How Mr Rich is taking a bite out of the legal profession.

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 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 have 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 SilverfoxEntrepreneurs Life. Okay, well, welcome to Clive, Clive Rich and I met some time ago because Clive is actually a celebrated author of negotiation techniques, but he's also a qualified barrister. So, Clive, could you introduce yourself please to the Silver Fox community?

Yes, delighted to be here. Thank you for the invite, Jim. So my name is Clive Rich. I'm a qualified lawyer barrister, as Jim says. I'm also qualified mediator and arbitrator. And after quite a number of years in the media tech world working for big companies, I now run my own business, which is a law tech business called Lawbite, which is democratizing the law for SMEs.

Great, Clive. And as a client of Lawbite, I know how wonderful it is to be able to access world class and top quality lawyers at an affordable price and using technology to make it all accessible. Can you just tell us why do you think, and I won't tell anyone how old you are, but can you tell us why you think it's great to be a Silver Fox entrepreneur?

Well, I think the positive is that you've been around the block a few times, you've got some experience and I suppose what that helps you to do.

Is.

Have a perspective on what you're doing so you recognize that problems are never insoluble, they're never quite as bad as they seem and triumph is normally temporary as well. So. And I think that's quite helpful because it helps you manage the inevitable, you know, ups and downs of running your own enterprise.

Great. And can you tell us then, Clive, can you tell us you had obviously a successful career, several careers really, what led you to start your own enterprise Law Bytes?

Well, I spent about 17 years working for companies like Warner and Bertelsmann and Sony, and I started off running legal divisions for them and then I sort of graduated to running profit centers. So I ran the digital business for Bert has been in Sony in the uk and I ran the business side of Simon Cowell's TV ventures with both those companies. And I found I really enjoyed it. I enjoyed being an intrapreneur, if you like, and being responsible for driving revenues. And I thought I had some aptitude for it. And I arrived at a point where I felt, well, you know, either you just keep doing this and, you know, you keep doing it for the company and, you know, dealing with some of the frustrations of being in a big company, which a lot of your listeners will recognize in terms of budgeting and multiple stakeholders and decisions and the length of time it gets to get anything done. Or you take your courage in both hands and go off and be an entrepreneur outside of the pastry case and see if you can cut it outside of a big company as well as inside. And I just, that's what I decided to do. So it's a sort of a decision that accumulated over a period of time and eventually I found the courage and an opportunity to have a go myself.

And you talk about opportunity. What did you see then, Clive, that that sort of led you to start Law Bikes? Was this the first company that you started after being corporate life or was there something in between?

No. So I, when I first left the corporate world, I thought I'd build a practice as a negotiator because it seemed to me that was something that everybody needs. But generally speaking, people aren't very good at. They don't really, they're not very awake when they're negotiating. They don't have a sort of conscious toolkit that they use. So I wrote a book about negotiating called the yes Book and then I created a negotiating app and I built a practice as a negotiator here in the UK and in the US and in Europe and you know, father flung places like Iran and Pakistan. And I really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed, you know, learning as well as coaching and doing deal making.

Those settings that I was familiar with and also settings like China and Iran, which I wasn't so familiar with.

And while I was doing that.

I held a position running my own sort of boutique media law firm within a big top 30 UK law firm called Olswain. And it was while I was doing all that that I noticed that SMEs really don't get a look in, in relation to legal advice work. So all of the UK's law firms are really focused on big clients with recurring billing. That's really nirvana for them. And SMEs are regarded as.

Not really.

Worth spending a lot of time or energy on because they don't have a big ticket attached to their work.

And it seemed to me that was.

A massive potential gap, because after 99% of UK companies are SMEs, they account for very nearly half the turnover of UK plc, about 2/3 of the employees. And it seemed to me that drawing on my technology experiences at Sony and Bertelsen, if you could build a platform that would reach this rather diverse audience digitally and give them law the way they want it, which is fast, affordable and understandable, rather than slow, expensive and complicated, which is more what they used to, then you could be onto something very interesting. And so I decided that was really something I could get my teeth into. And inherently it felt more scalable than the negotiation practice because it wasn't just about me. So I took myself off to a workspace pub in Farringdon in London, and no money in, and one person would give two laptops and we, you know, we design a software experience, you know.

Got the platform built and slowly that.

Has really overtaken the negotiation work that I did because, you know, the theory.

Seems to have been proven in practice.

That it, it is a scalable thing that SMEs really want. We're now on to our 26,000th inquiry. It seems to be delivering a service that people do actually need.

That's wonderful. And as a customer, I can say that it is. You skipped over one part there about you got a workspace, got the money and then got started. That makes it sound incredibly easy. Not the finding the office space, that's not so difficult. But what about getting the money in? Can you just share? What did you do for that? How did you manage the valuation? Who did you pitch to? Anything you can share about that?

