Paul:
Hello and welcome to What the Tech from Boast AI where we talk with some of the brilliant clients, pioneer new and exciting tech initiatives to learn what it takes to tackle technological uncertainty and eventually change the world.
Today, I am thrilled to welcome to the show Brett Colvin, CEO and Co-founder of Goodlawyer. This is a platform designed to give high growth scale up and mid-market companies, an alternative to the traditional corporate law firm with a smarter, faster and more cost-effective way to address their operational legal needs.
Goodlawyer's Fractional General Counsel is the only outsourced general counsel service that gives executive teams a dedicated legal partner to proactively manage legal tasks and risks before issues arise, while also providing on-demand limited scope and project-specific legal services.
Goodlawyer is also a fantastic boast partner as we leverage the expertise of their team while sharing a passion for the startup and scale-up communities across Calgary where Brett is based in the entire Canadian ecosystem. I can't wait to hear how Brett got into the startup based the genesis of Goodlawyer and what's on the roadmap for the rest of 2023. So without further ado, welcome to the show, Brett.
Brett Colvin:
Thanks, Paul. Pleasure to be here. Especially appreciated that intro blurb you put on [inaudible 00:01:07] on Goodlawyer. I thought that was very well done my friend.
Paul:
Oh, I'm so happy to hear it, Brett. Yeah, nope, my pleasure. And again, for audience at home, I am calling in from Toronto. We're doing things a little differently today. I am taking this interview from my hotel room live from Elevate Conference, so it's a lot going on these days, but like I said in the intro, Brett and his team at Goodlawyers are awesome partners. He has been rolling with the punches on this recording, and I can't wait to hear more about just how you brought Goodlawyer to the fore and what your plans are. So to kick it off, tell me a little bit about you, Brett.
Brett Colvin:
Oh, where to begin, Paul? Started my career in big law. I've been an entrepreneur my whole life, but started my professional career in big law, spent about four and a half years as a corporate lawyer here in Calgary. And it was really after many trials and very few successes in terms of trying to inject some innovation, some new ideas, some new approaches into the big firm context and just running into brick walls time and time again that really led to the idea for Goodlawyer and walking away from the firm back in 2019 to join forces with my fantastic co-founders and try to build something better.
Paul:
That is awesome. Yeah, something we hear very frequently are we've run into brick walls, we've reached the limitations of what we can do by doing things the old way.
Brett Colvin:
I can literally identify a specific moment. The idea had been percolating for a while already, but the moment where I was ready to put all my chips in, step away from a very healthy paycheck and take a big chance on this startup dream, it was one of the senior folks, kind of my boss coming into my office one day and I was kind of known as Mr. ideas guy, which certainly was not a compliment in the big firm context and he slammed the door and he really did mean well for me, but it was just sort of a reflection of that environment and the fear of change and he came in, slammed the door behind him and said, "Brett, keep coming up with your ideas. Just keep them to yourself." And I felt very muzzled and at that point, I said to myself, I got to go.
I got to go and try to figure out how to build something different because I don't think that the firm structure, the old-school partnership structure that's been around for hundreds of years was doing what it set out to in the early days firms coming into existence, and I think it was really leaving a lot on the table both for clients in our world, the scale-ups and high growth executives costing them tons of time and an insane amount of money and at the same time having a really negative effect on the good lawyers that were incredibly talented but sort of sucked into this way of working that I don't think fits the needs of people in 2023.
Paul:
I'd love to know specifically, so why the scale-ups, why those mid-market companies? What drives you to really partner with these companies that have that growth trajectory?
Brett Colvin:
Yeah, I mean I think for us, it's been this credibility march since we launched in 2020 in the early days, really focused on supporting the folks that would take a chance on us being a lot of early-stage startups that were going through a lot of the same pains as us and as we continued to grow and evolve, so did many of our clients. And one day we had a few folks come to us and they were looking for something more than just the project-based fixed-fee services that we'd been offering historically. And that's really where this Fractional General Counsel came from. The pain points that we've identified over the last 11, 12 months since we launched Fractional are these executives not in such dissimilar shoes as I am or our COO or our CFO is who didn't join the team, didn't set out on their own career trajectories to be sort of halftime lawyers.
And you have these senior execs within the business like Boast who become sort of a gatekeeper on the legal portfolio despite having say a finance or an operations background and it just begins to eat up so much of their time. They are unable to work on the most important high-leverage strategic items because they're in the weeds dealing with a high-velocity sales function or a really intense regulatory setting that they find their business in. And the ability to insert a senior experienced lawyer who has worked in their industry and can take the time to really understand their business becomes this incredible value-add. And once we figured out those pain points, we just doubled down and companies like Boast are the exact sort of target customers that we're looking for because we know we can add tremendous value with an in-house Fractional GC.
