Educating Lawyers
Educating lawyers and other professionals is a major part of what Second Wind has to do to save a client’s livelihood.
Most of these people are highly educated, very bright people, who have no idea what they are doing but truly think they do.
Lawyers in particular assume that they can treat an SBA loan like any other note, despite the bank having a whole slew of regulations specifically for SBA loan management.
For the past few weeks I have been battling over email with a lawyer who refuses to speak on the phone because I am not legal council and he feels I do not contribute anything important to the discussion. This is after he knows that I am the client’s chosen representative. He is a very smart man with multiple law degrees and even a few business degrees. He knows nothing about the SBA!
Yesterday in an email instead of trying to sway his position and get the asset sale completed, I sought to simply educate my opposition. I explained that he cannot sell a dead entity as a going concern and furthermore he cannot sell my client’s business at all. SBA regulations only allow a bank to foreclose and auction. This means any alternative had to be proposed from my side of the table. I also provided the contract and financials once more and wrote 25 bullet points on why my offer exceeded any value of an auction and cited specific SBA documents to show the reasons.
This morning, after checking my facts with the SBA directly, he has decided I may have merit after all and that he would like to talk later today about the specifics of my offer.
This tells me two things. The first is that he never really looked at the paperwork sent along because I am not a lawyer and therefore am useless in his eyes. The second is that Second Wind just beat that banker for the asset sale. The number is not decided and there is a fistfight on the way, but if the lawyer is willing to talk then the asset sale will go through and the business will be safe from legal issues.
Instead of just showing the numbers and why our plan was better. I had to teach this lawyer that his plan was not an option first. Once you remove the lawyers plan, most times they have nothing to fall back on and our plan becomes the only option.