Well, we decided quite quickly that it's very difficult to raise money without at least having a prototype of what you're doing. So the platform build needed to come first. If you go to funders and you say, well, I'm going to do this, I'm going to build that, and you're pre revenue, then you're sort of asking a lot of people in order to invest in you. So we decided we needed to build the platform first. So I funded that out of my Own pocket. And then when we had something to demonstrate and some real customers on the platform, then we decided to go to Crowdcube for our first money race. So Crowdcube was very young at that stage and it really worked. It really worked. So people really understood our message. They liked the idea of giving lawyers a bit of a kicking. And so it's a very popular kind ofmission on Crowdcube. So we raised about quarter million pounds in a couple of weeks on Crowdcube. And in 2013, which is when we did that, we were in the top 10 most successful crowdfunded companies in the country. So that worked very well. We did it again about a year later as we started to grow. And so Crowdcube was really the starting point for us. And I can't say the valuation was a scientific exercise, but what I did know for sure, having spoken to investors, including institutional investors, was that the crowd were likely to be a bit more forgiving on valuation than institutional investors. And so that seemed very attractive in terms of getting started. So we weren't having to give away vast tracts as a company before we even got going.

Okay, so you were able to share, maybe you're able to give away or sell away maybe 10, 20% and get to the sort of Series B funding. Were you, after that initial crowdfunding?

Yeah, I wouldn't say we're Series B, but it got us going and so we managed to create a 1 million pound valuation, you know, raised, raised, you know, several hundred thousand pounds. And that was a good start, really. And I don't think we would have got either the valuation or the money raised so quickly if we'd gone the conventional route. And every step after that has been a bit easier because of course, you know, you've got some progress to demonstrate, which is the most important thing. I think when you, when you talk to investors that you, you can show that you successfully deployed the last set of capital and made some progress.

And that's terrific. And could you share them once you'd got that money in, what did you spend it on? Because quite often people that I've dealt with over the years, they get money and they spend it on branding, for example. First, if it's VC money, could you share, once you got that tranche of cash in, what were you like the next three to six months worth of priorities?

Well, the tech is a greedy engine and always needs filling up. So we've always spent money on tech out of what we've raised, and the rest of it has really been spent on Marketing and sales, which is a combination of people and third party fees that you have to pay for things like Google Ads and so on. So the funding gives you enough opportunity to build some more tech and say, look here, we've managed to do this, we've managed to achieve that and it also manages to help you show progress in building a market.

When you say we Clive, I've met you and I've seen a team. But do you have a co founder? Because if you have a background as a barrister and a lawyer and negotiator in the music industry, it sound as though you are great at all the content side and the domain expertise. But what about the technology? Was that the co founder's role or.

Well, I had a co founder who.

Helped me manage the technology piece, so he remains our coo and so he's very good at detailed planning, supervising tech building process, product development and I definitely needed that.

And.

We outsourced the actual code writing to third parties like any bootstrapped company, just trying to keep everything lean. We made sure we owned everything and that we were to correct the operations. That's worked pretty well almost up to the present time. It's only now as we've got so much bigger that we're starting to think about different ways of organizing that.

So. So that's fascinating too about outsourcing. What was the sort of the challenge in the procurement cycle? Because if you were building something out that in a way was a concept, did you have a hard time explaining that or how did you go around procuring and getting it in on time and on budget?

Well, we started with a UK developer in London and that was probably the right choice because, you know, English is the common language and they were geographically close so we could actually talk to them face to face, which I think was helpful. I also had a non exec.

Effectively.

A non exec CTO who has been with me from the beginning, Danny Schisler. And he was great because he sort of acted as interpreter between what the business was saying it wanted and what the techies needed to hear in order to build it. So that sort of worked quite well to start with. And then we, as the tech spend demands increased, we, we ended up outsourcing to developers in first of all Armenia and then the Ukraine. And Danny helped with those processes both times, both in terms of sourcing the right developers and then kind of helping us manage the relationship so that we didn't sort of lose things in translation. So that has worked overall, you know, always things that could have been done better or quicker, but it has worked for us.

And as the company's grown in the past, essentially had line management responsibility, but someone else is sort of maybe having the vision. How have you created and communicated the vision? Because obviously your. Your thoughts here. How have you done that for the growing team that you've got?

Yeah, well, I guess I'm quite visible in the business doing quite a lot of doing now that has positive and negative sides to it. So the positive is people are hearing directly from me what the vision is and how I see it being executed, and that hopefully is impactful and keeps everyone aligned. The downside, of course, is that you end up being a bit stretched a bit thin and not necessarily executing everything as well as you could do if you're able to take a step back and leave some things to other people. So I think there are sort of pros and cons about that. But the positive side is I think we've kept quite a tight vision and coherence in what we're doing and being very present in the business has helped with that.

