Peter Hecht, Mark Calzaretta and Bob Ackerman formed Magna in 2007. Peter’s dad and Bob used to play basketball before Peter was even born and Bob liked to say that he knew Peter before they even met. Mark was friends with Peter’s sister in high school. Mark was also a friend of the Ackerman family and he and Peter worked for Bob at another court reporting company before they formed Magna. In 2011 Bob’s son, Jonathan Ackerman, joined Magna as the founder of its Record Retrieval division. Peter and Jonathan are brothers-in-law, and Mark once had green hair and opened up for KISS. He is still jamming with his band Tabloid Nation. Not sure why that is important, but you get the idea everyone is family here. Albeit a family with a business mindset that, in light of Bob’s passing in December and the company’s 19th anniversary, has seen Magna grow from a few guys from New Jersey with maxed out credit cards to a national powerhouse in litigation support.
What special contributions has each founder brought to the table?
Mark: What we had was chemistry. All of us had good chemistry because we all got along well. On the one hand, we were all capable of doing the same things, like sales. We all had operational experience in our background. But we also had some different disciplines. Bob was a court reporter. Pete was sales. I was a jury consultant. We each brought something to the table, but we also saw things similarly and got along well.
Jon: We all trusted each other, which was key. In a lot of partnerships that’s not true.
Mark: This is like a family. This is like a marriage. Now you see the results and just think it was easy like, “These guys are really successful.” But we got through a lot of rough stuff together like the credit cards being maxed out. Now we are stronger than we’ve ever been. You often don’t get this when you meet the right people at the right time.
Peter: My daughter was diagnosed with Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis in the early years of Magna and had to go through lots of medical procedures. But it was like a family with Magna. These guys were here for me and my daughter. And when we did the fundraising walks, the whole company showed up. And I came up with an idea to raise money for Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia for Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis called Chopped for CHOP. Bob thought my idea – bringing clients up on stage in a mock trial and potentially embarrassing them – well, he was not on board at first. I said we would end up donating $20,000 to the hospital. Bob supported me and my wacky idea. We ran the program for 10 years and raised over $200,000.00. I knew then as I know now with these guys, anything is possible.
What were the different roles everyone played?
Jon: Even though we all ran our own groups within the company, we all had a common mindset, and we still treated it as one company. It was always one company with the same goals.
Mark: Enough is never enough was our shared mindset. We always wanted to do more.
Peter: We love winning. That’s our problem but we are never satisfied. Bob was like, “Don’t just be happy this is just good enough.” And it’s like we all have ESP because we are so familiar with each other personally and professionally. If I’m not at a meeting, Jon knows what I am thinking and can answer for me. These guys know me well enough that they know what my goals are and can make decisions as if they were me.
Jon: That’s chemistry.
Bob was another generation older than you guys. What was that like?
Peter: Bob was like a help line. I could call him 24/7 with whatever was on my mind, and he could always bring me back to my baseline. Having Bob as a partner is hard to describe… he never got rattled, always had a plan and was an amazing listener. In the beginning money was an issue, we had none. We didn’t draw a salary for the first two years. When my credit card declined while bringing clients to lunch, Bob’s steady hand kept us from unraveling. He was able to keep the band together.
Mark: We were much younger so it’s one thing for us to take a risk. But Bob was already set up. He didn’t have to start Magna. So, Bob was a huge influence and mentor. We deferred to him, but he did not rule unless he had to. Not just with us but with anybody.
Jon: At 62 years old, Bob, when most people are thinking about retirement, he was starting a business.
Mark: Bob knew what it took to start a business. We were learning as we go so his experience definitely made a difference.
Peter: I think Bob missed his calling. He could have been on the world stage negotiating peace or trade deals. He was persuasive, astute and strategic. I learned that if you don’t ask, you don’t get. Negotiations was an art form for Bob. Just ask any leasing agents in Philly.
Jon: True story… We were working with a broker who had the value of the company written on a piece of paper as part of his presentation. Bob didn’t think it was right. He had another number in mind. Bob had the broker literally rip up the sheet of paper and throw the pieces in the air. And Bob’s number became the company’s value.
Looking back, is there anything you would do differently when you were starting the company?
Jon: Nothing different.
Mark: You do something differently, things could end up differently and I don’t want to mess with that. We are right where we need to be.
Peter: I could have bought more SWAG. LOL.
What was the best piece of Magna SWAG?
Jon: The Magna North Face jacket.
Peter: We gave out these keychains with a little box about the size and shape of an earbud case. This was maybe around 2006, before the iPhone came out. One side of the case had the Magna logo. The other side had a little screen. You could download your photos into the device and then display them on the screen. Before the iPhone this was a big deal.
Mark seems to have dropped off of the call. You claim to be able to speak for each other. What would Mark say was the best SWAG you ever gave out?
Peter: Since we are both totally bald, I’d say he loves the Magna winter hats.
What were some of the best things the company did?
Jon: The conferences. The CHOPPED for CHOP (our spinoff of the competitive eating show called Chopped but run in as a crazy mock trial) was a huge differentiator for Magna. After that, we were more than just your court reporting services vendor. That put us on the map and gave us cache.
Peter: CHOPPED for CHOP separated us from everybody. We were selling litigation support services, and we did a ton of traditional marketing. However, separating yourself from the competition using those ground rules is hard. When we created these conferences like Battle of the Experts, Chopped for CHOP or the Jury Game, we stepped into totally new marketing dimension. We merged education and entertainment to create the “edutainment” experience for our clients. On top of that we created a new business development ecosystem for them. For example, if you are a defense lawyer, meeting new clients can be challenging. Remember trial attorneys and litigators are not always the best salespeople outside the courtroom. So, the Magna events made rainmaking an easier experience. That changed the dynamic of our relation very quickly. Clients really appreciated it and today many of them have become our close friends.
