Nobody likes being told to do something when it makes no sense. The Lawson Group strives to help its clients in a way that makes sense, works for a specific company’s needs, and prioritizes the best interests of its employees.
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The business now was up to about 40 people, we do about $8 million a year with the revenue. We’re in one of the nicest office buildings in Concord, New Hampshire, and people will say to me, “So how did you have the plan to do this Forty three years ago?”
Generally, I laugh because it was never a plan to do this. It was never a plan to have a business with 40 employees and to be that big, it was really in the beginning all about just feeding my family.
I went to work for OSHA right out of graduate school. I always like to say that it turns out I’m not really good with authority figures. I don’t like being told to just do something because it’s what you should do when it makes no sense.
So I lasted about four years with OSHA and then left to start a company to do OSHA-type consulting work. People who either had questions or problems with OSHA would hire us, hopefully, to go in and help them solve their problems.
When the company started with just me and again, I would say that the staff that I had were my 70-plus-year-old mother and father. My mother did most of my clerical secretarial work on an electric typewriter with carbon paper.
I used to sit on my parent’s living room floor and we’d sort of 300 pieces of mail by zip code order. Wrap it up into bundles with rubber bands, take boxes of mail to the post office, put it in the mail, wait a week or 10 days and jump on the phone and start dialing for dollars and try to set up sales costs.
I can’t even tell you what I was doing back then. I would literally work from four or five o’clock in the morning some days earlier than that until I’d fall asleep at a desk at midnight or one o’clock the next morning. And I would just go and go like that for a week or two at a time until I would just collapse for two or three days and do nothing but sleep, and I get up and do it all over again.
And it wasn’t because I wanted to do that. It’s because that’s what was necessitated in the early days of the business when it’s just one person, you’ve got to do everything for yourself.
Value Past Customers
So we started to realize that no surprise is that once you actually do work for somebody, they can become a source of future work. So over time, it shifted from me doing the bulk mailings and phone calls to calling back customers that I had.
In the very early days of this—and I still harp on it to this day—I used to have my A, B, and C list, and the A, B, and C list was in my head, not on a piece of paper even.
And the “A” companies were companies I had done work for and I knew I was going to do more work for them. The “Bs” were the people that I had done some work with and hoped to do more, and the “Cs” were people that I thought were good chances that we might do work for them, and then everybody else fell off the list.
Case in point, we had a company in Connecticut where we did a bunch of work for. All of a sudden I call back one day just to follow up and they said, “Oh, I’m sorry, he’s not here anymore.”
And I asked the stupid question and said, “Where is he?”
Well, he now works for our sister company down in Florida. So I tracked him down. I called him in Florida, and he was surprised that I had tracked him down. I said, “I was hoping you might have a chance to use us down there.”
And the next thing you know, I’m on a plane to Florida to go work for them. And that translated into, I think we’ve done that work in twenty-six states around the country.
The same thing happened to somebody I had worked with who changed jobs two or three times, ended up at a major oil company, and had an affiliation with their office up in Alaska. And the next thing you know, I’m on a plane flying to Alaska to work inside the Arctic Circle for a major oil company.
Help Customers Make it to Dinner
One of the things I learned early on in doing business is that not only is it all about the relationships, but the more you can help the person that you’re doing work for get their job is done (and I always used to say go home on time to their family) the more they will seek you out to help them.
And the more helpful you can be, the more you will be able to do work with them between then and now.
Over 40-something years, I’ve probably made several million dollars worth of mistakes. I think the biggest attribute that I’ve been able to accumulate over that time is learning from those really expensive mistakes that I made.
And so you learn how to not make the same mistake again, and the mistakes that I make nowadays are smaller and way less expensive.
But what I did learn was the more you can deliver on what you promise a customer you’re going to deliver, the more respect they have for you, and the more likely they are to come back to get you to help them with other things.
Everybody in the building is actually a salesman. It’s not just the people who actually sell for a living, and I always say that everything you do every day to do a good job for your customer to deliver the services promised return phone calls, get them the thing that you promise you were going to get to them.
All of that is considered marketing. It’s all the things that make us valuable assets so that we have something to sell.
Somebody told me 100 years ago, you can’t sell from an empty wagon. And so if you’re selling a product, you obviously have to have the product on the shelf.
When you’re in the professional services business like we are your wagon is the stock and trade of the people that work for you.
If they didn’t do such a good job, then we wouldn’t have a product to sell where the product that we sell is the people that do the work for us.
Know When to Make a Change
So many people come, people go, Oh, you’re so lucky you own your own business. Luck has nothing to do with it. You might be in the right place at the right time to take advantage of something. But somebody who can start and build a business looks for an opportunity or a void and finds a way to fill it.
And it’s that opportunity or void that they fill that creates the business that they have.
We had a huge job with the paper mill in northern Maine, where we actually were there as a company for almost three years, and I was up there myself for almost 18 months nonstop. And we kind of came back from all that in about 92 or 93 and said, we have a business, but it’s not really a business. It’s a paycheck. And we employed probably 30 ish people at the time, and we might make 50 grand as a company one year and lose 25 the next and then make twenty-five and lose 50.
So year after year after year we were working our butts off to create a business that really wasn’t much of a business in terms of making a profit and being able to take good care of our people.
And we had a big client in Rhode Island that was self-insured for workers’ comp. And at that time I knew next to nothing about worker’s comp insurance, but I saw an opportunity to work with their third-party administrator in Rhode Island because they might need health and safety people to do loss control to keep people from getting injured on the job.
So their suggestion was if we partnered with them to either start or take over some of the self-insurance groups that were around, they would then hire us or work with us to do the lost control on those companies while they provided the third-party administrative services.
A couple of months after we partnered with them to decide this was a great idea they lost interest because a big insurance company gave them $10 million worth of workers comp insurance to manage in Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
I’ve been accused many times of making the glib statement, “Oh, how hard can this be?” And we’ll just go ahead and do it on our own.
So from about early 1994 until April of 1995, we spent a quarter of a million dollars of borrowed money. It was 100 percent of the line of credit that we had to basically hire a couple of people and chase being in business as a third-party administrator.
And the story I always tell is I was cold calling people to basically say, we’re not in this business. We don’t employ the people that are going to do this. We’ve never done this before. We don’t even have a license to do this. But how would you like to sign up with us?
And I always say that I’m very fortunate that I’m either a really good salesman or I found seven companies that were really silly or foolish that wanted to jump in bed with us because on April Fool’s Day, no joke of 1995, we had seven companies that helped us start our worker’s comp self-insurance group for manufacturers.
We did employ the people and had a license to be able to do all that stuff as of April of nineteen ninety-five. And that has since grown, or that group has since grown from those original seven companies and about three-quarters of a million dollars in premium as of today when we’re shooting this.
We now insure or are the carrier for all practical purposes of self-insurance for almost 375 companies in about $23 million in the state of New Hampshire.
