3 business lessons I learned from running my own firm for 24 years

Mark Goh, founder and managing director of Vanilla Law / Photo credit: Vanilla Law

Mark is a star contributor for Tech in Asia and publishes exclusive, high-value content that serves the Asian tech community. Read more from star contributors here.

I have been a lawyer for nearly a quarter of a century and have spent most of those years running my own firm. Like any small-to-medium enterprise (SME), I struggled through the very basics of building and operating a business—figuring out and building my firm’s corporate structure, defining my value proposition, identifying my customer segment, and planning my finances. (For these basic lessons, I recommend using Alexander Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas.)

I realized pretty early on that I was in a very unique position where I straddled two different worlds:

1. The world of a lawyer
2. The world of an SME business owner

I have been blessed with many insights over the years, and I wanted to share three of the most important ones.

Founder’s myopia

In Bill Gates’ book, Business @ the Speed of Thought, he references an old business joke that goes, “If railroads had understood they were in the transportation business instead of the steel-rail business, we’d all be flying on Union Pacific Airlines.”

As business owners, we sometimes become too focused or protective of our “babies;” we hang on to that first successful iteration of our business and refuse to innovate, expand, and keep up with market trends. We need to keep our minds open to be able to see the possibilities.

Earlier in my career, I invested in a company that conducted boat rides for wakeboarders (this was when the sport was gaining popularity in the country). The demand was so high from wakeboarding enthusiasts that the owners were not able to cater to other types of customers.

No one ever thought about attempting to capture the waterskiing market even though there was obvious demand. In the end, the wakeboarding craze died down, and the company folded.

Perhaps if the business owners looked beyond wakeboarding and recognized that their business was about supporting various water activities instead, they could have planned and executed a more flexible and sustainable business strategy.

My own product, VanillaLaw Docs, was designed as a legal document assembly software to help SMEs reduce legal costs and streamline the legal process. However, I have come to realize that the software can also be effective in industries outside of the legal industry. One such example is in the field of publishing, where companies that need to quickly assemble and print annual reports or assessment books can possibly use the software to organize and customize their print jobs.

These types of realizations are important because without them, we would continually operate in a limited space, unable to break out of the “trap” we created for ourselves. A simple way to avoid this trap is to always keep updated with the developments in your chosen and related industries and dedicate time (e.g. quarterly/biannual meetings) to review your business processes and strategies with your team.

Reexamining relationships

I used to be quite wary of the notion guanxi (roughly translated as relationships or connections) and have even written about the subject in relation to how SMEs conduct business. In essence, the culture of guanxi leads people to ink deals based on verbal agreements and trust instead of proper legal procedures. I’ve had several clients who’ve come to me with problems as a result of this.

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