Partner Article

A blueprint for start-up survival

Today’s market for small businesses is a far cry from the dog-eat-dog world of the nineties. There is increasing recognition that collaboration, not competition, can lead to shared success. Lawyers On Demand (LOD) were delighted to be involved in a new report from Zipcar, the UK’s largest pay-as-you drive network. The report, entitled ‘The Smarter Business Blueprint: Insights from SME Trailblazers’, was published with StartUp Britain and Ashridge Business School and combines fresh research surveying over 1,000 UK start-ups with key insights from focus groups. The report lays down an invaluable six-point blueprint for start-up survival, which resonates strongly with our own experience:

Adopting Beta attitudes is one that spoke to us: after all, the aim of the successful start-up is to disrupt the existing business model of industry incumbents. LOD began as a pilot within a large law firm, Berwin Leighton Paisner (BLP), and our model looked like it could cannibalise their business and deconstruct a 400-year-old career path. We were lucky that the partners were visionary enough to embrace what we were trying to do. The 2008 crash then increased the urgency for a more innovative approach to managing legal work. Now, we are always in Beta mode, we never tell ourselves that this is the finished product - it’s a counter-intuitive business model, but it keeps us nimble.

We’re not alone in being a collaborative cost-cutter; eight out of the 10 (82%) entrepreneurs Zipcar surveyed rely on collaboration to build and grow their business, and more than half (55%) say it is essential to their survival. Collaboration as a tool for reducing costs and encouraging flexibility and dynamism. LOD evolved out of the law firm BLP, sharing office space and resources with them. This enabled us as a start-up to operate swiftly and leanly, and have access to the right technology and infrastructures necessary to be agile.

It’s not just physical resources where sharing is king. Staffing 2.0 identifies a new attitude to attracting the best talent. As an an alternative legal services provider, we encapsulate the idea that ownership of staff is seriously out-dated. Our lawyers are offered on a freelance basis so multiple legal teams are able to use them, and is becoming increasingly acceptable in even our traditional industry. People see that access to services is more important than ownership. Premiership football teams loan their talent to others, why shouldn’t we? Owning staff, cars and offices are all concepts whose time has come and gone.

Getting tech savvy is critical for today’s entrepreneur. Nine out of 10 (93%) of entrepreneurs’ business models now rely on technology to function, according to Zipcar’s survey. Certainly our model is underpinned by technology, allowing many of our clients and lawyers to work remotely with each other to reduce costs and increase access to expertise.

Zipcar’s survey showed that 25% of start-ups are actually set up to escape bureaucracy of corporate environments. Battling the box tickers was the seed for LOD, as we wanted to produce a solution that was as straightforward as possible, making it simple and easy for our clients to say “yes”. We knew a revolution in law was just around the corner because we had clients telling us they wanted to work in a different way and lawyers telling us they were tired of being in the office for 12 hours a day

Finally, staying future focused is essential; don’t sweat the small stuff or you will never go to bed. Stay focused on the 2-3 big things that really matter. For us that means staying true to our brand essence of value and quality assurance. We now even have clients coming to us for advice on making their lawyers as happy and successful as ours

We know there is a better way of doing business - the sharing economy is set to transform the UK SME market.

Zipcar’s Smarter Business Blueprint is available for download here.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Jonathan Brenner .