Does a long business slump make you compromise on who you are and what you value? It shouldn’t. Here’s why.
Last year was a tough stretch for my small investigative firm. Business in 2019 was down about ten percent across the board. The peaks and valleys were much more accentuated, which caused some mildly stressful times.
Perhaps most frustrating was that there was really no rhyme or reason to the down year. A big case or two can usually make the difference between a good year and a not-so-good year, and 2019 didn’t have any of those. So that might have been the difference.
What happens in stressful times as a business owner is that you tend to reach. You stop practicing what you preach. You may start taking on work that you wouldn’t normally take or chasing cases out of your wheelhouse. Or worst of all, overpromising and under-delivering.
We never did that. We kept grinding through 2019.
And then the pandemic came.
A down year (or even two) doesn’t mean that we aren’t going to eat. Or that we have to make major cuts or wholesale changes to our business model.
It just means that we are not continuing on that upward-and-to-the-right trend.
That’s frustrating, but it’s ok.
But there is one story that I’m going to take away from 2019, one that I will hold onto forever: It’s about sticking to your guns and being true to who you are.
Now we are in the middle of a worldwide pandemic, this story rings truer than ever.
The Call
In the summer of 2019, I received a call from a New York public relations firm. My name had come up in years past through a mutual friend. The firm was representing a well-known person who was in the midst of a multi-million-dollar legal battle, and they needed some investigative help. When the public relations firm described some of the investigative tasks, at first I was hesitant. Frankly, there was a lot at stake. The case required more resources than my small firm could comfortably offer.
The public relations firm said that I would be hearing from them soon. They wanted to get moving fast, while there was still time before the case came to a head.
I didn’t think much about the matter until September 2019, when I received an email from the law firm representing the well-known person. The email explained that the case would require hundreds of hours of research and in-person interviews all over the country. The firm peppered me with questions about my experience working on cases similar to the one at hand.
But then I turned around the questioning. Frankly, I was a bit puzzled as to why they would want to use a small firm based in Westchester County for what seemed to be more of a national case.
“I have the utmost confidence in my ability as an investigator, and can go toe-to-toe with any investigator out there, but why wouldn’t you use one of the large, multi-national investigative firms for a case like this?”
They had used a larger firm, but didn’t have much luck, and intimated that the bills racked up fast. They also liked the idea of using a small, agile firm and talking directly to the people doing the work.
I told them that I had no interest in risking my reputation for a case. If they were looking for an investigator who was willing to push the envelope into some grey area, they probably had the wrong guy.
I sent the firm a note thanking them for their time. I didn’t hear a thing for more than a month, when I got an email asking if I could meet at the firm’s Midtown office.
What I thought was going to be a meeting introducing me to the investigative team turned out to be a 20-minute whirlwind meeting with some of the legal team members and the ultimate client. It kind of felt like speed dating: Again, they peppered me with questions about my experience and my personal story. The questioning seemed to center on the theme of whether or not my firm and I were capable of handling a case of this magnitude.
I told them that a case like this, with dozens of moving parts, would put a strain on a small firm like ours, where time and resources are limited. If they wanted “agents” on the ground in multiple cities doing interviews simultaneously, I said that, frankly, having a large firm with more personnel was probably a better way to go.
I even gave them the name of the two New York-based investigative firms that I would recommend.
What also came up was the sensitivity of the case and how I felt about it.
I told them that I had no interest in risking my reputation for a case. If they were looking for an investigator who was willing to push the envelope into some grey area, they probably had the wrong guy.
Twenty minutes later, there were no more questions. The attorneys said they were interviewing a number of other firms that day and would get back to me.
I walked away from that meeting about 95% sure I wasn’t going to get the case. I’d spent the majority of my face time talking them out of hiring me. After all, selling is not my strong point. I’m too brutally honest to be a salesperson, and the best salespeople tend to tell folks what they want to hear.
While I walked away thinking that I missed out on a possible career-altering case, I also walked away with a sense of enormous pride.
I didn’t pretend my firm was something it isn’t.
I was completely forthright about my capabilities and skills.
I didn’t promise anything that I couldn’t back up with real action.
And I was completely true to who I am.
Without naming names, I even told my teenage kids about it, using it as an example about how “failing” can be good. Some close family members questioned the sanity of talking myself out of the case.
By mid-November, I had put an item on my to-do list: Draft another note to the legal team, thanking them for their time, presuming that they were headed in a different direction.
To my surprise, a few days later, I got a call from the firm saying that they wanted to sit down the following week to introduce me to the entire legal and investigative team that was going to be working on the case.
The Response
I didn’t write this story to brag about how I landed probably the biggest case of my career.
In fact, it didn’t matter if I had gotten the case at all.
This is a story about being true to who you are. I’ve embraced the fact that I cannot be all things to all people. Not everyone is going to be accepting of my brutal honesty. I am never going to pretend to be something that I’m not. I have zero illusions about the fact that I am not the right investigator for every job.
I guess I’m lucky, in my life and my business, to be in a position to make choices like that.
It’s a damn good feeling.
About the Author:
Brian Willingham is a New York private investigator, Certified Fraud Examiner, and founder of Diligentia Group. To read more Willingham wisdom, check out his blog and his previous stories for PursuitMag.