This article is written by Ramanuj Mukherjee, CEO, iPleaders.
This Sunday I was invited by a Gurgaon based co-working space to come and interact with young entrepreneurs. I asked them if they want me to speak about law and regulations or about entrepreneurship. They told me that I must speak about my experiences.
I decided to talk about the hardest part of starting up.
But I played a trick. I kept the topic “The hardest part of starting up” but didn’t say what I am actually going to talk about.
When the PPT was fired up on the screen, I showed my title screen. And asked the audience about what they thought was the hardest part of starting up.
Once I took a poll, it was clear that most of the startup founders present there thought that finding customers and selling their product was the hardest thing.
I could not disagree more.
Selling is the easiest thing, provided you have the right product and there is actually a market. You don’t even have to do much, people will come and buy if your product is that good and they really have a need.
Otherwise, anyway, you are doomed.
The hardest part according to me is handling people. The most unpredictable part of doing business. Always the weak link. And sometimes, just sometimes, the strength behind the idea too.
Getting people right is the hardest thing about being an entrepreneur and also the most misunderstood and underestimated challenge. After 10 years of being in the same business, I have only begun to understand the scope of this massive problem and solved only tiny fragments of it.
And every time I solve a tiny fragment, my business grows by leaps and bounds.
But this is not what the newbie startup founders were thinking. Almost all of them were overestimating how hard it was to sell. And underestimating the hard part – building an amazing team, fabulous execution, building an organization that can deliver crazy results.
“People” include the founders themselves.
The biggest reason for startup shut down across the world is co-founder conflicts.
However, perhaps a bigger reason, which never gets recorded, will be a failure as a person.
Being scared, being undisciplined, giving up, getting lured by temptations, short-sightedness, not learning fast enough, being too risk-averse, being in a hurry to get validation and success etc. These are all personal failures. And these always destroy possibility of success.
We never think what great risks we pose to our own ventures and ambitions. We ourselves are the greatest risks.
But here is a brainwave I had later.
These are exactly the same mistakes young lawyers make too.
They think getting the job is the hardest part, and do not prepare for how to do the work once they get the job.
They think too much about who will want to hire them, and too little about what makes them worthy of being hired by a client.
They think too much about their billables and too less about if the client was satisfied, treated well, taken care of.
They think too much about the brand of their law school and do not work enough to establish a personal brand.
They think that getting clients is the hardest part but do not realise that actual hard part is constantly developing themselves, upskilling, keeping in touch with market trends and every changing realities of the legal industry and training their teams to do amazing work.
They invest a lot in a nice looking office but forget to invest time and effort in building an amazing network which would have their back.
The hardest part of being a successful lawyer
It is not hard to do a great performance once or twice or even once every month.
A successful lawyer has to do a great job every single time, relentlessly, unforgivingly, unflinchingly, even at a personal cost and that is very hard. You cannot let any client down!
A successful lawyer has to stay on the bleeding edge of legal development. He may have known everything about the law till last month but if there have been new developments since then and he does not stay on top of it, he can lose the case, face and clients in an instant.
A successful lawyer is often as good as his support staff. If his juniors screw up, if his clerk does not have discipline, if the secretary lacks integrity, her practice will go for a toss. She has to take responsibility for her whole organization. It is hard to keep the whole firm/ organization in ship shape all the time.
A successful lawyer has to understand how new technology can be used to stay ahead of the curve. Otherwise others those who do will overtake him.
It is hard to stay on top of so many things.
It is not at all hard to find clients. There are tons of people looking for competent lawyers. The fear that “if I strike out on my own I may not find clients” keep a lot of good lawyers away from trying.
However, you will hardly ever see a competent, well-rounded lawyer failing to get enough clients. They may have to be patient, but usually, the patience pays off.
However, the hard part is delivering high-quality work, again and again.
It is never difficult to find a job. All the law firms and companies are desperately looking for lawyers who can do good quality work. Even for them, it is not challenging at all to find clients. It is much, much harder to find lawyers who are capable.
If you are worrying about finding jobs or finding clients, please don’t. Just learn what you have to do and how to do once you get the client or land the job. That is the only hard part.
Like at LawSikho, it has never been hard for us to find students. If we build good courses, students come. The hard part is to deliver high quality, amazing courses that actually helps the students to learn something.
The mistake I made and corrected
When I was young and naive, I thought we needed university certificates to sell our courses. Then one day we were forced by the situation to depend on our own brand, and voila! Soon we were doing much better on our own, so much so that I would not want to work with any universities in the future.
If I have to create a University, I will want to make something like the Mindvalley University in Kuala Lumpur.
The quality of the course is what matters, not the certificate! In fact, our certificate has been increasing in value given the rigorous training and assessment process, and recruiters having good experience with our graduates. Large companies and law firms have been reaching out to us in much greater numbers as our ability to deliver quality and customized programs have grown as we don’t have to pander to university bureaucracy and irrelevant UGC requirements which used to restrict our vision and innovation.
It’s hard to actually give meaningful and effective training to students, and not that hard to set up universities, as you can say from the way low quality universities have mushroomed all over India.
What is possible for you if you stop worrying about outcome and begin to give your effort and attention to preparation?
Think about it. Think hard.
People are ready to pay a premium for really amazing, rare, high quality things. Royal Enfield sells more and makes more profit than all the other boring motorbikes although it is so much more expensive.
Do you want to be the Harley Davidson, Royal Enfield or some boring and cheap brand nobody even remembers the name of?
I hope these few paragraphs will make you think and help you to set the right priorities.
We can help you to train and become amazing at some skills that we teach.
Here are the upcoming courses that will start in February at LawSikho:
Diploma Courses
- Diploma in Advanced Contract Drafting, Negotiation and Dispute Resolution
- Diploma in M&A, Institutional Finance and Investment Laws (PE and VC transactions)
- Diploma in Entrepreneurship, Administration and Business Laws
Executive Certificate Courses
- Certificate course in Advanced Corporate Taxation
- Certificate course in Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code
