Clive Rich, a barrister and former corporate lawyer at Warner and Sony, built Lawbite to make legal advice cheap and fast for small businesses. He raised £250,000 through Crowdcube in 2013, one of that year's top-10 crowdfunded companies, and hit a £1M valuation as the platform scaled to handle 26,000 inquiries.
Questions this video answers
About 26,000 inquiries.
About £250,000 raised in 2013 on Crowdcube.
In the top 10 most successful crowdfunded companies in the UK in 2013.
Around a £1 million valuation after the initial crowdfunding and subsequent raises.
Chapters
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 1827 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 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's 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. 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'm sort of graduated to running profit centers. So I ran the digital business for Berk as well and 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 know, being responsible for driving revenues. And, you know, I thought I had some aptitude for it. And I, and I arrived at a point where I felt, well, you know, either you just, you know, keep doing this and you, 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 that's what I decided to do. So it's a sort of 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 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 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 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 Olswane. 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 all, 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 Bertel, 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 know, you could be on to something very interesting. And so I decided that was really something I, 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 hub in Farringdon in London, and no money in and one person and we designed a software experience, got the platform built and slowly that has really overtaken the negotiation work that I did, because.
The theory seems to have been.
Proven in practice that it is a scalable thing, that SME is really what 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. So you got a workspace, got the money and they got started. That makes it sound incredibly easy, not defined in 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 need 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 racer. 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 was 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 cryocube 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 were 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 were 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've got some progress to demonstrate, which is the most important thing, I think, when you talk to investors, that you can show that you successfully deployed the last set of capital.
