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

Jim James: 0:03

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 are 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'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 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, please introduce yourself, please to the silverfox community.

Clive Rich: 1:24

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 Lawbites, which is democratizing the law for SMEs.

Jim James: 2:00

Great Clive, and as a client of lawbite, I know how wonderful it is to be 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?

Clive Rich: 2:20

Well, I think the positive is that you've been around the block a few times, you've got an experience. And I suppose what that helps you to do is have a perspective on what you're doing. So you recognize that, you know, 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.

Jim James: 3:04

Great. And can you tell us in Clive, can you tell us you had a obviously a successful career, several careers really what led you to start your own enterprise Lawbites? 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 sort of graduated to running profit centers. So I ran the digital business for birth personas solely 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'd like, and, you know, being responsible for driving revenues. And I thought I had some aptitude for it. And I arrived at a point where I thought, well, you know, either you just keep doing this and you 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 getting anything done, you know, or you take your courage in both hands and golf me an entrepreneur outside of the pastry case, and see if you can cut it outside of the 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 opportunity to have a go myself. And tou talk about opportunity. What did you see then Clive that this led you to start lawbites. So is this the first company that you started after being corporate life? Or was there something in between?

Clive Rich: 5:08

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 happen awake when they're negotiating 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've also practiced as a negotiator here in the UK, and in the US, or in Europe, and, you know, farther flung places like Iran and Pakistan. And already enjoyed it 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 work, which I wasn't so familiar with. And while I was doing that, I held a position running my own a boutique, Media Law Firm, within a within a big, top 30 UK law firm called Olswang. And it was while I was doing all that I noticed that SMEs really don't get a look in, in relation to legal advice work. So all of the UK law firms are really focused on, you know, big clients with recurring billing, that's really nirvana for them. And SMEs are regarded as not really worth spending a lot of time and energy on because they don't have a big ticket attached to their work. And it seems to me that was a massive potential gap, because after 99% of UK companies or SMEs, they account for very nearly half the turnover of UK PLC, about two thirds of the employees. And it seems to me that you're drawing online technology experiences at Sony and Bertelsmann, if you could build a platform that would reach this rather diverse audience digitally, and give them know the way they wanted it, which is, you know, false, affordable, and understandable, rather than slow, expensive and complicated, which is what they used to, they know, you could be onto something very interesting. And so I decided, that was really something I could get my teeth into. And inherently, it's more scalable. And then the negotiation practice because it was wasn't just about me. So I took myself off to workspace hub, in Farringdon in London, and no money in. We've been to . And we, you know, we designed software experience, you know, got the platform built, and slowly that has really overtaken the negotiation work that I, I did, because, you know, the, the theory things have been proven in in in practice that it is a scalable thing. That SMEs really what we're now on 26,000 inquiry seems to be delivering service that people do actually need.

Jim James: 8:55

That's wonderful. And as a customer, I can say that yes. You skipped over one one part there about you, sir, you've got a workspace got the money in and they got started. That makes it sound incredibly easy. Not 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?

Clive Rich: 9:24

Well, we decided quite quickly that to raise money without at least having a prototype of what you're what you're doing. So the platform build needs 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 you're sort of asking lots of people in order to invest in you. So we decided we need to build a platform first. So I funded that. So my own pocket, and then when we had something to demonstrate and some, some real customers on the platform, then we decided to go to Crowdcube. For our first moneyraise, 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 we're very popular kind of mission on crowdcube. So we raised about a 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 crowdfunding companies in the country. So that worked very well because 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. What I did know for sure, having spoken to investors in companies, 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, we weren't having to give away fast tracks as a company before we even got going.

Jim James: 11:32

Okay, so we 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 where you after that initial crowdfunding,

Clive Rich: 11:45

I would sat that Series B, but it got us going. And so we managed to create 1 million pound valuation, you know, raised brace, you know, several 100,000 pounds. And that was a good start, really, and I don't think we would have got either 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 this you've got some progress to demonstrate, which is the most important thing I think, when you when you talk to investors that you can show that you successfully deployed the last set of capital and made some progress.

Jim James: 12:30

And that's terrific. And could you share them? Once you've 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 on branding, for example, first of his VC money, could you share once you've got that tranche of cash in what we like the next three to six months worth of priorities?

Clive Rich: 12:51

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

Jim James: 13:38

And when you say we, Clive, I've met you, and I've seen the 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 on the content side and the domain expertise, but what about the technology? Was that the co founders role or?

Clive Rich: 14:00

Well, I had a co founder who helped me manage the technology piece. So he's, he remains our COO. And so he's he's very good at, you know, detailed planning, supervising, you know, tech building process, product development, and I definitely needed that. And we outsourced, we outsource the actual code writing to third parties, like any bootstrapped company, just trying to keep everything lean. We make sure we own everything and the operations, well that's worked pretty well. Almost opposite present time. It's only now as we've got so much bigger that we're starting to think about different ways of organizing.

