"Hey, Emma? It's Bill McBride in Tampa. I called to wish you happy birthday and I hope everything is OK over in St. Pete. Yeah? Well, ya'll sure do work well together over there. Is there anything I can do to help you?"
"Hey Jack, Bill McBride in Tampa. I'm fine. Is it cold in D.C.? I called to say happy birthday. Did they give you chocolates? I'm glad. Happy birthday. Can I help you with anything? Yeah. Mmm hmm. I sent a letter to a bunch of my clients about that. OK. I'll keep it in mind. Yeah, it's hard. Thanks. Happy birthday, Jack."
Trading pleasantries in his Leesburg drawl, McBride well-wishes 10 Holland & Knight employees, from partners to paralegals, from Florida to New York to California. He does the same thing every day, ensuring that each employee in the firm gets to talk to the boss at least once a year. The calls exemplify the feel-good corporate culture that chairman emeritus Chesterfield Smith created as he built Holland & Knight into Florida's biggest law firm. McBride, Smith's protege, has mastered the firm's high-touch culture. But the friendly, aw-shucks fellow dishing out happy birthdays is also the man behind the drive to make Holland & Knight one of the largest law firms in the world.
McBride sees the legal profession evolving quickly into a borderless playing field where being a big regional firm won't be good enough. Elected managing partner in 1992, when Holland & Knight had 280 lawyers, McBride has led mergers and acquisitions that have more than tripled the firm's size and taken it far beyond Florida - including offices in Atlanta, Boston, New York City, California and Mexico City. Deals are pending in Tel Aviv and Argentina.
He may be setting his firm on the course to global success. In the process, however, McBride will be risking the firm's future as a business - and its soul. Preserving Holland & Knight's culture at all costs could water down its ability to compete. Success in the global arena, on the other hand, could kill the culture that has made the firm what it is. Joseph Klock Jr., chairman and managing partner of Steel Hector & Davis, a Miami-based competitor, says watching McBride try to pull it off is like watching someone lift 3,000 pounds of weight: "You have a high level of regard for it and you're really impressed," Klock says, "but you wouldn't want to try it yourself."
While Holland & Knight has gotten bigger - it rose from the nation's 17th largest firm in 1997 to 12th last year and will move up again this year, according to the National Law Journal - the firm's profits haven't increased proportionately. American Lawyer ranked it 50th in the country last year in total gross revenues, at $168.5 million, and 76th in profits per partner, at an average of $365,000. "Their model is not as entrepreneurial as others," says Ritchenya Shepherd, who writes a weekly column on firms for the National Law Journal. "Others are definitely watching them to see if there's room in the market for this type of firm."
Bill McBride isn't worried. Believing he's seen the future, he feels compelled to position Holland & Knight accordingly. A figurine of a wizard in his office reminds him of Merlin, the magician who could foretell King Arthur's fall but couldn't stop it. "That would be the worst fate in the world,'' he says, "knowing the future and not being able to have any control over it."
McBride, 54, has been trying to control the future since he was a kid growing up in Leesburg, the eldest child of William Sr., a TV repairman, and Patricia, a homemaker. The marriage was rocky, and young Billy tried to shield his two siblings - Paul, now an engineer in Charlotte, N.C., and Cheryle, who owns a Tampa travel agency - from the emotional turmoil. "The worse it got with our parents, the more we bonded," says Cheryle, close enough to McBride that they take family vacations together. "He was my mother and my father and my friend. Maybe it was unfair, all the pressure we put on him."
If McBride felt the pressure, it did not show. By the end of high school, he was the all-round, All-American Boy: An honors student, Mr. Leesburg High, president of the senior class, governor of Florida Boys' State, and most valuable football player, playing fullback and linebacker. In the fall of 1963, he headed to Gainesville on a football scholarship to the University of Florida.
Energy
During his freshman year, McBride's parents divorced - about the same time he blew out his knee. McBride gave back his scholarship and worked three jobs to put himself through school. He waited tables at the University Inn, shelved books at the library, and, during every break, worked at the Concord Hotel in New York's Catskill Mountains. Tampa lawyer Bob Bolt, a fellow UF student, remembers driving with McBride in a beat-up VW Bug from Gainesville to the Concord during Christmas break one year. "We worked as busboys all day, as waiters all evening, then we would party until dawn and do it again," says Bolt. "He has an incredible amount of energy." Indeed, McBride found time to serve as president of ATO, the largest fraternity on campus, and treasurer of UF's Blue Key, the club whose members have constituted much of Florida's political elite.
Mr. Smith's Lesson
McBride earned a degree in English in 1967 and enrolled in UF's law school, seemingly on track for a career in politics. But that academic year, he lost a bitterly contested race for student body president. By the end of the year, he had something more serious on his mind: Vietnam.
Driven as much by machismo as patriotism - 30 years later, those two traits are still as obvious in McBride as his 6'3", 250-pound frame - he dropped out of law school and joined the Marines. In 1969, he graduated first among 163 soldiers at the Army Ranger School, one of the only Marines to ever do so. As an infantry platoon commander in Vietnam, he saw combat and lost men. He doesn't talk much about it. He spent his last year of duty in Quantico, Va., teaching officer candidates how to lead platoons. He came home with numerous citations and a group of friends he still gets together with once a year. "I learned that people will do great things if you trust them and believe in them," he says. "And I learned that the only way to get people to do very hard things is if you're willing to do them yourself and they know that."
