This article is written by Ramanuj Mukherjee, CEO, LawSikho.

Let me begin with something that Vijeta Dravid said about Rahul Dravid, one of the greatest batsmen ever from India.

“Now I know that with Rahul’s cricket, nothing is casual, unconscious or accidental. Before he went on tour, I would pack all his other bags, but his cricket kit was sacred – I did not touch it; only he handled it. I know if I packed only two sets of informal clothes, he would rotate them through an entire tour if he had to and not think about it. He has used one type of moisturising cream for 20 years because his skin gets dry. Nothing else. He doesn’t care for gadgets, and barely registers brands – of watches, cologne or cars. But if the weight of his bat was off by a gram, he would notice it in an instant and get the problem fixed.”

That’s an obvious sign of greatness.

Most people will spend a lakh on a TV or 50,000 on a fridge, but not even 20,000 enough on their continuous learning and development. Yes, they think education, learning and development is for school kids and teenagers in colleges. After you have gotten your degree, why should you spend money any more on training and development?

And tools for professional success are alien to most, except for the most successful.

Now compare that with champions. In sports. In business. Even in politics! They invest in growth. The invest in top notch tools. There is no other way to stay on the top of the game.

Obsession about the inputs that go into your performance is, therefore, a sign of greatness. One of those things are the tools of your trade.

Do you have a computer that hangs often, loads pages slowly, or generally underperforms when you are trying to work? As a frugal entrepreneur, I worked with a computer like that at a point of time.

Then someone asked me, how many minutes do you lose in a day due to this slow computer? How about in a year?

I used to think Apple computers are too expensive. A laptop priced around 1 lakh? Why should I buy one when I can get a reasonable Dell laptop for 30k?

Well, I have been using a MacBook for the last 4 years, and it works as well as it used to when it was brand new! Looks like I can use it for another 4 and it will be equally good.

It did not only last longer, but it has also saved me countless hours in the last few years – and I have never bothered with laptop troubles ever. What is that worth when you are trying to build a multi-crore business?

Would you spend money on a keyboard that has mechanical feedback and helps you to type with more accuracy but much faster? Especially if it was 5 times more expensive than normal, mediocre keyboards? Chances are that you do not even know that such a thing exists unless you obsess over your tools of the trade. Neither did I till I discovered the magic of keyboards of mechanical tactile feedback.

I grew up in a lower middle class family, and the value that we must save money at all costs is hard grained into me. I am a congenital bargain hunter. I had to learn how to get out of that habit, because getting a bargain is great but cannot be the only focus in life!

Let me give you some examples.

I have an opportunity to hire a finance and operation wizard, with a proven track record on a part time basis. I expect that the work he does will double the revenue of my company. He has already proven his value by advising me on a capital infusion process that may be a gamechanger. It filled a critical gap in my plans.

He also helped by crunching some data that led to some insights that I had no clue about. I want to hire him, but he expects to be paid around 75k for the work of 3 days a week. It’s not a bargain, at all. It will be a very expensive hire. I do not pay at this scale to any employee, and not even myself! And this hire, like any other, may eventually fail!

Should I go ahead? If I am bargain hunter, absolutely not.

I am planning to hire someone for social media and youtube related work for lawsikho (still not decided, if you are interested and can work full time in our Delhi office, buzz me). I have a choice between paying 15k per month to people who are greenhorn, and not so good in English, or 25k to someone who has standard knowledge of English and better training.

My experience says that the high quality experienced people are expensive, and their expected salary may be double that of average people. But they add 10 times more value than the average people.

Who are you going to hire? Most businessmen will go for the cheaper candidate. Successful businessmen make different choices though.

Early on in our business, we chose to reinvest our money back into the business by building a team. A competitor, who had very similar revenue numbers at the time, chose to never hire an employee. He decided to work with very lowly paid law students who worked for a few thousand of stipend, while we hired highly qualified lawyers. We now have a team of over 30 full time people, and guess how many he does? Still zero.  

