How a Singapore lawyer uses vanilla to stop the SME goose chase.

Welcome to the Silver Fox Entrepreneurs Podcast, a series of interviews to inform, inspire, and support men later in life who want to start their own enterprise for profit or for pleasure. Hi, my name is Jim James, and I started the Silver Fox Entrepreneurs Group in my 50s because my friends who were losing their jobs or were bored and felt insecure about keeping their jobs were asking me how to make money from their own initiatives. I've run my own businesses since the age of 27. 7 in Asia and in Europe. I've also set up peer groups for younger entrepreneurs, and now I think there's a need to share information from subject matter experts, inspiring stories of men who've already started on the journey of making money from their passions, and to provide opportunities to collaborate and to increase the chances of success. I hope that you'll enjoy this interview and learn something that adds value to you. Do subscribe or leave a rating, and for more information, please visit Welcome to the Silver Fox Entrepreneurs Podcast. And this week I have a special friend from Singapore called Mark Goh. Mark and I have known each other from all the way back in 1995 when I started my firm in Singapore. Mark had actually just started his own law firm. And today he is the proprietor of Vanilla Law. And they have a service called Vanilla Law Docs. Mark, welcome to the Silver Fox Entrepreneurs.

Jim, thank you so much for inviting me on this platform. Yeah, it's a really, really long time, and I'm, I'm so happy to hear you, hear you start this business, and I'm ready for your questions.

Perfect. Well, I, I, as you're a lawyer, you'll be used to tough cross-examination. I think that, uh, First of all, really, Mark, you and I go back a long way. But for those people that don't know who you are, just tell us about your journey to where you are today and what you're doing now.

I started my career in a very unusual way. Most lawyers started out working in a large firm. And then after that, somewhere around the 40s, or maybe getting about 10 years into— then they start out their own business. For me, I started out immediately after graduating and getting called to the bar in England, and then also going back to Singapore, I started out my own business. Actually, I started my own law firm at 26 years old, almost right out of school. Why did I do that? Well, it was due to circumstances. I did not find working in a large law firm terribly enriching. In fact, it was, I think, just indentured worker. So, I quit the large law firm and started on my own. Ever since then, I have been serving the SME market. I realised that that is an underrepresented market, that people in small businesses and so forth, They have not got good access to lawyers. I think in one of your podcast guests, Clive, Clive said that basically a lot of lawyers will go for the bigger companies because that is the big-ticket items, but no one was willing to serve this smaller community. So that's how I started.

Well, and I met you back in '95. So we were both young men starting out our own businesses there. And so now you and I are both the same age. We both just popped over the 50 mark. And you started a new business, Vanilla Docks. Do you want to share with us why you think that being over 50 is an ideal time to start another business?

OK. Vanilla Docks is actually a software. It is a document assembly software. I started out, I started developing the software actually in 2014. The thing was that by this time, I have already known that there are gaps or problems in the market with SMEs. A lot of SMEs see lawyers only when when they are in trouble, and it is too late, and it comes when they are in litigation. That is when the cost, legal cost, is very high. I will ask my clients and say, look, why do you wait? Why do you wait until the last minute? Why do you wait until this stage, then you come and see me? Why cannot you basically have some preventive measures put in. Most of my clients tell me that it is the cost. Legal cost is just simply too prohibitive. They cannot afford in-house lawyers like the big companies. One of the biggest problems that they cannot handle is document or agreement drafting. If a lawyer were to— if we were to hire and retain a lawyer to draft every agreement for every transaction, it is just going to bankrupt all of them. I went around the market at that point in time looking for software that can help my clients. 2 of the giants at that point was this Rocket Lawyer. It is an American company. And LegalZoom, which was another American giant in the document assembly or agreement assembly ecosystem. However, I found this software not really up to the par in the sense that they are just template engines. Templates basically just allow you to fill in the blanks. But I think lawyers will know that that is not good enough because scenarios change, and you need to be able to switch in and out clauses. I could not find a software that could specifically function in that way. That was why I had to solve the problem on my own and decided to develop this software in-house. Then, we started marketing this software and we found out that there was a need. Indeed, it helped a lot of SMEs in Singapore to reduce their agreements drafting needs. Because what it does is that the software guides you and you basically self-assemble with the software. And then you send it over to the lawyer to review. So lawyers charge only the review time.

Why would you need to set up a new company? Because at 50, setting up a new company is a little bit of a risk, and you obviously have a successful law practice already. So you said you wanted to solve another problem, but what would you say have been some of the problems that you've faced in starting the new Vanilla Loradox business, and how have you solved those?

