October Program Wrap-Up: MBA Basics

MBA Basics in Just One Day

On October 12, forty-eight legal marketers got a taste of a traditional business school curriculum. The Capital Chapter’s MBA Day Camp was hosted at Jones Day’s offices near the Capitol, and was taught by Ranjan Daniels (M.B.A., Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University) and Aveek Guha (M.B.A., University of Michigan), each of whom has more than ten years of experience at various financial institutions and Fortune 500 companies. Lexis Nexis sponsored the event.

The mini-MBA course, which spanned approximately seven hours, was specially tailored for legal professionals and marketers. The course covered key concepts in strategy, marketing, accounting, and finance. The instructors made a strong effort to focus on service industry issues and incorporated evaluations of best legal marketing practices wherever possible.

The course provided practical tactics that a participant can employ immediately to improve his or her department’s performance. The instructors suggested taking a multi-disciplinary strategic approach: first analyze one’s clients, competitors and strategic partners, then identify what client problem the firm is trying to solve. Every marketer should be aware of the firm’s core competencies and how these competencies can fulfill current and potential clients’ needs.  Performing an internal and external strategic analysis, such as SWOT or Porter’s Five Forces,
can aid in clarifying the firm’s overall marketing strategy.

In addition to business strategy and marketing, the instructors touched two areas of business that legal marketers tend to be less familiar with: accounting and finance. Someone equipped with a basic working knowledge of accounting can better use quantitative data to support a marketing initiative. The instructors effectively showed how to  measure performance by using key metrics to monitor success. They also explained the main components of basic financial statements and gave shortcuts for quickly evaluating the information. These tools can better enable one to evaluate the firm’s revenue, gross margin, cost of goods sold (COGS), and operating income.

The discussion on finance explained basic financial principles such as the time value of money (what tomorrow’s dollars are worth in today’s terms) and the company cost of capital (the rate of return a company expects for any dollar invested internally). These principles can assist marketers in a variety of ways, such as evaluating a project from a financial perspective, determining how a company is valued from an investment banking perspective, and managing risk through different finance instruments.

As the program ended, many participants were glad that they had been exposed for the first time to such varied yet approachable forms of business analysis. The financial and accounting exercises, usually foreign to most marketers, should prove to be critical tools in expressing value to partners obsessed with budgets and numbers.

Johanna Kasper is a Marketing Assistant in the Washington, D.C. office of McKee Nelson.