Michael Bodekaer

I often speak with very bright people who dream about becoming entrepreneurs.
They explain how they feel trapped in their current 9-5 jobs but are afraid to make the “dangerous” jump into unknown world, where fixed monthly salaries are a thing of the past.

In this great guest blog post, a dear friend of mine, Kristian Holte, shares his story, on how he quit his job at a law firm 3 months ago, and already today has a profitable business!
Very inspirational and informative 3 minutes read.

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Yes, you got it right. It is actually possible to start your own law firm and earn more than enough to survive. Is it easy? No. Possible? Definitely. I did it. And you can do it too.

In this post I’ll outline 5 key principles that made me go from dissatisfied employee to legal entrepreneur in just 3 months.

I quit my job on 1 May 2010 and as of today 10 August 2010 my company Simply Law is thriving and attracting more and more qualified and interesting clients each day.

1. Value-Based Pricing

As you probably know most of the legal industry bills by the hour. There’s really no point since the interests of the attorney and the client often aren’t aligned using this model. The client is interested in getting the job done well swiftly and the attorney is interested in spending as many hours as possible.
So let’s reverse that.

It is so easy to differentiate yourself here by offering value-based pricing. Maybe you think this means that you can’t charge as much. Not at all. It only means that you have to consider the value of each case and price accordingly.

Value can be many things. Urgency, mental pain, accessibility, monetary value and strategic advantages are factors to consider when pricing your services. The pricing of your competitors as well. When you’re starting out your costs are low and you don’t need to price as high to break even. Use this to your advantage by comparining your pricing to your competitors’ when making an offer.

2. Compete on Quality

Don’t compete on price. This is an endless spiral which drags you downwards and which does nothing but attract the wrong type of clients. It makes you earn less and less money over time as well. You don’t want that. Instead, position yourself as a speciliast within some or a couple of fields, obtain cutting-edge knowledge and market yourself by sharing this knowledge with current and prospective clients.

3. Lean and Mean

Keep your costs low. I don’t even have a real office. I work from home. Or from the coffee shop. I decide myself. I rarely have physical meetings, because I find they often aren’t necessary. Clients don’t find them necessary either, apparently.

I use a range of free or low-cost online tools, I’ve outsourced the secretary function so I don’t have to answer the phone all day. I get e-mailed once my “secretary” has received a call from a current or prospective client.

In short: It isnt’ necessary to reside in a castle and to have chocolate with the firm’s name on it. Focus
on being excellent and communicating this to the right people. Then, you can have the chocolate later. And the impressive marble office.

4. Pick Your Niche

Have an idea of which niche you want to focus on. But don’t start out too narrow. I have chosen intellectual property law as my area of specialty and 75 % of my revenue is generated by IP-work. However, I also have a client base within the restaurant business. Now, I hadn’t anticipated that, but along the line I noticed an opening here.

So: Pick a main niche, but don’t be too specific and picky to start out with. There is plenty of time to specialize narrowly as you go along. Someday you’ll be THE expert in your niche.

5. Market Yourself Everyday

A lot of attorneys don’t like to market themselves. But this part of being a legal entrepreneur is crucial.
I enjoy marketing myself as much as I enjoy pracitising IP-law. Sometimes more.

Set up your own marketing system which you execute on a daily basis. I spend about 50 % of my time marketing Simply Law. If you do this well, you don’t have to worry about attracting the right clients.

This was a quick overview of some of the principles I’ve found to be useful. If you have any questions or
comments please feel free to e-mail me at holte@simplylaw.dk or simply post a comment below.

Kristian Holte, legal counsel
Simply Law

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Do you have a similar story? Please share it below in the comments! I love to hear these success stories!

I first got to know about Prezi a few weeks ago, and I was immediately impressed by how easy and amazingly cool interactive presentations you can create with nearly no effort!
So when I shortly after was invited to present at DTU in Copenhagen (Denmark’s very own MIT :), I naturally decided to test out this cool tool and see what it could really do when pushed to the limits.

Having worked with interactive and animated online solutions for many years, I naturally felt at home right away. My past experiences is by no means a precondition for you to be able to use Prezi though. Its easy and intuitive interface is truly amazing, and there is a bunch of great videos that will get you started in minutes.

The result? The audience was super impressed, and Prezi surely helped in keeping the audience “glued” and engaged while adding a great touch and wow effect to the whole presentation :)

Interested in seeing the presentation?

Below is a slightly shorter version with minor modifications, to make it more “online-friendly”. Keep in mind that it is intended as an aid for a speaking presentation – not a presentation in itself. So you’ll miss out on all the goodies and jokes in between the lines ;)

Sit back, relax, and enjoy Prezi in action

Create Your Own Free Prezi

The best of the whole thing? It’s free!
Just go to www.prezi.com and create your own presentations right away.
You can even import your old PowerPoint presentations, and give them some cool transitioning effects.

A lot of people asked for the presentation afterwards (surely for the wonderful animations ;), so I put it up for you here.
Feel free to share it with your friends.

Thanks everyone and Stardust especially for setting up and arranging everything so well!

Note: It is quite heavy on graphics and video, so you might have to let it load for a short time.

I love to reduce unnecessary work and clutter, and always seek to eliminate such things quickly.

As a result, I decided to go paperless 5 months ago, and now wanted to share with you my experiences from running a paperless startup office. So here is a brief post, to help you go paperless today and even protect the environment at the same time.

What you need:

• iPhone
• Evernote
• JotNot (iPhone App)
• RightSignature (Web + iPhone App)
• Optional: Personal Assistant

Scenarios:

Here are some usual scenarios, and how I use the above to handle them effectively.

