The 7 types of Business Case for partner

Most firms require their potential partners to create a partner promotion business case. Typically there are only 7 types of partner promotion business cases. Once you know your Business Case type, you can increase its impact and persuasiveness. In this article, I examine all 7 types of Business Cases and discuss the strategy you need to maximise the opportunities of each type.

A partner Business Case – what is it?

In chapter 11 of Poised for Partnership, I discuss the 7 different types of Business Cases.

The fully updated 3rd edition of Poised for Partnership is a clear roadmap that strengthens your case and makes reaching partnership inevitable if you’ve got ‘the right stuff’. And if you haven’t, it will show you how to get it. 

Much of this article is taken from chapter 11 of Poised for Partnership.

Before the partnership can admit any new partner they need a Business Case for doing so. Your Business Case is where you demonstrate the commercial advantage to your firm of making you up to partner. A Business Case will typically be built on one of the following premises:

• A partner is retiring and the department needs a replacement.
• A part of the firm is growing and needs another partner-level person to help service this part of the business.
• You have personally built a profitable partner-sized client portfolio, which your partnership cannot afford to lose.
• You have a great network of trusted contacts that you can use to open doors for other partners in the firm.
• You have strong relationships with, and deep knowledge of, one particular client that your firm would like to work with more.
• There is an opportunity to enter a new marketplace or offer a new service stream that you can build into a profitable client portfolio, which in turn will justify your admission into the partnership. You also need Partner on your business card to build this new revenue stream for your firm.
• You run a business support service or practice management department such as HR, and need to be privy to the partners’ conversations in order to help the firm operate more profitably.

Any well-organised partnership will identify where there is a Business Case for a new partner many years in advance. They will then work with a selection of candidates to build a Personal Case for partnership. This gives the partnership choices about who will be the best candidate for the new partner role.

If you are looking for a structure or a sample Business Case, look no further. Based on our years of working with Partner Business Cases, we have identified a structure that most Business Cases will use. Download the structure (and help) here

How to increase the impact of your partner Business Case if it is based on a partner retiring

When a partner leaves the practice, or retires, there is always a risk that their portfolio will walk out with them, or steadily start to retire as well. After all, most professional advisors’ clients are within 10 years of their age. If you do the maths, then you will realise that inheriting a partner’s client portfolio may not to be the good deal it seems on the surface. If this is what your partner Business Case is based upon, then your business case needs to consider:

• How will you defend what you have got so it stays with the firm? This will likely include doing a client portfolio analysis to truly understand what is worth keeping and what can be let go without concern.
• How will you expand what you have been given, particularly as it will likely have received very little attention recently? What is actually worth expanding?
• How will you ensure a seamless handover? (Of course, that’s if you have the luxury of a handover!)
• What will you do to bring in new clients? (After all, you will likely lose a material proportion of the client portfolio you inherit.)

If you are reading this and feeling despondent. Don’t worry, most lawyers, accountants and consultants like you are taught to be great technicians; not great at business planning and putting together commercial and persuasive documents. After all, your Business Case for partnership needs to feel very commercially sound AND persuasive. To help you do this, we put together our course “How to Build a Cast-Iron Business Case for Partner”.  It’s included within our subscriber-only site Progress to Partner. This course is one of the most downloaded of any of the 150+ resources within Progress to Partner. 

How to increase the impact of your partner Business Case if it is based upon your department growing and needing another partner

When a department grows it may need more partner-level people to service the workload. Many clients only want to deal with a partner, rather than a competent director, senior associate or senior manager. Or perhaps the work of the department is so complex, high profile, or sensitive that it needs someone of partner-level standing to manage the project. If there are too many clients or assignments like this, the department will have a Business Case to bring in another partner. If you are in this situation, you may find that other partners in the department will ‘donate’ some clients to you to get your client portfolio up-and-running. Of course, they will never give you their best clients! Typically you will get the clients with the least potential to grow or do anything interesting.

