EL 021: Nice Lawyers Finish First: Why the Days of Mean leaders are Over, with Peter Shankman
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“The best thing you could do is be awesome to the clients you have, because they will get you the future clients that you want.” – Peter Shankman
Peter Shankman prides himself in being able to have FUN in what he does, whether it’s helping businesses or individuals do better. He is everything he preaches for: helpful, fun, and nice. Listen and learn how to be a HAPPY lawyer and turn your customers into loyalists to grow a successful business.
(Me and Peter Shankman at Lawyernomics 2014)
To me, Peter Shankman is an inspiration – his philosophy and his notions continually motivate me to be more enchanting. I was blown away by his keynote speech at Lawyernomics 2014, where he taught entrepreneurs how to treat their customers one level above crap.
When it comes to being a service provider, the essence of Shankman’s philosophy, attitude, and core value is, in his own words, “All you do is helping them and they remember you…and they come to you when they need something. That’s how you generate a business; that’s how you generate relationships; that’s how you generate clients. Not by going out and saying ‘I’m awesome’, but by giving people what they want in any facet that they want it.”
You can find everything you need to know regarding Peter Shankman at shankman.com, or email him at peter@shankman.com. The business Shankman founded and is brought up several times in the interview is Help A Reporter Out.
In this interview you’ll learn:
- 01’19” Shankman’s background
- 02’22” Being nice and how Shankman does it
- 06’47” Mistakes companies make
- 08’19” The future connectivity
- 09’09” Shankman’s vision
- 10’54” Shankman’s business mastermind ShankMinds
- 11’40” Shankman’s upcoming new book “Zombie Loyalists”
- 13’03” What it takes to be successful
- 14’00” Work and life balance
- 14’41” Shankman’s family
- 16’14” One tip from Shankman to better your business
Written Podcast Transcript:
Jacob: Hi everybody, this is Jacob Sapochnick and welcome to the Enchanting Lawyer podcast where we talk about marketing, leadership, and just doing great business and how to be enchanting. Today, I have a very special, and I’m honored to have Peter Shankman on the show.
For those of you who don’t know Peter, he is recognized as radically one of the most innovative marketers and expert in social media PR and advertising. He’s actually best known for founding Help a Report Out, HARO, which is under a year became de-facto standard for thousands of journalists looking for sources on deadline; offering them more than 20,000 sources around the world.
He’s an author, entrepreneur, speaker, and a worldwide connector and I’m privileged to have him on the show. Welcome, Peter.
Peter: Hello! Good to be here. Thanks for having me.
Jacob: Peter, for those people in the service business, why don’t you give me a little bit of a background briefly about what brought you to do what you do right now?
Peter: I got very lucky. I found out that I could do what I do and I love what I do and you get paid for it and have a lot of fun with it. I’ve always worked in content. I started my career working for America Online as the founder of the newsroom there. From that I started a PR firm. And then from PR firm went to starting a company called Help a Reporter that connected journalists with sources around the world. It got acquired.
Primarily, I just spend a lot of my time having fun teaching companies how to do better, teaching people how to do better. I connect people. People that are good, people who might do well, things like that with each other.
I’ve been very, very fortunate to have a good time with what I do and I’m having a blast with it.
Jacob: I met you at the legal conference a few weeks ago. When you started the speech, I knew about you before. I knew about the book that you wrote about; helping companies, why they should be nice.
But, I think, one of the core things about you … I mean you build a lot of your career about basically saying, “How can I help?” and you actually deliver. We had a very brief communication. You gave me an opportunity to email you and you responded back. Why is it so difficult for so many companies to be nice and helpful?
To continue reading the complete transcript from this podcast, click here.
Is there any question you have regarding the podcast guest that is not addressed in this blog post? Please leave me a comment below or send me your thoughts at jacob@enchantinglawyer.com. I would really appreciate your feedback, your suggestion on future guests, or just an opportunity to chat with you!