This decision to invest into building an organization meant we made less money in initial years personally, did not manage to buy a big car like our competitor did, but we ended up having a much bigger, far more mature, and well developed business which still has a very long way to grow!

As a startup, we usually minimize our salary bills by hiring inexperienced people, and then training them to become good. This works well most of the time. However, what would happen if we keep doing that always, for each and every position? Just like it is important to know where to save money, it is critical to know where to spend. I have no doubt that our growth will be stunted if we never hire leaders and only hire inexperienced people who need training for every position.

To be successful, I had to leave behind my mindset of saving every penny, because that prevents me from investing in growth. Very often expensive things are not just luxury, they are a necessity if you want to grow.

Sometimes they are just good investments.

Can you imagine how much top tennis players in the world spend on their coaches? This article says the average is about 1.5 million USD in a year for top coaches. Sometimes top tennis players pay a percentage of their earnings also, which could run into a lot more!

How much do they spend on their tools? The obvious one is a tennis racket. A top class professional tennis racket is available in the shop for 300-400 USD. But top tennis players easily spend north of 40,000 USD on customizing their rackets for a season!

Top professionals invest in their tools. I see lawyers as professionals who are akin to sportsmen.

They get disproportionate results when they train and get to the top. They must train hard and keep themselves in shape just like top sportsmen. They need good coaches. And the tools they use matter in their performance.

This is the exact place where I have positioned our LawSikho courses. As a tool and a training ground for serious lawyers (as opposed to law students, who are easy pickings, as most of the other legal education companies do). A gym for developing legal acumen and skills.

We work hard to be the Apple of legal education. You may learn something for 3 months or a year, and benefit from it for the next 10 years. If you spend a rupee on us, you should get 10 back, and more, otherwise what are we doing?

Imagine learning to draft a Shareholder Agreement. How long will you be doing it from clients or bosses once you learn that skill? It is such an important skill that it alone can make a difference between getting a job with a top law firm and not getting that.

How much will you earn from that skill over a lifetime? How much time will you save when you get updates from us about new market practices that are emerging for negotiation of Shareholders Agreements or new compliance requirements?

We want you to make all the mistakes in our simulation sessions, and not in front of your boss or clients or the judge. Just like a coach we will guide you through all the mistakes and errors that you may not detect for yourself. That is what we do at LawSikho for over a thousand current students.

Many people ask me why we keep increasing our price and not charge as less as our competitors do.

Could we charge 2000 or 5000 for a course and still offer this kind of value? I do not know how to. If you can tell me I am eager to hear.

But what about a treasure chest of legal resources that can help you to expand your practice and increase your annual income by lakhs? How about learning to do work that very few in the market can do, and for which you can charge in lakhs?

We can do that for you. Just check our Master Access. You can get a 5 year access to it for 1 lakh.

We want to constantly evolve it, so that it becomes an inevitable tool that every growing law practitioner is forced to buy to stay ahead of the competition. Or even better, eventually, just to keep up. It would take a few years for the brand name to get there as the word spreads, but those who adopt it early will benefit the most.

We are so confident that we are even giving a 1 month money back guarantee. If you use it and don’t like it, we will return your money. That requires us to have confidence in our product, doesn’t it?

Now the question is, do you have the confidence in yourself to invest in yourself at that level?

You may not be ready yet to invest in something like Master Access yet. No worries. You will get there someday. But do think about it, according to where you are currently, are you adequately investing in your future growth? That is the biggest determinant of who you are going to become, a year, or 10 years down the line.

What are the critical tools for you right now? Are you scrounging there or doing justice?

Most successful lawyers, as of now, have not done our courses. It is not a sine qua non.

But since you read our emails, I invite you to think about the question of investment in your professional success – how are you doing it? If you are not doing it, how do you expect to succeed? What’s the strategy here? I really want to know.

Do tell me – what are your biggest tools for professional success? What tools have given you best returns till date? Reply to this mail and let me know!

Get ahead by crawling if you can’t run. Willingness to pay the price, through time, effort and money is the most important thing on the path to success.

All the best!

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