Bill received via snail mail

[Total time: 1 minute]

1. Scan with JotNot iPhone App (makes it look like a perfect scan)
2. Forward to assistant with header “Task: Please pay and archive”
3. Recycle paper and get a cup of coffee
   
   It now gets paid by my assistant, and the document is put in a special folder in my Evernote account which my assistant has access to. I can now also search all my documents and easily find them later on, as the text is OCR scanned automatically in Evernote. Annual reporting becomes a simple export of my Evernote folder for the accountant.

Electronic document needs to be signed

[Total time: 3 minutes]

1. Upload document to RightSignature website
2. Sign document using iPhone RightSignature App
3. Done.
   
   No need to print, sign, scan etc. RightSignature now emails the signed document to you with a special signature certificate attached to it. You can easily forward the email to whomever need the contract, or forward it to your Evernote email account for archiving.

Paper contract needs to be signed

[Total time: 2 minutes]

1. Sign on paper
2. Scan with JotNot iPhone App
3. Forward to Evernote email account, or assistant with header “Task: Please archive contract”
4. Recycle paper and relax while wondering why life is so wonderful
   
   Very easy. And again, Evernote allows you to easily search for documents by OCR scanning everything automatically.

I hope this gave you some inspiration as to how you can reduce paper and clutter in your daily life and work.

I can warmly recommend going paperless – the technology is now ready to make it easy and convenient!

Below is an interactive version of the mind-map on personal development that I have put together.
Keep in mind that the items listed are the ones which are important to me – there are of course thousands of other topics to list, but these I find to be the most important ones.

Notice also that you can mouse over the small note icons to get detailed information about each of the topics.

New website is now up and running. Welcome.
The site will be undergoing several improvements over the next few weeks, with the goal make the site as informative and useful as possible.

As always, I love to get feedback, so feel free to leave a message.

Yanik Silver, a very successful online marketer, just released a really interesting presentation by Zappos CEO from his yearly Underground Online Seminar.

I really enjoyed watching the presentation, and how the company just focuses on two things, and as a result the growth and success apparently comes by itself according to the CEO.

So which two things makes Zappos so successful?
1) Outstanding customer service!
2) Amazing company culture!

So focusing on happy repeat customers and happy employees, is the absolute top priority for Zappos – an approach which has proven to be highly successful with Zappos 1 billion USD yearly turnover.
Not bad :)

Have a look – it’s 1 hour packed with many good insights and ideas on how to manage your own startup.

Zappos CEO presentation

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Clay Shirky (author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations) recently presented at TED about social media. The presentation is fairly simple and straightforward, however as always, Clay is very good at providing good real-life examples on how the social media should be applied.
I especially like the example on the Obama campaign about 12 minutes into the presentation.

Back in January, I also had the fortunate experience of meeting Clay in person to discuss the potential and dangers of using social media for larger corporations. It was without doubt a very intriguing experience. I especially enjoyed  ”picking” his brain on his understanding of the hundres of interesting ways in which social media is being applied today – an understanding and knowledge which I really admire and envy Clay for.

I can also warmly recommend Clay’s blog dedicated to the book on soecial media: http://www.herecomeseverybody.org/

Related external articles

• Pure gold nuggets from Shirky (dougbelshaw.com)
• Books for Understanding Social Media (800ceoread.com)
• Clay Shirky on Historical Significance of Social Media (myventurepad.com)

In a few weeks from now, I have a couple of presentations to do in San Francisco on entrepreneurship, as part of the teaching I do through RealAcad at Stanford.

As usual, I have a couple of slides with me to guide the presentations, and I actually felt I had it all pretty well under control after many years of working on digital design, combined my experience from the consulting world.

However I soon realized that I still had much to learn.

It all happened as I picked up the book PresentationZEN just recently. The book focuses on providing the reader with an understanding of how to create PowerPoint presentations that just works, by providing clear simple messages that the audience 1) understands and 2) remembers.

As I started reading, the book quickly got my attention with it’s visual appeal, clear communication, and naturally highly relevant topic. As a result, I read it over a couple of Starbucks Coffees and Thai Lattes (it’s a very easy read if you apply some simply speed/photoreading techniques).

I especially enjoyed the second part of the book on design and delivery, which provides many great “before” and “after” type of examples on “how not to do it” and “how to do it”.

A mind map for you

As usual, I also scribbled down the most relevant points from the book, and placed them a neat little Mind Map which I have attached below. Feel free to use it any way you like.
(It is an interactive map, so you can use the mouse to drag around and open/collapse items)

TED presentations

While reading the book, I also got inspired to watch some of the TED presentations recommended. TED is without doubt one of the absolute best sources of inspirational, condensed and impactful presentations. With each presentation being only 18 minutes long, the presenters are forced to make their points very simple and clear. As such, the presentations are a great source for role modelling on good presentation skills.
Here is one presentation I especially liked, for the presenters ability to make a statistically highly complex topic very simple, clear and fun :)

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Here is a great video on the hype and usefulness of Facebook, Twitter etc. for business networking.

I strongly agree with the points Seth is making on the little usefulness for medium and larger corporations, but at the same time also believe that especially Twitter has a huge potential for small business/pure online entrepreneurs who seek to quickly build up a cheap marketing channel. Perry Belcher has some good examples on this and how to monetize the twitter base – but watch out, all his videos on this are packed with sales speeches :)

Here are some additional interesting videos from the AMEX event:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/07/four-videos-about-noise-social-and-decency.html

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