That's the first of two lessons McBride carries with him to work each day. The second he learned from Smith, who, after being elected president of the American Bar Association in 1973, plucked McBride out of law school to work as his assistant in Chicago. "Mr. Smith taught me a lot about intellectual courage," McBride says. "He tends to say and do what he really believes rather than what other people want him to say and do. Sometimes it's hard, but that's how I try to be."
Smith, a taskmaster who frequently wadded up speeches that McBride had stayed up all night to write, became like family. When McBride graduated from law school in 1975, Smith brought him into Holland & Knight as an associate. He started McBride out in Lakeland, then moved him around to work with the firm's top partners in different fields and different offices: Tallahassee, Bradenton, and finally, Tampa, where McBride found his niche in banking law.
McBride's work in banking helped him make partner and led him to the woman who would become his wife: NationsBank executive Alex Sink. It also convinced him that the firm needed to change. He saw national businesses becoming more a part of Florida, and Florida businesses expanding their scope nationally and internationally. He came to believe the firm, too, needed offices around the country. In 1992, after stumping Holland & Knight offices around the state on a platform of expansion, he won a contested election for the managing partner job.
The victory coincided with one of the lowest points in his life, however. When McBride joined the firm's Tampa office in 1977, Maribeth Roja became his secretary and soon, his best friend and confidant. They worked together for 15 years until May 18, 1992, when Roja's husband shot and killed her and then himself. McBride was devastated. "She was smarter than I was, she worked harder than I did, she was there all the time, she made friends easier. When we started out, she was making $20,000 a year, and pretty soon I'm making $100,000. That's always been something I just don't get."
The memory of Roja shaped many of McBride's early decisions as managing partner. Asked for his proudest accomplishment, he points not to Holland & Knight's growth, but to the system he implemented in 1992 that gives staffers and associates a role in evaluating partners. Like many of McBride's ideas, it's two-edged - altruism coupled with practical business strategy. The firm has established children's issues as the focus of its philanthropic efforts, for example, and donations favor the organizations where employees invest time as volunteers. The strategy serves a social good, but it also gives McBride a way to say "no" politely to requests for money and helps to focus the efforts of a large, dispersed firm around common goals. It's not bad advertising either. McBride, who keeps a dizzying charity schedule himself, is the first to admit he hopes it all comes back around. "What we're trying to do is become so important in the communities we're in that those communities would really miss us if we had a bad year," he says. "It gives us a buy-in."
Keeping that buy-in, however, has become more problematic as Holland & Knight has grown. A small Washington, D.C., office grew after a 1994 merger with Dunnells & Duvall, and it's now the firm's largest, with 134 lawyers, and the model for expansion. But so far, no other has been as successful. The Atlanta office - started in 1994 through a merger with a six-lawyer firm and expanded in 1995 with the merger of 43-lawyer Branch, Pike & Ganz - has struggled with high turnover. The New York office - formed in a 1997 merger with international maritime firm Haight Gardner Poor & Havens - did not expand services or draw international clients as quickly as some partners had hoped, although the office recently had its best quarter.
McBride is willing to sacrifice short-term results for long-term success. The firm has continued practices like compensating partners based on the success of the entire firm, not individual offices. McBride alone is responsible for deciding how much each partner earns, a task he says is his toughest. (In addition to the blind staff evaluations, he considers about 20 different criteria, including community service. McBride won't disclose his own salary. Partners say he returns a portion of it to the firm.)
Positioning
Ward Bower, a law firm management consultant with Altman Weil Inc. in Newtown Square, Pa., says McBride is ahead of his time in his view of the future of the profession. Increasingly, Bower says, global and national corporations will seek one law firm with branches in the cities where they do business rather than multiple firms serving multiple offices. Holland & Knight will be better-positioned, and much better-priced, than its New York-based counterparts, he says. "The most important thing they can do is hone and refine a unique Holland & Knight approach that's the same whether you're a client in Florida or California or some other country," Bower says. He adds that McBride is doing a better job of that than most. McBride hosts huge meetings twice a year, for example, that involve all the firm's offices. He asks long-time partners to relocate and teach newly acquired firms the Holland & Knight way. The latter strategy has caused grumbling in Florida offices, where some lawyers say moving experienced partners out of state has cut quality back home.
McBride preaches patience. The firm has begun to attract a number of corporate heavyweights, including Marriott Corp., Motorola, General Electric, New York Life and John Hancock. And profits per partner continue to grow, an average of 9% to 11% more each year for the past seven years. "It's not that we're not trying to compete and make more money," McBride says. "But we don't want to do that to the detriment of what we are."
That's the primary worry inside Holland & Knight. "There are still some people in the firm who aren't so sure this is the right thing to do," says Buddy Schulz, a partner in the firm's Jacksonville office who has known McBride for nearly 40 years. Still, Schulz and other partners say, McBride inspires confidence even among his detractors. After McBride's motivational speeches at company meetings, Schulz says, "most people are willing to do anything he asks them to do."
That charisma and leadership have a lot of people asking McBride to run for office. Smith, now 82 and a shrewd observer of politics, says McBride would make a great governor, but a lousy legislator. "Legislators make compromises," Smith says. "Bill likes to decide what's right and do it." McBride's term as managing partner ends in 2002, and he's not certain he will run again. "My inclination is that you can keep a job too long," he says. He might like to practice law again. He dreams of traveling with his kids. He thinks he may be too old to start running for office, though he wouldn't mind being appointed. "If someone asks me to be president," he laughs, "I'll consider it."