The managing partner of Consul Group, Sergei Pivovarchik, believes that a lawyer has to be devoted to the profession. Sergei refuses to play by someone else's rules and takes an assertive and active position in his dealings with opponents. He is prepared to invest in his specialists, and colleagues who want to come to work every morning are his reward.
The main element in any firm is its development. You have to know where you are going, how you are going, with whom, and under what flag. I am the person in the firm who thinks about what we can do so that the market hears us, so that we can take our niche and provide the services that are needed, rather than "let us do everything". Before Consul Group I worked on the development of consulting firms. My last positions were as director of development.
One's own firm is like a breath of fresh air. When you work in some large corporation, and not in your own firm, you have to play by someone else's rules. I always wanted to concentrate on one thing and do something that was right for the market: a narrow line of work with strong expertise. In 2013 I found that line, when a new chapter was added to the Tax Code, and Article 378.2, which changed the principle on which commercial property is taxed.
It is impossible to do everything at once. To be a bankruptcy lawyer and a tax lawyer, a specialist in international law and in employment or family disputes. I think that this is the problem of Russian consulting today. Most consultants will provide any service, so long as they are paid. On the American market, for example, most lawyers are narrowly specialised. That is how we work as well. We specialise in advising owners of real property, and we have substantial expertise in the taxation of real property. Over five years, something in this tax is constantly changing, and what you knew the day before yesterday may already be out of date today. And all that happened, it would seem, is that one word in the Tax Code was changed.
The law is a profession you have to be devoted to. You have to be in it 100 per cent, and you have to like what you do. If you are only lukewarm, then you are not a lawyer. Why work at all, especially when what is at stake, for example, is a matter for a client or an employer involving 100 million roubles. The attempts of such a lawyer to prove that he is worth something turn into losses in the budgets of business owners.
You have to sense events. We treat every project as a living organism that evolves step by step. To provide a proper service, you always have to sense how events are developing, not only within the project but beyond it. That view lets you anticipate where you will be tomorrow, and what you will have to face,
- indicates the managing partner of Consul Group, Sergei Pivovarchik.
We understand what we are doing, and we weigh the consequences. We now have many disputes in which the defendant is the government of a constituent entity or the Federal Tax Service. 100% of those disputes are our ideas. We go to clients and say: there is an idea for how to recover part of the tax through the courts. That is an assertive and active position, and there is no other way. We could refrain from looking for ways to reduce the tax burden on our clients, and not argue, for example, with the Government of Moscow, but that is not us.
We always work through every possible way a dispute can develop. In any project we have to know that we will come out of it as the winners. Again, we do not get into fights in which we want to earn a reputation at the clients' expense. That is, if we lose, the client suffers very serious consequences and we do not: the consequences for us are only reputational. We do not play that game.
In this country, people are simply not prepared to pay consultants. On the Russian market, nobody considers that he ought to pay you for advice that has led him to an enormous saving. It seems to them that you spent only five minutes getting to grips with it and then produced a solution. People do not understand that years of experience and practice stand behind your advice. But there is a problem on our side as well, as consultants: so far we cannot say no.
We can hire someone even when the firm has no practice line for him. Sometimes we hire a person even if there are no projects, when we understand that we will need this in the future. In that case we are prepared to invest in such a specialist, if he is ready to lead the practice line and to be its driving force.
I think that a very important part of the coaching we give specialists is independence. If you do not let him take the knocks, he will not become independent. The knocks can be taken on controlled projects, where you know that neither you nor the clients will suffer. The employee learns, and the manager assesses the ability to learn. In many Russian companies people are simply left to fend for themselves, and nothing is explained. The person does not understand what he is doing. In the end the firm loses the person and several months of payroll, and has also destroyed the firm's reputation with someone. We, by contrast, keep developing the specialist: if you want to know, you are welcome to. We will sit down with colleagues and explain to the person what he does not understand.
People are chosen for the firm by "chemistry". It matters to us that a person is a professional at his work, that his eyes light up, and that he wants to learn, and, no less important, there is the chemistry. It may be a collective quirk of all the partners, but each of us has to understand what the person feels. If you sense the person, it is easier to understand his acts and his conduct. It is easier to find a way out of any situation with him. If I do not understand what he feels, I cannot anticipate what he will do in one situation or another.
The worst thing is if one of the employees puts on a crown. It cannot be taken off at all, whatever you do. Such people therefore have to be removed from the team very quickly, because the person starts to poison his colleagues' minds, to set himself above the others, and it turns into a bad story.
For a time we held no meetings at all. I am no fan of meetings, and I do not like them. A meeting is a piece of time you take away from your practical tasks. If it carries no meaning, what is the point? We have weekly meetings, but often I do not know what to talk about at them. Everything is dealt with online, and tasks are adjusted every day. There are departments in which the specialists meet quite often. The development department does so most often.
We live, in principle, at a time when everything is automated. Yes, some of the software is not very convenient. It cannot be built around your own work, but it still frees 50% of working time. In the end everything is planned, and the question of meetings gradually recedes. At my meeting we mostly discuss what passed me by over the previous week: projects I was not involved in, and which stood out as something new and interesting. It is not the case that we settle global questions at the weekly meeting. We are young, and we are alive.
If a friendship has grown out of a partnership, that is something very precious. And friends can run a business together if each of them knows clearly what he is supposed to do. The greatest satisfaction in one's own work is having managed to assemble an excellent team. Not only the partners, but the employees as well. There are tasks that are urgent, and then nobody has to be asked to stay after work. Colleagues plan their own time and may sit until 2-3 in the morning, not so that you will notice and praise them, but because they are interested and they want to do the task now, and not tomorrow. That is the greatest reward for any manager: the wish of colleagues to come to work every morning.
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