Okay, so marketing, sales and marketing, um, was a big, big, big challenge at that point in time. Getting, getting people, um, to adopt and, uh, and, and basically buy into a new system was very difficult. In 2014, 2015, because they could not understand how it is used, how it would save costs, how lawyers worked, and how to work with lawyers. There were multiple challenges for us. We had also issues of what is the right pricing. and so forth. That was the biggest challenge, getting market adoption. What we decided to do was to give it free at first, just to get the market to play with it, handle the system, and then we got feedback from some clients telling us, how they would work it. The user experience was very important for us at that point in time. Once people got used to using the system and got used to how it worked, then it was quite easy because the recommendations came, referrals came, and then we slowly built a reputation there. We have not hit a critical success yet, but I think we are gaining momentum. In the sense that we have now got Singapore businesses coming on board and also Japanese businesses. And that's partly why the reason— that's partly the reason why I'm in the UK now, because I'm trying to reach out to the UK SMEs to see whether this is something that UK SMEs would be interested in using.

And do you have any experience so far, Mark, of how different companies in different countries are operating with the law? Do you find, for example, Singapore SMEs are more or less savvy about their legal situation than, for example, ones in the UK? Are you starting to see any, any interesting patterns in legal use and legal knowledge?

The patterns that I see It's not cultural specific or geographical. It is not specific to geography, but rather it's specific to the size of a company. Now, what happens is this, is that if you have worked in a large corporation with many people and you've got departments and got department heads, then you will be aware of— you will have this thing known as organisational awareness. That means you will be aware of how different functions of the business are being run and how they interact with each other. Let us talk about a typical business. Typically, any business, whether big or small, will have 5 business functions, starting with the sales and marketing function. Then you have the processes or the operational function which supports the sales and marketing function. Then you have to hire the people or the HR function to operate these processes. Now, processes and people will need money. So, you have the third function— sorry, the fourth function, which is finance, which will raise the money to basically fund All your operations and your human payroll. Then the last function is structure and law. These are the laws which keeps everybody moving in a certain way so that people play by the rules, and then the whole machinery is well-oiled. Now, if you work in a larger organisation, you will actually see and work with people in these different departments or different functions. But for SME, typically, it is a one-man show or maybe 2 persons. So, there is a lack of awareness that there is embedded in every business these functions and that as the owner of the company, you will have to basically think in terms of these 5 functions. When you Talk to your lawyers, instruct lawyers. Part of the problem of cost is that the owner himself is not able to articulate his problem because he is not able to pinpoint or align his problem with any of the functions. The lawyer is sent on a wild goose chase thinking that that is the problem, but actually, you know, it is something else. That is why legal costs for SMEs sometimes can be more than when you are acting for a larger company, simply because larger companies, they have the experts who are able to pinpoint the problem and tell the lawyer, this is what I need you to do. This is very common with SMEs.

That's a very interesting point. So does the Vanilla Law Docs kind of help to identify which department or what nature of case the SME owner should be focusing on then?

Embedded in the machine is this, is that Vanilla Law Docs is a question and answer. It's like answering 20 questions. You will soon realize trying to select options and trying to answer that you will have difficulties. And when you have difficulties, you will realize why. Because you are— the system or the engine itself presumes that you know the function that you are dealing with. So, these functions are built into the agreements itself. Built into the clauses. When the user starts using it, and he finds that he cannot answer some of the questions within the clauses, or within the agreement selection, that is when he suddenly realizes, oh, there are things that I may not know, and there are things that I ought to know. That is where, in the software, you can basically call a lawyer and talk to a lawyer. And that's where we start our education.

Right. And, and I can see, Mark, on your website, which is vanillalaw.com.sg, you've even got, um, the Senior Ministry of State for Law from Singapore, uh, Indranee Rajah, giving you great accolades, in fact, for the Vanilla Law docs process. So how have you addressed the innovation of the product. Are you, are you building that yourself and, and thinking about the, the workflow and the technology yourself, or are you outsourcing parts of it? Just talk us through how you've been building that, because obviously you've obviously understood the legal issue very well. How have you transitioned into becoming a tech entrepreneur?

Good question, Jim. Jim, I have— other than a lawyer, I had another life.

Tell us about it.

In Singapore, right, when you're an 18-year-old boy, you are forced into a conscript army. So I was conscripted, not that I liked it. I was conscripted to be a military engineer. So, we go through about 2 and a half years of training in engineering school. Then after that, it is 40 days of reservists every year. So, I only retired as a captain in the military engineers, or what we call the combat engineers. At age 50.

Oh, wow.

That was 2 years ago.

Yeah.

So I have actually about 26 years. Yes, that is my alternate life. I have 26 years as an engineer.

In the military, in the Singapore military.

So, one of the things about— yes, in Singapore military. In particular with engineering, Engineers have a certain way of thinking and organizing problems. They look at problems in a modular sense. When we built the bridges, we did not build it from nuts and bolts. We actually built them from modules. We have got modules. It is like Lego. You are putting things up in Lego. I I was able to think of a contract, and I was able to— I think not many lawyers can do that because they are basically humanities students. But because of my training as an engineer, I was able to dissect an agreement into different modules. Once you are able to see it from engineering, the agreement from an engineering perspective, then you are able to communicate to the computer software programmers from an engineering language. And you could actually tell them what to do, but you cannot use legal language to explain that to them. You got to explain it to them and say, I wanted you to do this in an engineering sense.