Jim James: 14:57

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

Clive Rich: 15:19

Well, we started with the UK development in London. And that was probably the right choice because English is a common language, and they were geographically close, so we can actually talk to them face to face, which I think was helpful. I also had a non exec, effective non exec CTO, who has been with me from the beginning, Danny Chisler, and he was great, because he sort of acted as interpreter between what the business was saying wanted, and what the techies needed to hear in order to build it. And that's that sort of worked quite well start with. And then we, as the tech spend demands increase, we ended up outsourcing to develop those in, first of all, Armenia, and then the Ukraine, and Danny helped with those processes, both times based in terms of sourcing the right developers, and then kind of helping us manage the relationship so that we didn't lose things in in translation. So that was not a set of works. Overall, you know, always things that could have been done better or quicker, but it has worked for us.

Jim James: 16:57

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

Clive Rich: 17:19

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, you know, what the vision is, and how I see it being executed. And that's, you know, hopefully, it's impactful, and keeps everyone aligned. You know, the downside, of course, is that you end up you know, being a bit stretched thin, and you're not necessarily executing everything, as well as you could do. If you're able to take a step back, and, you know, leave some things to other people. So, so I think there are sort of pros and cons about that. But, you know, the positive side is I think we've kept quite a tight vision, and coherence in what we're doing. And, you know, being being very present in the business has helped with that.

Jim James: 18:37

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?

Clive Rich: 18:52

Well, only one.

Jim James: 18:55

Choose, choose, it could be the biggest he 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?

Clive Rich: 19:05

Well, I think, you know, funding is a sort of periodic challenge, it never really goes away. So you think you have to live with that as an SME, unless you're running a lifestyle business where you are, you're happy with a certain level of income and you're happy, but it's a certain size. And you don't you don't really have any ambition to grow, then that then that's fine. You know, we from the beginning, really, we've been, I suppose engaged in, you know, trying to build a capital growth company. And, you know, ultimately, I guess, you know, say a lot of some kind would be a sign that we've been successful. So if you're gonna do that, you've got to keep investing in order to grow and so it's a challenge that never Really quite goes away. Because you're all you're always either raising the funding or spending it with the views of creating the next fundraising opportunity. And so I think I've learned a lot about funding and fundraising. Over the last period of time, we've been running Lawbites, I think we're on to our fifth raise now. And, you know, I think I think that's, that's probably the biggest challenge so far, you know, it's a key word we've been, we've been successful every time and, you know, each time you hope you're sort of derisking it somewhat, because you're bigger than the time before. But 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. Yeah, that that creates. Yeah, that's there's some there's 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, you know, start to make a difference. In the sense that was, that was the funding challenges will, I think will always be there. At least I won't be, you know, submerged so much in the day to day business. And I'll give you an opportunity to focus on the goal.

Jim James: 21:27

Congratulations, it sounds like you've really, you know, managed to do 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. It was, because I think you've also got a young family. How have you managed that Clive? 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 a very supportive wife, who's always believed in the business and, and always believed in, in me, and has been very encouraging. Even at times when I felt discouraged. She's been very positive, supportive. And I think that's, that's been a fantastic help. So, you know, if you if you're, if you're trying to do what we're trying to do as entrepreneurs, and 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's sort of created a emotional platform from which the rest of the family's life can proceed. So we've got four wonderful children as they're getting older now. So three of them don't technically live at home anymore, although I see. 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 his business, it's, you know, it's it's exciting, but challenging, and we're all behind him, aren't we? And so you know, I've been my wife support it's kind of led 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 they all understand what what we're trying to do and hopefully one day they'll they'll benefit from it and I think in their in their own way they they think it's quite cool that that dad is doing this so so I'll be very lucky I think with my domestic setup and that's really been enabled me to you know, devote a lot of times the business without you know, damaging my my family life. Great Clive, obviously a lucky man and if people want to find out more about you and about Lawbites or about your Yes negotiating book, how can they find out about you?

Clive Rich: 24:29

Well, obviously the, the the Yes book is, is available, you can buy on Amazon, random house publication, and I've also written a book in the dummy series, Lawful Business of Dummies, which is available from Wiley's the publisher and and other outlets. I've got my own negotiating website. Still, I still get quite a lot of requests and negotiating work and I do the things that I find interesting or engaging, so you can find me on Cliverich.com for my negotiating work, and obviously, you can contact me through Lawbites, we have a very personal LinkedIn. And you can contact me through the websites, lawbiteco.uk, there is to fill in an inquiry form and ask, ask for me. And indeed, I was thinking about whether, what what I could offer to your listeners. And I thought perhaps one nice thing might be to say this, we, we, we offer in any event, a 15 minute free consultation to all our potential clients. That's, that's part of our, you know, part of our mission for SMEs is to is to provide that safe harbor for them. And if, yes, I do work on a platform as well. Not much now, but I do do some. So if you're, if your listeners happen to want their 15 minutes to be with me, that's fine. They can just fill in the enquiry form on site and mentioned my name mentioned this podcast and the association with Jim and I'll make sure that they get their 15 minute call with me.

Jim James: 26:18

Clive, thanks very much indeed. And having benefit of a 15 minutes with you, I think it's well worth the time. So thank you very much indeed Clive of lLawbites and inspirational man and entrepreneur, and wonderful all round counseling silverfox. Thank you for listening in today to the silver fox entrepreneurs podcast. 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.