And if you could identify sort of maybe one key challenge that you've had over the last, I guess, six years now since you started, can you share with us one, maybe one key challenge and how you've overcome that challenge?

Well, only one.

Could be the biggest, or you could do more than one. Any notable moments where you feel like it was touch and go and you. And you managed to pull it out of the hat?

Well, I think, you know, funding is a sort of periodic challenge, so it never really goes away. So you, I think you have to live with that as an SME, you know, unless you're running a lifestyle business where you are, you know, you're happy with a certain level of income and you're happy that it's a certain size and you don't, you don't really have any ambition to grow it, then that's fine. From the beginning, really, we've been, I suppose, engaged in trying to build a capital growth company and ultimately, I guess a sale or some kind would be a sign that we've been successful. So if you're going to do that, you've got to keep investing in order to grow. And so the challenge never really quite goes away because you're always either raising the funding or spending it with a view to creating the next fundraising opportunity. So I think I've learned a lot about funding and fundraising over the last period of time that we've been running Law Bytes. I think we're on to our fifth raise now and you know, I think that's probably the biggest challenge. I mean, so far, you know, touching wood, we've been successful every time and each time you hope you're sort of de risking it somewhat because you're bigger than the time before. But, you know, it's nonetheless, it's always a challenging process and so I think doing that and then managing the day to day to be present in the business, that creates some tension in that dynamic. So we've now finally reached a stage.

Where.

I've been able to bring in an MD and one or two senior staff and so I'm hoping that will start to make a difference in the sense that whilst the funding challenges will, I think always be there, at least I won't be submitting merge so much in the day to day business and it'll give you more opportunity to focus on them productively.

Well, congratulations. It sounds like you've really managed to work on the business rather than just in the business now. And you mentioned sort of tension. Part of the remit for this sort of show is to talk about how we manage the tension and work life balance because I think you've also got a young family. How have you managed that, Clive? I mean, not how did you manage to start a family. I think we probably know that. But how do you manage the work life balance? How do you set boundaries and guidelines and how do you communicate that at home and at work?

Well, I'm not sure I am very good at that. I'm very lucky. I've had, you know, very supportive wife who's always believed in the business and always believed in me and has been very encouraging even at times when I felt discouraged. She's been very positive and supportive and I think that's been a fantastic help.

So.

If you're, if you're trying to do what we're trying to do as entrepreneurs and you know, you've got someone miserable at home because of the energy that requires, that's quite a difficult combination. So I've been lucky to have someone who's been with me all the way and that sort of created a, you know, emotional platform from which the rest of the family's life can proceed. So we've got four wonderful children, they're getting older now, so three of them don't technically live at home anymore, although I see quite a lot of them nonetheless. One's in his last year at school and so, and they've sort of grown up in a, in a context which says, well, Dad's building this business. It's, you know, it's exciting but challenging and we're all behind him, aren't we? And so, you know, I've been. My wife's support kind of bled into the rest of the family and actually all the children at one point or another have worked in the business, you know, on school holidays or whatever. And, you know, I think they all understand what we're trying to do and that, you know, hopefully one day they'll benefit from it. And I think in their own way they think it's quite cool that dad is doing this. So I've been very lucky, I think, with my domestic setup and that's really enabled me to, you know, devote a lot of time to the business without, you know, damaging my family life.

Great. Clive, you're obviously a lucky man. And if people want to find out more about you and about Law Bites or about your yes, negotiating book, how can they find out about you?

Well, obviously the yes book is available. You can buy it on Amazon, Random House publication. I've also written a book in the dummy series Northwest Business for Dummies, which is available from Wiley's, the publisher, and other outlets. I've got my own negotiating website still. I still get quite a lot of requests for negotiating work and I do the things that I find interesting or engaging. So you can find me on some@cliverich.com for my negotiating work and obviously you can contact me through Law Byte.

We have a, you know, I'm very.

Present on LinkedIn and you can contact me through the website lawbite.co.uk Very easy to fill in an inquiry form and ask, ask for me. And indeed I was thinking about whether what I could offer to your listeners and I thought perhaps one nice thing might be to say this. We offer in any event a 15 minute free consultation to all of our potential clients. That's part of our mission for SMEs is to provide that safe harbour for them. And yes, I do work on the platform as well. Not, not much now, but I do do some. So I thought if any of your listeners happen to want their 15 minutes to be with me, that's fine. They can just fill in the inquiry form on the site and mention my name, mention this podcast and the association with Jim and I'll make sure that they get their 50 minute call with me.

Clive, thanks very much indeed and having benefited from 15 minutes with you, I think it's well worth the time. So thank you very much indeed, Clive of Law Bites, an inspirational man and entrepreneur and wonderful all round counselor in Silver Fox. Thank you for listening in today to the Silver Fox Entrepreneurs Podcast. We're wishing you well. Bye bye. 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.