Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Will Noveck. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Will, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Looking back at the decisions you made early in your career, particularly whether to join a firm or start your own, do you feel you made the right choice for that stage of your career?
I was working for one of the major test prep organizations for a couple of years and at first it was wonderful — but one day I had a student and we got into a disagreement about whether retrocausality was real (what can I say? I was a philosophy major!)
I thought it was a friendly debate. But he never forgave me for disagreeing with him. He gave the company scathing feedback about me, which led to an investigation. The company ended up taking my side and apologizing to me for the whole thing but I did not like the idea that one person could threaten my job. I decided that day that if I went out on my own, I would never have to worry about being fired.
It was a great decision. That student hated me, but he ultimately helped me strike out on my own and achieve success.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I started with the LSAT (the test you take if you are applying to law school). I noticed that I was getting my clients amazing LSAT scores and then they were screwing up the rest of their application so I expanded my services to provide assistance with the entire application. Editing personal statements is really fun so I started doing those as well.
It evolved into a full service business designed to maximize people’s chances of getting into law school.
Meanwhile my friend’s oldest children were in high school and so my friends started hiring me to tutor ACT even though it was not an initial area of expertise. Again I liked it so much I started offering that as a service.
We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?
#1. DONT
Social media is an enormous time commitment. Do not do it unless it is clearly and obviously worth it. If you can, pay someone else to handle your social media.
My clients spend thousands of dollars with me. They are not going to part with that amount of money just because of an instagram post.
#2 If you are going to do social media, you really need to EXPERIMENT to figure out what people want and what they will respond to. Like so many things, 5% of the posts are getting 90% of the traffic and you need to really mess around and do different things to figure out what that 5% is going to be.
Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?
Being really good! If you are BETTER than the competition you can build your business directly with word of mouth and then you don’t need to spend on advertising.
How did I get really good? Whenever I had to work with someone who seemed impossible to help, I didn’t give up but instead tried harder. That forced me to figure out how to get really good.
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