Guest: Warren Martin
Warren Martin's answer to how an auditor becomes a rainmaker is a method, not a personality. Study the competitors you actually lose to. Build a network around the people who consistently move a market, rather than whoever happens to be in the room. Become the expert in one narrow vertical so those people want to talk to you. Listen more than you speak, and be the first to make an introduction. Then grow the practice the way you build a house, one brick at a time. He laid it out for Carl Grant III in a sixteen-minute episode of Rainmakers recorded in October 2020, twenty-two years after he hired Carl into his first business development job at PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Three kinds of people worth knowing
Warren describes approaching differentiation almost scientifically. In a crowded professional services market he studied the firms he competed with, how they went to market, and where their strengths and weaknesses left a window. Then he turned that understanding into a deliberate network built around three groups he calls value drivers. The first is the market movers: executives, board members, and serial owners who consistently start, finance, grow, and exit businesses and then do it again. The second is the capital that consistently finances those people. The third is the other influencers who support them, the law firms, insurers, trade associations, and recruiters. He built that network nationally rather than only in metropolitan Washington, and he credits that reach as the thing that set him apart.
Why anyone would want to know an auditor
Carl puts the question bluntly: every successful company needs an audit and nobody wants to buy one, so how does an auditor make people want to know him? Warren's answer is depth and attention. He practiced in one narrow vertical, technology, and set out to understand everything about it, the accounting issues, the financing, the disclosure around an IPO, so he could talk with market movers about the problems they were actually facing. He made a point of listening. At a conference or after a panel he wanted the other person to talk more than he did. And he followed what he calls the win-win rule of business development: be the first to make an introduction. He did not try to meet twenty people in a night. One good conversation with one person he had not met before was the whole goal, and if that person shared his code of conduct he went out of his way to do something for them first.
What a career relationship looks like
Asked to explain a term he taught Carl decades earlier, Warren tells the story of a chief financial officer at a publicly traded software company in Tysons whom he met around 1993. Warren was not doing his work; another firm was. He simply liked him, invested time in him, and introduced him to people who could help his business. Five years later, by then a partner at a leading private equity firm, the same man came back with an opportunity to become auditors for a large publicly traded software company with headquarters in the Netherlands and in Reston. Warren's point is that he was never impatient with people he liked. Those relationships become friendships for life, and business is a part of the friendship. Carl adds his own example: two lawyers Warren pointed him toward early on, one of whom later became counsel to two of his startups and then recruited him to the law firm where he built its business development function.
Bringing business development into a professional services firm
By both men's account, Carl was an early example of a dedicated business development professional inside a professional services firm, and he asks Warren what he was thinking when he created the role. Warren's answer is that Northern Virginia was exploding with new companies coming out of the success of AOL, private equity and venture capital were arriving in the market, and partners who were each responsible for their own business development were drinking from a firehose. He needed help, thought about who he would want alongside him, and met Carl through the Fairfax County Economic Development Authority. He says he knew right away that Carl had the attributes for it.
His advice to a young CPA
Quality over quantity. You build a house one brick at a time, and you build a practice or a career the same way. Do not go to an event looking for twenty business cards; look for one good contact and grow it. A client portfolio grows one client at a time, and a network grows one relationship at a time. Take care of it, because done properly it is a lifetime asset that benefits both parties for the rest of their careers.
Warren and Carl now work together again as partners at AcumenX. Growth Advisory, the practice Carl leads, is where the firm applies the relationship-first view of business development this conversation lays out.
What the episode covers
- Studying the competition to find the windows of opportunity
- The three value drivers in a professional network: market movers, the capital behind them, and the other influencers
- Building a national network rather than a local one
- Becoming the expert in one narrow vertical
- Listening more than you talk, and being the first to make an introduction
- What a career relationship is, and a five-year example of one
- Creating a business development role inside a professional services firm in the late 1990s
- Advice for a young CPA: one brick, one client, one relationship at a time
This episode is part of Rainmakers, the podcast hosted by Carl Grant III.
