Life updates before life passes too quickly
I gave a little talk earlier today to sixth form students at Queen Elizabeth School on how to start a business in your early twenties. I really like these in person talks and the chance to share a few lessons I wish I’d known when I was younger. Really, my takeaways came down to:
Cultivate an ability to think for yourself - the danger in concentrated environments like university, the workplace, or social media, is to do what everyone around you is doing.
It’s very hard at a young age to know what you want to do with the rest of your life. Instead, you should think about where you want to start and be willing to leave if it’s no longer right for you.
How running a business is about experimentation. You don't wake up and suddenly have the idea. Rather, business is about you testing things and tweaking as you see results.
How business = finance. The fundamental point about a business is to make more money than you spend. The problem is this often gets lost in the journey.
Plus, here’s a photo I rediscovered from the early days when I started the business. I remember thinking this looked very glamorous…
While I’m writing, I want to take quick stock of this year:
In person working
It has been almost 1 year of working with a team in person. This is fun. I like having the opportunity to brainstorm ideas with the team, which takes the pressure off me to think I need to come up with everything. It strikes me every time someone says something and I’m like, ‘Oh wow, I would never have thought of that’.
We work quite unusually in that we don’t necessarily sit and work in the same spot, even though we’re in person. We’ll usually touch base, discuss our goals for the day and work-allocation, and then I’ll go into a booth and do some deep work. We’ll then meet again at points in the day when we need to. I like this as a hybrid because I can still make progress on the things I am working on, which requires a lot of clear space. That said, maybe I’m wrong? One downside I see is that there is less opportunity for team members to learn by osmosis. We’ll see on this.
What I’m less good at is planning ahead, which is unhelpful for the team. We’re currently doing one month sprints, where we focus on one big project at a time and reflect on our progress at the end of the month.
New product & B2B sales
We built a new product at TCLA - to be released in September. It’s very well designed, based on what students care about when applying to law firms + also expensive. This has reminded me of how conservative I have been with applying capital to things that bring a long-term return on investment.
We’ve been meeting lots of law firms to pitch this product. It’s a nice feeling when they get the ‘wow’ moment of seeing this product demo. It’s also harder, though. I have been somewhat lucky over the last few years of being able to market something and it just sells. I have since learnt how much of working with businesses is about building a long-term relationship, well before they make a decision to work with you.
I’m okay with this now, but it definitely took time. This process has definitely taught me how sensitive I can be to rejection. But I think I have come out the side with new skills and more resilience.
I wrote a little book
I’ve written my first book: Corporate Law Made Simple: M&A.
The more time I spend teaching classes on M&A and finance to non-finance people, writing my legal newsletter, and breaking this down on Instagram (which has rocketed to 140k followers) the more I have realised that this is a unique role I can play at TCLA.
Writing is fun for me and I find the world of finance genuinely interesting, so it’s nice to be able to share what I have learnt in an accessible manner. I’m now writing the next little book: Corporate Law Made Simple: Finance.
Community
This has pretty much been the recurring thing over the past few months. We’ve done a lot of fun stuff, like top trump cards at our in person events with different law firms, a new finance game ‘The Bear, The Bull & The Hawk’ (thanks Hiba for suggesting the name), and a little WhatsApp community for our scholars and customers. What’s I love about TCLA is having the chance to run a business in the way I want to, allowing it to have a personality, and bringing people together in a journey that can otherwise be pretty soul-destroying.
Thanks for reading!
Jaysen