Paul:
I love that and you really brought it back to I think is a shared core ethos between Boast and Goodlawyer. These companies at this phase, those founders need to be focused on making their dream happen, making their innovation come to light, making the business actually function. We come in and we help them with the financing part where they could get really bogged down and that could be a huge time suck and where they really just get distracted from the main mission that they're on. And we don't want that happening. We want to make sure that they're focused on what they need to be focused on and let's leverage our expertise to make sure that you have that funding.
I feel like that's exactly what Goodlawyer's bringing to the table.
Brett Colvin:
Sure.
Paul:
You can get more done when you're with people too who know what it takes to build a company at that phase. I know a lot of the folks here at Boast, I'm kind of an outlier here in that I'm not a founder, but almost everyone else on my team, almost everyone else who I work with at the company, they have been in the weeds getting a business going.
Brett Colvin:
I still remember first meeting Lloyd Lobo at one of your guys' co-founders at Traction Conference a couple years ago and seeing his passion and energy was inspiring the tremendous growth that you guys have experienced over the last couple years. I think it goes to show just how intertwined and I think it's getting better connected this scale-up ecosystem is.
I've got a call with Lloyd from Dubai on Sunday catching up about community building initiatives and finding people that get it, that understand just what you're going through as a scale-up founder or one of these executives that comes in a little bit later makes everything more fun and a hell of a lot easier when you're explaining exactly how you are utilizing a service, whether that's Goodlawyer, whether that's Boast and how that's propelling your business forward because you don't have to worry about it anymore.
Paul:
No one brings the energy better than Lloyd does and I think that that is something too that you see when you partner with companies like Goodlawyer and like Boast. It is not lip service. It is very much something that we have felt intrinsically and we get excited when we are on a mission with you. So that is something to our founder audience. I want to make sure it's super clear.
Now talking about where Goodlawyer's been to date and what you're looking towards in the future, how have maybe your goals changed or evolved since you started Goodlawyer and what are you kind of looking forward to next year, next two years, however long?
Brett Colvin:
I think that the highest-level goals have maybe evolved a bit, but from day one, the desire was to empower good lawyers initially across Canada but eventually across the world to run better businesses and have a lot of the supports that I experienced inside the big firm context without the tremendous costs associated with that and really empowering these really talented individuals to pursue careers that were meaningful and rewarding for them. And then tying that to a huge problem that I have recognized since my earliest days being a lawyer.
As soon as you get into law school, all your friends think you're a lawyer and have all the answers, but the fact was I couldn't really support certainly early-stage companies, but even the scale-ups and the day-to-day operational needs of enterprise customers, I couldn't support those well in the firm context because the firm is really built on those bet the company transactions and litigation mandates that you can pack a ton of bodies on and drive the billables and when it came to the more operational day-to-day legal needs of a business, big or small, we weren't fitting that problem with a solution that I think made any sense. That's why you've seen this huge growth in-house teams and unfortunately a full-time in-house lawyer, there's a huge delay on that for most companies because even a scale up the moment when you actually need a full-time in-house GC and you're able to find one that knows you're in this industry intimately well, it's a really recruiting task. Really hard. And I think our ability to fill that really emanates from our deep understanding of the legal profession and what lawyers are looking for and our ability to connect those dots I think is what has driven our success from the early days when we were just serving $25 per page contract reviews all the way to today where we're serving some huge enterprises with operations all over the world.
I think sticking to that belief that we want to empower good lawyers to run great businesses and support these scale-ups and mid-market companies and enterprise clients, I think that is the trajectory that we're on now, and I like it.
Paul:
I love hearing that, and I know we work with Patrick on your team. I'd love to know, we have talked about Boast, we've talked about our partnership, but what's it been like working with your team? Could you add a little shade to what our partnership looks like in practice, how we've helped you guys as a company and also just what the give and take looks like?
We're all in this founders ecosystem together, so I'd love to know a little bit more about what that journey has been.