And that's how I got my programmers to program and structure the program And from a funding point of view, Mark, have you been paying for all of this out of your own pocket, or did you decide to spin this off and make it into a venture-funded or crowdfunded business?

Well, unfortunately, I had to bootstrap this. That means I had to actually fund this out of my own pocket in 2014. Because we were so early at that point in time that the Singapore government did not have a program, or grant, or system for law firms developing their own software. We did not fit into any of the known criteria at that point in time. Of course, after After launching our software, we had a mention from our Law Minister at that point in time, Indrani Raja. She was part of this Future Economy of Singapore study team. They picked us up. I raised this up with her and said that that is a big problem. That was my biggest problem at that point in time. From there onwards, now, today, I believe there is actually a lot of funding for other law firms and other tech companies wanting to develop software like ours. I do believe we are actually— we started something so that the others could follow.

And speaking of starting things, it looks as though when I look at your website on vanillalaw.com.sg, you've also started a community called GoSME. Do you want to share what is that then, Mark?

All right, so with GoSME, it's basically a— we're trying to move— it's a movement, it's a kind of movement. We're telling SMEs that You know, don't get stuck into thinking that business can only be done in your local community. Don't think small. You may be small, but you can start thinking big. You can start thinking global. Now, let me explain to you why this is so. I mean, the internet has changed a lot of things. So, when we talk about business, and we understand business in its 5 basic functions. In the old days, it was very difficult to disembody or break these functions up and put it all over the world simply because you have a command and control issue. For instance, if your HR function was in China, If your finance function was in London, how is London going to control the people who are working for you in China? It is almost impossible 100 years ago. What big companies would do is that they will send an expatriate with his family, house him, pay his lodgings, pay a big fat salary. That is why it is terribly expensive to have offshore companies or offshoring kind of strategies. It is only the province of the larger companies. But now, with the internet, with digital communication, with what you call project management software, it is actually very simple. To control people and control these functions, where they are in the world. Now, therefore, what's happened is this: is that if you look at the five business functions, you can actually choose which country gives you the best option, and you can maximize it. So take for instance Richard Dyson, right? He's moved his HQ to. Singapore, and many people ask why. Now, if you understand the meaning of HQ, HQ in business parlance means tax and law. So, he has moved the tax or the finance function and the legal function to Singapore. But the sales function, the R&D function, ops function, and the people who are selling his products are still in the UK. Why is that so? It is quite obvious that the Singapore tax regime is much more favorable than the UK tax regime. Singapore laws on commercial contracts, dispute resolutions are much better than those in the Euro. What companies are doing now is that they are going all over the world, shopping for the best price and the best options for their different functions. And I'm saying to SMEs, go SME, you know, it's time you play the same game.

Okay, so you think really technology is making it possible for the SME to go global without the kind of infrastructure that in the past was the preserve of SMEs, of MNCs rather?

That's right.

And what does that mean for you personally, Mark? Does that mean that you are going to be based part of the time in Singapore, part of the time in the UK? Just share, because there's an implication, isn't there, to having sort of a global business. What does that mean for you and your family?

In fact, it's done very well for my family because I actually don't need to be based anywhere now. I am talking to you now. I can be talking to you anywhere. I can possibly be sitting in Singapore, but I happen to be sitting in Manchester. This is how easy it is to do business. It is almost seamless. Your physical presence, actually, the number of times my physical presence is required is only when I am asked to attend court. or attend arbitration, or attend mediation. Other than those times, basically, we can travel around. Now, what has it done for my family? The thing is that my son, well, he is 19 years old now. It has given us an opportunity to expose him to the wider world, to be mobile, to be self— to be independent, really. Now that we are here, he is back home in Singapore. He is taking care of himself. He's learned to cook, he's learned to basically do the laundry. So, so these things, I think, are also important skills that children ought to have.

And it sounds as though with what you're creating with Vanilla Law Docs, you're creating independence for, for owner-operators of small businesses. Mark, that's wonderful. I've known you for a long time, and, and I've always cherished our friendship and always Love the knowledge that you've got. If people want to find out more about you, where would they go to get in touch with Mark Goh?

Well, we have a website and it's vanillalawdocs. Sorry, it's vanillalaw.com.sg. And if you go to the website, you will see my profile. I think I have a video founder's message. I've got Various blogs in there. So you can find a lot of resources in the website.

It's been a pleasure to have you on The Den today. Thank you so much for sharing. And in the show notes, we'll also obviously include details about Mark Go and the Vanilla Law Docs. So that's all we've got for this show. Thank you for tuning in and enjoy your week and go online and go global.

Thank you.

Do subscribe or leave a rating. And for more information, please visit silverfoxentrepreneurs.life and drop me an email. I'd love to hear from you, and maybe we can get you on the podcast and share what you know, or let me know what you'd like to know. Thank you once again.

Have a great day. Thank you.