How My Mentor Built A Multi-Billion Dollar M&A Practice From Scratch

I found a valuable mentor in a senior lawyer, who I was tasked with helping carve out an M&A practice after I graduated from UC Davis School of Law. We started with deals worth a few hundred thousands. Within a year, we were closing multibillion-dollar deals with Fortune 100 companies.

Here’s how he did it:

In the beginning, it was all about getting work. Any type of work, even if that meant losing money. The way it played out is that he’d agree on a pre-negotiated fee that was attractive to clients. That we both might have had to spend ten or twenty hours more on it, or hire a tax specialist who charged exorbitant hourly fees, was immaterial.

We were playing the long game.

One of the first VCs we worked with was so happy with the quality of our work that he started referring other clients to us. Within months, deals in the hundreds of thousands became deals in the millions and then in the tens of millions.

Nonetheless, our methodology for every job remained identical — give it your absolute best. It was antithetical to the common practice of giving larger, more lucrative clients preferential treatment.

I still remember my mentor calling me on a Friday evening and telling me to come back and rework something I’d done. To say I was upset would be an understatement. I was just trying to enjoy my weekend and blow off some steam.

But I ended up acquiescing because this was what I’d signed up for: He’d always been crystal clear about being uncompromising. No one had forced me to work for him — I’d wanted to do it.

His attention to detail and willingness to go above and beyond were legendary. He’d bring in the right experts, agonize until contracts were bulletproof, and cut no corners to ensure everything was at the highest possible level of quality.

He demonstrated what was common sense: That referrals are the best (highest converting) form of marketing, but the hardest to pull off.

The closest thing I can think about that would exemplify the work ethic he espoused would be the cathedral builders of the last millenium. Their philosophy was that even having your grandson come in for a repair would constitute a failure.

And although his labor does not attract millions of tourists every year, it was a work of art in its own right.

I believe that the lessons I learned with him have helped me bring my own company, Qwil, to where it is. We provide financial liquidity as a service to SMBs and independent contractors through the companies that hire them.

Qwil has advanced over $100M and has seen its revenue grow 775% in 2018.

But we’ve had to deal with countless challenges, from raising money to setting up payment rails, to highly complicated compliance and regulation challenges, etc. That attention to detail and the uncompromising meticulousness he instilled in me — even when it comes to the smallest of tasks — has been invaluable.

Each day, I remember my mentor’s mantra: “How you do anything is how you do everything.”