Jon: We also had a sales philosophy that everyone matters; not just the managing partner at the firm but the legal assistants and the gatekeepers are treated as important. One of biggest cases we did – one of largest gas leak contaminations in the country – originated with the paralegal at a law firm who was coordinating the graphics. (More on that later.)
Peter: Jon came on late in the game in 2011. He had been doing commercial real estate sales, and I was probably tougher on him than anyone else. I’m glad he was able to tolerate me. I would joke with Bob that I was training my successor. But Jon would always say he wanted to do more work. No matter what I asked him to do, he would say, “Give me more.” That came into play because clients kept asking about doing their medical records retrieval. So, Jon started the medial records retrieval division at Magna, and it is now the company’s second largest revenue stream.
Jon: For me personally, that was a huge moment. I always wondered how I would differentiate myself. Starting the records retrieval department was a big milestone for me. I don’t recall Pete being that hard on me. But now that I think of it, I did have to come down from NYC to Philadelphia every Monday morning at 9AM for the sales meeting. Money was tight so I took the Greyhound. Eventually I graduated to Amtrak.
Peter: One thing you have to understand is Mark is like a savant in consulting. He’s a musician, an artist. He started out working for Bob at his other company on the ground floor with the production department and worked his way to the top. When we started Magna, Mark brought his gift. And that is, there’s nothing he can’t talk about. We needed that big time when we hit the road to build our client base. Way back when, when I joined Bob’s prior company, Bob said I was going to work with Mark. I didn’t know Mark all that well at that point, but next thing you know we were going everywhere and selling trial presentation services across the country. This was when doing simple call outs and light graphics at trial was considered cutting edge tech, to showcase what can be done at trial we put together a presentation of the graphics used at the Oklahoma City bombing trial. We didn’t actually work on the case, but the info was public and we put together the presentation as an exemplar of what can be done with your trial material.
We spent three years touring law firms with it. He got so good at it – and he got better every time – that everyone assumed we actually worked on the case. But we didn’t. And we never said that. We just knew so much about the damn thing. Of course, it made my job as a sales professional super easy. Every time we did one of these presentations, we walked out with a new case. Inevitably the time came that we made a presentation to a firm and someone there who had actually been on the case said, “Hey, you guys didn’t work on the case.” And Mark said, “I never said I worked on that case.”
Mark: One of our big breakthroughs, in my mind, was the graphics for that huge pollution case that we referenced earlier where we were working with the paralegal. The law firm we were looking to work with had gone to everyone, and everyone said that graphics showing what had happened in this pollution case could not be done. Basically, we had to model an entire town, including the bedrock, and show how groundwater flowed through the entire town and that gas plumes had flowed in and gotten into groundwater. It’s basically pollution. And we’re talking thousands of wells. There was a “hydrogeologist platform” of software used to model aquifer systems and even the company that made the software was saying it couldn’t be done. So, I had thousands of pages on my floor for two days. And we did it. We modeled an entire town. Nothing’s impossible. That’s our philosophy. Say yes and figure it out. That’s how we built a lot of it.
What are some of your favorite Bob stories?
Jon: Well of course the one where he ripped up the paper with the valuation the broker had. But I should say that you hear a lot of horror stories about working with your family. Ours was the exact opposite: I got to learn from my dad.
Mark: Bob and I went across the country selling for our old company. We had a nationwide license to hunt because we were super effective. We were interviewing someone for a sales job in Los Angeles, and we went out to dinner at an expensive steak place. We were a couple bites into dinner. And we’re sitting in one of those U-shaped lounges. The guy we are interviewing is talking away. He takes another bite of his steak and then starts turning purple. He’s choking, and he puts his hands around his neck in that universal sign of “I’m choking.” Bob sees what is happening but we’re in this U-shaped lounge, and we’ve got our bags and we can’t just jump out and make something happen. Finally, Bob gets to the guy and starts giving him the Heimlich. But it is not totally working. I say, “Bob, do you know what you’re doing?” Bob gives me a look like, “Kinda.” I could just about die laughing at that point if this wasn’t such a serious situation.
Then the waiter finally comes over and finishes off the Heimlich and gets the steak out. But honestly, I think Bob really did most of the work and set things up by knocking it loose. Remember, this was a job interview. So, the guy tries to make like nothing happened and just keeps going but it’s not working. Bob says, “Look, take a break. Go wash up. Then we’ll start all over like nothing happened.” And we ended up hiring the guy. I can’t stress how amazing a person Bob was. He is the singular, most remarkable person I ever met in my life. He was special.
Peter: He had the best stories and meaningful one-liners. I was often on the receiving end of those one-liners and would drive home from work still processing what he shared with me. He was like the Jedi of motivators. My relationship also transcended being Bob’s son-in-law. My own dad said to me a few years back at dinner: There’s three men in your life that made you the man you are today. My dad is a big one of them, but he said Bob may have been the most influential. That was pretty powerful coming from my own dad.
Will things change at Magna without Bob?
Peter: I feel the same level of optimism about the future that I’ve always had. And we still have that desire for success and winning: We can’t stop handing out the Magna business card. We can’t stop growing.
I once interviewed Bob for the Magna newsletter, and he said he had one regret: Not turning the Magna day by day into a reality TV show. Agree?
Peter: We would have definitely had gotten an Emmy.
Jon: It would have made for incredible reality TV. But we also need to acknowledge all the people who have been here at Magna for 19 years. We grew but we also watched them grow and it’s so great that the majority of people who started the company with us are still here.
Mark: Back to reality TV. Should we have done it? Yes.