This situation is very common in firms with large audit practices. To keep an audit client an audit partner will ‘roll off’ a client, and a different audit partner in the firm will then take this client over. Without this change of audit partners the client may decide, due to good governance principles, to change its auditor. But to do the partner switches the firm needs a certain number of audit partners. This can often lead to a new audit partner being made up.

If this is your situation, then your partner Business Case needs to demonstrate:

• Why you are a safe pair of technical hands.
• How you plan to expand and grow what you have been given.
• How you plan to win your own clients.

If you are looking for a structure or a sample Business Case, look no further. Based on our years of working with Partner Business Cases, we have identified a structure that most Business Cases will use. Download the structure (and help) here:

How to increase the impact of your partner Business Case if it is based upon your client portfolio being too good for your firm to lose

This is probably the most common Business Case: you have built up your own practice from scratch, and it has become so important that your partnership can not afford to lose you or your practice. In this type of partner Business Case, you need to state:

• How your practice has grown year by year, by headcount and value.
• How valuable your current practice is to the partnership, e.g.
  • Projected figures, revenue and contribution, of how big it will grow in the next 3 years.
  • Your top 5-10 client accounts or matters and how much each was worth to the partnership.
  • How much work you up sold or cross-referred to the practice year by year.
  • Your top 5-10 referrers and how much work by value and volume they sent you (whether or not your team serviced the work).
• Evidence of your expertise and authority in the marketplace, e.g.
  • awards or any league tables you appear in.
  • PR.
• How you plan to grow your practice further and how you will actually do this.
• A clear statement of why you need to be admitted to the partnership.

This type of Business Case is more common in law firms than other firms. It is often found to be successful where the firm doesn’t have mature or formalised talent management processes. This type of Business Case comes with a warning. There is often a big difference between what the individual and firm think is ‘too important to lose’. Firms know that not every client will follow a fee earner. Indeed, if they are worried about this happening, they will put the individual on gardening leave and then enforce the 6-month restrictive covenant. These 6 – 9 months of breathing space between an individual resigning and their restrictive covenant ending is often enough time to stop the client from following the departing fee earner.

If you are reading this and feeling despondent. Don’t worry, most lawyers, accountants and consultants like you are taught to be great technicians; not great at business planning and putting together commercial and persuasive documents. After all, your Business Case for partnership needs to feel very commercially sound AND persuasive. To help you do this, we put together our course “How to Build a Cast-Iron Business Case for Partner”.  It’s included within our subscriber-only site Progress to Partner. This course is one of the most downloaded of any of the 150+ resources within Progress to Partner. 

How to increase the impact of your partner Business Case if it is based upon your network of trusted contacts who can open doors for other partners in the firm

This type of partner Business Case is common where a person has been in industry for a number of years. The position the person held in industry, is often high profile or a senior decision maker. The strength of their partner Business Case is based on how easily they can get the firm’s partners in front of the right people. In this type of Business Case you may not be able to point to direct evidence of your ability to sell. You will need to show in your Business Case:

• Who in your little black book could easily  be introduced to the firm, and what the potential value of that introduction could be.
• Evidence of your authority and expertise, e.g.
  • PR, awards and endorsements you have gained, industry committees you sit on or lead.
• A brief history of your experience and how this will help the firm going forward.

How to increase the impact of your partner promotion Business Case if it is based upon your strong relationships and deep knowledge of an important client or introducer

Sometimes an individual becomes so important to a client that, in effect, the client becomes “theirs”, regardless of who won the client in the first place. Although the partner who believes that they brought the client into your firm may dispute this! This can result from the individual undertaking a secondment with the client or introducer. For example, I’ve seen two successful partner promotion Business Cases based on the following premises:

1. A turnaround specialist spent 12 months on secondment in a bank. As a result of the strong relationship he built in the bank, he could get his firm onto important panels AND get a disproportionately big part of the work from these panels. If he had left his firm, he would have taken his network within this bank with him, and the firm would have lost this significant stream of work.
2. A corporate lawyer spent 6 months as an associate in a retailer where the firm struggled to gain a proper foothold. As a result of the secondment, the retailer only sent work directly to this associate and refused to deal with anyone else in the firm. She expanded the client into a major account for the firm.

