A cold email was the best way to approach law firms
I knew how to tailor a cold email to a law firm
Because we already had a community, law firms would be primed to partner with TCLA
I would have the same experience as I did when a law firm approached TCLA for a partnership

I am close to saturating the market for growth in the consumer space
Sponsorship is the only route to partnering with a law firm
This is the route I want to take TCLA

This newsletter is about vulnerability, so I will start this week by calling myself out. I didn’t write last week1.

Now, let me explain why.

I write this newsletter between Friday and Monday each week. As my workload has transformed over the past month, this makes particular weeks difficult to write if I want to have time for myself.

So why have things become so busy?

Market changes

First, we’ve just entered the busiest five months for the business. Because the legal job market is seasonal, we receive a substantial increase in customers between October and February each year. This is especially true between December and February where we see an explosion in users on TCLA.

Take our forum, for example.

Hiring & Inductions

To manage the busyness of this application season, I have been hiring across two different teams. But hiring doesn’t just mean a multiple-stage assessment process, it also comes with a whole new world of administrative tasks, such as hiring an employment law firm to draft contracts, securing the right insurance for the business and conducting right to work checks.

It has also meant improving our onboarding process for new team members. I still have a long way to go, but I am proud of the changes we implemented this year.

Two weeks ago, you may remember that we had just begun to dip our toes into using Notion. Thanks to the support of a team member, who I would not have been able to do this without, we made extensive use of Notion for our induction training.

It’s a start and I’m delighted that we now have the base for this team which we can all collectively build on. I can’t wait to see how this looks next year.

Learning from a community

The second reason my time has become more precious is my new commitments to a start-up programme. For both personal and business reasons, this has already become one of my best investments this year.

I joined the programme because I have been trying to break into this world with little help. But now I believe that my ability to successfully lead TCLA depends on my willingness to meet and learn from other people who have been in my shoes.

This programme is a fast-track to accelerating my learning and identifying my blind spots. I can also dedicate a day to step away from the weeds and focus on the big picture goals for the business.

However, this programme does mean I am now away every Wednesday evening and every other Friday. It also means I am taking on new challenges as part of the programme.

For example - two weeks ago, we were asked to set our most important goal for our businesses over the following eight weeks. As you may remember, I have been intent on transitioning to business-to-business sales, so I decided my most important goal would be to contact 50 law firms in eight weeks. That seemed manageable!

But just before we left for the day, we were told to complete our chosen goal in two weeks 😲.

And what a journey this was. I started week one with good intentions, deciding I was going to contact five law firms every day. I planned to do this at 9am - 11am each day, my most productive period of the day for which I set the most important tasks.

9am on Monday came, and there was something more ‘pressing’ to do. But it was okay, it was only day one. I could afford to catch up on Tuesday. Then the same thing happened on Tuesday. And Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

By the end of week one, I wanted to explore my lack of action. This goal was supposed to be the most important goal for the business, why could I not find time to work on it?

I think there were several reasons. Primarily, I was scared.

I was facing a new problem. Because I had not yet started, the goal felt bigger and harder than it was. Because of these imaginary blockers, it was easier to focus on other issues that felt far more urgent, even if they may have been less important.

After checking in with my start-up group, I shifted my plan to work on this task as the first task of the day, before looking at anything else. By working on this from 7:30am-9am, the day would still be quiet, and I would not be diverted away from seemingly urgent issues.

I made more progress in week two, contacting 13 law firms with tailored emails based on the firms I was applying to.

Now, when approaching this task, I had many assumptions. For example, I believed:

It feels obvious now, but I had many mistaken assumptions about the process of contacting law firms for a partnership. This comes from lack of experience; to date, I have significantly improved my ability to pitch to consumers, but I have little idea how to approach businesses.

Because I believe in TCLA, I assumed law firms would pick up on that immediately and jump at the chance to partner with us. Oh, how naive I was!

I am learning that business-to-business sales is a completely different ball game. It’s about building relationships. You can’t go straight in and ask for a partnership, unless you happen to be the right kind of company or you have a substantial amount of luck on your side. It was back to the drawing board for me.

But all is not lost. Most importantly, had I not had the goal of completing my eight week goal in two weeks, I would have waited eight weeks to test my assumptions. This accountability was one of the best parts of the challenge.

Deciding the direction

This experience has also been interesting for me as a test of the direction I want to pursue. Was I delaying this challenge because I was too busy? Was it because it was a new problem I didn’t know how to solve?

Or was it because it was not the right problem to solve? Is this really the step I need to take to scale TCLA right now?

On one hand, it makes sense. Law firms have bigger budgets and therefore to grow TCLA faster, sponsorship is a tried and tested path.

But I am assuming:

At the moment, the idea of using my time during the busiest six months of the year to approach law firms isn’t that exciting. It’s not necessarily true that I’ll put an end to this target, but I need to be careful of pursuing goals without thinking deeply about why I am pursuing them first. No doubt I will come back to this topic in the future.

For my readers, I hope it’s clear - I don’t always know what to do. I think it’s important for me to be honest about this because sometimes there’s an outside perception that everything runs smoothly.

When running a business, it’s very tempting to do things because you’ve decided it’s your goal or because it feels like it’s what you’re supposed to do. The danger is confining your future to a decision you have made in a few moments.

I find much of the process of judging the direction of a business is trying things, testing assumptions, using new data to iterate, and revising your thought process before you decide what the right path is to take.

Special shoutout to the people (thank you Netty!) who dropped me a message about last week. While I may not be able to write every week, this newsletter isn’t going anywhere, and I’m honoured that each of you take your time out to read this.