Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
The Best Business Advice I’ve Ever Received 5-12-25
12 May 2025
In this episode, Scott Becker shares the top two lessons that shaped his career: the power of building great teams and the importance of respectful, people-focused leadership for long-term success.
Full Episode
This is Scott Becker with the Becker Private Equity and Business Podcast. Today's discussion is the best piece of advice I ever received in business. And so this discussion today, I'm going to give two pieces of advice, and it's been teed up for me. I have a keynote talk this Wednesday at the Advancement Link Young Health Leaders Summit, which is a great organization. The talk is in Atlanta.
In the interview, he posed one of these questions, you know, what's the best advice you ever received in business? And so here's what I'll tell you. The two best pieces of advice I ever received was, first was from a lawyer named Jerry Peters, who was a leader in a law firm, one of the best law firms in the world, called Latham & Watkins.
And Jerry had built this incredible practice, huge practice in healthcare law, Kaiser Permanente was one of his first big, big clients, but had really built a fantastic practice. And he was nice enough to sit down with me when I asked him to and asked him for advice about building a practice.
And he was very clear about the key to building a great business, a great practice, is to build great teams. And this may seem so pedestrian and so not that substantial, but But the reality is it's so, so important because so many of the business icons, you don't hear about them building teams. You just hear about them, whether Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, whoever it might be.
And what's lost sight of is all of these people did it through building fantastic teams and great products, not just themselves. They may be energizing, they may be a fire starter, but nothing great gets done without great teams.
The second great piece of advice that I learned, and it was really an education for me, and you got to remember, I grew up in business 30, 40 years ago when people yelled and screamed, and this is how they got things done. It was more important to be respected than it was to be liked, and so many other things like that. It was more thought of as a hierarchy and top-down leadership model.
And in the old days, to get things done quick, you yelled at other people to move them along. And one of the brilliant lawyers I worked with, Marcelo Corpus, who was a few years younger than me, pulled me aside one time after dressing down another associate at the firm about performance on a project. And he said to me, look,
You might be right that that performance was bad, but when you yell at that person, right or wrong, you're totally screwing up the culture that we're trying to build here and what you're trying to do. And this was, to me, great advice. To my credit, I took the advice. I'm imperfect, but I largely from that day on.
evolved my management style away from that results-driven to much more gratitude-driven and people-driven. And I just thought it was a fantastic piece of advice and stuck with me for the rest of my career, that if you want to build teams, you better respect people and treat them nicely and not just be results-driven that moment. You might get slower results,
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