If you are in this situation, you will need to demonstrate:

• How you have expanded the client account or the amount of work which comes from a particular introducer. E.g. revenue or contribution.
• How strong your ties are with the client or introducer and how they rarely, if ever, go anywhere else in the firm to talk about new business.

If you are looking for a structure or a sample Business Case, look no further. Based on our years of working with Partner Business Cases, we have identified a structure that most Business Cases will use. Download the structure (and help) here:

How to increase the impact of your partner promotion Business Case if it is based upon an opportunity to enter a new marketplace or offer a new service

Typically this type of partner promotion Business Case is exclusively for lateral hires into the firm. In this type of Business Case you will need to demonstrate:

• Your credentials to build up this new service offering or this new market sector.
• Your track record at winning new business for the last three years, broken down by year.
• How you plan to use the existing firm infrastructure to build up your new practice, e.g. cross-referrals from other departments.
• The team you will build beneath you.
• Risks and critical success factors associated with your business case.
• How many of your current client list or introducers will come with you when you move to the new firm.

If you are reading this and feeling despondent. Don’t worry, most lawyers, accountants and consultants like you are taught to be great technicians; not great at business planning and putting together commercial and persuasive documents. After all, your Business Case for partnership needs to feel very commercially sound AND persuasive. To help you do this, we put together our course “How to Build a Cast-Iron Business Case for Partner”.  It’s included within our subscriber-only site Progress to Partner. This course is one of the most downloaded of any of the 150+ resources within Progress to Partner. 

How to increase the impact of your partner promotion Business Case if you run a business support department

Very occasionally, a firm will admit non-fee earners to the partnership. These tend to be people in critical lead roles in their practice management departments, e.g. HR Director or Marketing Director. The whole premise of their Business Case is built upon how much more effectively they could do their job if they were privy to the sensitive and confidential conversations around the partnership table. There tends to be some non-negotiables before a partnership will entertain the thought of a non-fee earner being admitted to the partnership:

• They and their department are highly regarded across the firm.
• They are personally liked and seen as highly valuable to the firm.

Typically a Business Case for a non-fee earner is based on some or all of these premises:

• There is a precedent in the marketplace to admit the person doing this role to the partnership. Firms that have done this are seen to be outperforming their peers.
• There are numerous examples of where the partners would have been put under less stress, had an easier time, or lost less money if this individual had been able to guide their thinking earlier in the process. Typically this involves large-scale change projects for a partnership, e.g. merger or acquisition, major restructuring.
• The individual can identify exactly how their department would be able to deliver a better service to the partnership if they had a position at the partnership table.

In summary

No one Business Case is the same as any other. However, if you know the premise your partner promotion Business ase is built upon, you can easily maximise the impact of your case.

What’s in Progress To Partner which will help you with your final step up to partner?

Progress to Partner is our membership site that will give your the knowledge AND confidence to fly through this final step up to partner.

It’s like a Netflix for your career in the professions. Find what you need to watch or read at the time you need it. Within the site, you’ll find over 150+ courses, videos, checklists, templates and plans to help you progress your career to partner. Amongst the many curated resources (no more unnecessary scrolling or searching), you’ll find:

1. On-demand courses on how to create and articulate your business case, including our most downloaded course “How to Build a Cast-Iron Business Case for Partner”
2. A section on the Partnership Admissions process with guides and recordings to help you find your way through the process with your sanity intact.
3. Recordings and checklists on how to ace your partner panel interview
4. On-demand courses on how to win the right sort of clients
5. Proven advice on how to still do the day job and find the time to get through the Partner Track process

Check it out!