the things we remember as we get older — relationships, experiences, accomplishments, and failures — it’s only what you didn’t do that haunts you.
When things get tough.
When they are hard.
When they don’t go as planned.
It's that “gotta try” mentality that I continue to fall back on.
Reminding myself that it’s the hard things that are the most rewarding.
Like when I moved my entire family from our comfortable life in Australia to stand up DLA Piper’s dispute practice in Dubai. Without any knowledge about the culture, their laws, or where to start. Thinking daily, “What the heck have I done?!”
Or when I left the promise of riches and achievement at the pinnacle of a global law firm to start my own tech company in 2016.
Or when I recognized in PERSUIT’s early days that the market in Australia just wasn’t ready for us and moved our meager sales team of 3 (including me!) across the pond to New York City to land PERSUIT’s first Fortune 500 company.
And now readying our team to push our boundaries to expand our reach beyond the powerhouse of global brands — now including the six largest banks in the United States — to take on the rest of legal.
You gotta try.
And if you do, you get the chance to see, one by one, the world start believing what you believe. What we believe.
I can't tell you how proud I am of our “gotta try” group at PERSUIT. Who continue to land the world’s strongest logos, the hardest customers, one by one.
That’s the way change — or at least any change worth making — happens.
⚖️ Take on the rest of legal?
🔦 Make transparency in legal sourcing the norm?
💪 Empower GC’s to make (and justify) the right decisions on outside counsel spend?
💲Save in-house legal teams billions?
You bet we’re gonna try.
What about you?
Cheers,
Jim
P.S. Our team sends their best Miami greetings to all of you!
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