Steve Herz
speaker
95 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Steve Herz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I think there's never going to be a shortage for companies to improve their culture. And I think it's a need. Ultimately, you know, like you said earlier, skills and abilities are great, but what need are you filling in another company or another person's life? And if you're not fulfilling a need, then there's no value to it.
Thanks, Heather. Happy to be here.
Sure. So when I was in my second year of law school at Vanderbilt in 1990, I worked for a law firm called Curtis Malay Prevost, a Park Avenue law firm in New York. And the way the law works is that you get to find out if you get a job coming back at the end of law school after your second summer. And so it's a big deal. Most of the good jobs are taken in that wave of job offers.
And at the very end of the summer at Curtis Prevost, there were, I think there were 29 or 30 summer associates. And I was the last one to be called into the managing partner of the program's office. His name was Turner Smith. And all of the 29 previous kids that had gone in before me were all given offers.
And it was kind of a very euphoric feeling in the office in the last week of the program, that August of 1990. And I walked in, and he looked at me, and he said, we take it very seriously when we don't give someone an offer. We really know that it's putting kind of a black mark on your record. It's going to make it very hard for you to get a job in the law.
And in your case, we didn't really stress about it. We're not giving you an offer. And we don't think you should practice law. And he said, I don't even think you should. Maybe you shouldn't even consider finishing law school. And I think you would be much better suited coming back here as a client, as a business owner or a businessman, rather than continuing the law.
And so that was the gut punch. And I kind of reeled out of his office with a whole new focus of what the rest of my life would look like. Because up until then, those first 25 years were directly in that one singular manner of I'm going to become a lawyer.
No, no plan B. As I said, I mentioned this in the book, my dad is now retired, but he was a successful attorney. I have two older brothers that were and are successful lawyers, cousins, aunts, uncles. I mean, it's just like, it's the family business basically. And I grew up our family, you know, kind of pastime is arguing and dating. So this was it. This was my whole life.
And then it was gone in an instant, in a sense.
It's interesting. I mean, we're going back 30 years now. So I'm committing this to memory that I think I was just lost for a while. Look, the good news is that I agreed with Turner Smith.
I think the worst part about getting fired from a job, I would think, this luckily has never happened to me, is that you get fired from a job and they tell you you're no good at the entire field and you actually don't believe them. You do believe you're good at it. I knew I wasn't cut out for it. So that was kind of, in a weird way, it was comforting and discomforting at the same time.
It was kind of a double whammy in the sense that I now had to go figure out what else could I do with my life after not having thought about it. So I was kind of lost for a while. I had this last year of law school to finish and it didn't make sense not to finish. And also, you know, take the bar. So my dad and mom were like, hey, just take the bar.
If you don't want to go practice law, at least you'll say you could have done it. So that was I knew there was another year of all that. And I did all that. Luckily, passed the bar, etc., But I just didn't really know what I wanted to do. And nothing really came to me. And I did end up practicing law briefly from my dad's law firm on Long Island.
And that's when I kind of just had this weird thing happen. I was reading the newspaper one day, the New York Times sports section. And there was an article about this goalie for the New York Rangers named John Van Biesbroeck. And it was a story about how he was going to be traded, likely to be traded.
And there was a quote in the article from his agent, Lloyd Friedland, of Garden City, Long Island, where I was working at the time. And I couldn't believe it. Somebody was working in a field that I was interested in, in the same little place I was. And I went into the law firm, little law firm library, and took out the white pages and
And looked up the name Lloyd Friedland, found his law firm and business, and cold called him. And he picked up the phone, who the hell are you? I tell him I'm this guy who went to University of Michigan, worked in the athletic department, knows a lot about sports, and I'm giving this entire crazy sales pitch, not knowing that everything I was saying was really irrelevant to his business.
And I didn't have what I thought I had, but I was too ignorant to know that I didn't have anything to offer this guy. And he was luckily either not smart enough about the business or just didn't care and like what he was hearing. And he said, all right, let's have lunch. And so we had lunch the next week and he hired me.
He decided he wanted to start a small sports agency and he was going to try to grow this practice beyond this one or two clients he had. And it was Valentine's day of 1992. And that was when I guess kind of my life changed. I was in the field that I thought I might be good at.
Well, that job wasn't what I hoped it would turn out to be, but it led me to something, I guess, the right place. Lloyd was a very good guy and he had all the right intentions, but he was primarily, and is primarily still to this day, a successful matrimonial lawyer. And he was trying to build off these few clients.
He didn't really have the time or the energy or frankly, the industry context to build out a business like this. And I certainly didn't know anything. And it was kind of the blind leading the blind in a way. And after about six months, I think he realized he was throwing money down a rat hole with me. I was completely useless to him. at least in this incarnation of his business at that point.
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