Keep pushing, growing, hiring, scaling. Establish myself as a thought leader. Partner with businesses. Delegate the tasks it does not make sense for me to do.
It all sounds right, but am I guilty of falling into the trap I left behind four years ago? The trap of the default path, of constantly striving for the next best thing, of playing status games, of replacing salary with revenue as a metric for my self-worth?
Grow the business, and I can reach and hire more people. I have the leeway to experiment and a buffer to withstand storms. But what if there was a tension between making more money and building the life I want to lead? What if staying small led to greater fulfilment?
As good as it gets
Last year, I would have dismissed the idea of having a mission or values for my life. They would have sounded made up, vague, perhaps even odd. And maybe they are all of those things, but I keep coming back to them. They serve as a benchmark to help me make decisions aligned with my happiness.
My personal mission, to ‘bring joy to people’, is an overarching principle. It’s designed to oversee everything I want to do in my life, including the businesses I want to build and the life I want to lead. This overlap is fundamental: if my work is going to consume a substantial proportion of my time, I want to build a business that isn’t dependent on the destination, but one that gives me and the people around me day-to-day meaning, whether or not we make it to the imaginary end-point. I want to design a business, and a life, where I am happy with the answer to the question, “What if this is as good as it gets?”.
As a business in pursuit of joy, we have the permission to do things that don’t scale. We send notes to customers and gladly offer refunds. We make decisions to be vulnerable, to tell the truth, and to use our platform to provide people the support and information they may not have had access to in the past.
This is the philosophy underpinning TCLA. We don’t want your ability to access great ideas to be governed by your background, connections or location. With the power of an online community, you have a tribe, a voice to your concerns, an opportunity to feel less alone, a group of people who are there to celebrate your success and support you during your lowest moments.
Rethinking the business model
Nine months after I started TCLA. I had moved back to live with my family. I had used up my savings, the money I had made from my short time as a trainee solicitor, as well as a bank loan to fund the business.
I remember this day because I was working on the business in my local library, and I saw they were hiring an assistant. At that moment, I had to make a decision: I would either introduce a subscription, or I would apply for the assistant role and use the funds to support TCLA. I knew that if I did not find a way for TCLA to sustain itself, there would be no TCLA. I chose to introduce a subscription.
Since then, it has been our philosophy to share as much content as we can, as widely as we can. The vast majority of our platform is free, with the costs of our forum funded by the small percentage of paid subscriptions to our platform. We try to be clear that you don’t need to sign up to our platform to secure a job in commercial law; you can learn everything you need to know through our free resources.
Along the way, we try to mitigate financial hardship. We give away free subscriptions in our forum every week and access to our lectures in our newsletter. We run a yearly scholarship programme and regularly provide free subscriptions to those who contact us to say they cannot afford our services.
All this justification to say, I readily feel the conflict between our mission and the pricing of services. It bothers me that we have to justify it. My battle right now is the need to fund the operations of TCLA with the consequences of pricing out an underserved market.
But I’m excited to share with you something we have been thinking about since the start of 2022. It’s a new long-term goal and trajectory for TCLA.
This goal is to provide free access to our training platform. This way, we can upskill thousands of aspiring lawyers, especially those who need it the most.
Now, it will take time to get there. We’re bootstrapped and we’ll need to work on replacing our current income to support our costs. But I am excited by a goal that feels deeply aligned with the life mission, one where we truly bring joy to the people around us.