Brett Colvin:
I think our partnership is a special one and a little more unique than a lot of the partnerships we have just because of the incredibly aligned ICP, ideal customer persona. We are supporting a ton of the same organizations. I suspect that if we cross-referenced our customer lists, there would be a tremendous overlap. And so I think the opportunity to have you guys involved in our events, get on your content, Lloyd's going to be in our newsletter in a couple of weeks. That ability where you can spend time with people that you like because guys like Lloyd, yourself, I love the Boast folks, Anastasia, shout out. But I think when you can have that sort of personality alignment, which I believe we do, coupled with perfect business alignment, it makes for a big opportunity and days like today, jumping on the Boast pod I think is a reflection of that.
Paul:
I love it. I'm so glad too that again, the personalities thing, it keeps coming back to that. I'm so glad you shouted out Anastasia. I think that's something that I've learned as a huge differentiator for those two. Like I said earlier, I'm at Elevate. I'm used to being that marketing guy who shows up at conferences and they see your brand on your shirt or they see your brand on your hat and they're like, our vendor's going to come over and talk to us. They are excited when they see the Boast logo, they have a name in their back pocket. I can't tell you how many people came up to me being like, "Is Anastasia here?" Just Miriam, actually.
Brett Colvin:
You'll definitely see a couple of Goodlawyers and [inaudible 00:12:08] run around Elevate today and tomorrow.
Paul:
Oh yeah. I'm going to corner them the second I see them too. So this is just step one of the Goodlawyer engagement here on the podcast. So I'd like to broaden it out a little bit too. I like asking everyone kind of near the end of the show, what is your take on the current state of startups? I know there's a lot of doom and gloom in the headlines around funding and a lot of doom and gloom around just VCs not being involved at early stage right now, but what is kind of your take on the ground floor of what's happening in the community and maybe some advice without being too strategic for any founders looking to get in today?
Brett Colvin:
For sure. I've kind of operated on another sort of core belief that is deep in my bones whether I like it or not, and that is being too frugal to fail. I think that approach that I've just had kind of baked in from day one is more important now than it has been in the last several years. The fact is the investment and fundraising ecosystem is tighter than it's been in a long time. I digest a ton of startup scale-up-related content and the vibe that I'm getting is that it's going to last another year, two, and it probably won't come back to the insane levels that it was at in say '21.
So I think capital money, external money coming into your business is tighter than ever. I think being smart with your costs is more important than ever and I'll plug Goodlawyer and Boast on that front. And so I think battening the hatches to an extent really pushing to what we've kind of called internally, financial sustainability is a top priority or should be a top priority of most startups and scale-ups. We managed to break even for the first time ever in June and that was a huge weight off of my shoulders. We are still growing at a pretty incredible clip right now and growth is a top priority for our business now that we have secured some financial sustainability and we know that we've got a long runway, really figure this out and scale it globally.
It's being appreciative of the circumstances, understanding that financing is going to be more challenging than it was a couple of years ago and really reflecting on how do you give yourself as a founder, as an executive, the best chance of succeeding and managing your costs is a key way to do that.
Paul:
Absolutely. I think something too that comes up in a lot of these conversations with founders is I think Shark Tank has given us all kind of the mentality that every funding avenue is going to involve handing over equity when that's just plainly not the Dick case. It doesn't have to be that way. It's very, very, very involved with what Boast does, but I think there are so many non-dilutive opportunities that founders could take advantage of today to kind of layer onto what you were saying without handing over equity in the business, whether that's SHRED in Canada or whether that's the US already tax credit program or any other avenue, there are so many things out there. It's just a matter of digging in and figuring out what qualifies. That's what we help with. I know that your team helps a lot with that as well.
Brett Colvin:
And I would kind of put that into the cost control bucket. I'm certainly more familiar with the Canadian ecosystem. There are a ton of funding programs. SHRED is obviously the most common one and there is annoying hurdles that you have to overcome to access that funding, but to me, that is a key piece of managing that cost structure. I do think that unlike a lot of traditional industries ... And in my former days at the firm, I was a banking lawyer, so I did a tremendous amount of bank financing deals, syndicated loans, all that kind of stuff. And debt bank financing is more expensive than it's ever been. And frankly, it isn't really that accessible to most fast or marketplace or it really isn't because you just don't have, in most cases the hard assets to lend again, which does bring you back into the equity land.
And so I think raising some capital to give you some distance or just getting to cashflow positive faster than you thought you could is key to giving yourself enough runway to figure out the problem you're solving and solve it really well. When it comes to the non-dilutive, you should be maximizing those across the board and that's something that I think Goodlawyer has done a hell of a job from day one and now with the support of you guys.
Paul:
That is fantastic, Brett. I couldn't agree more. I love how you put that too for founders. It's also got to be diversified. It can't just all be like your eggs in one basket. I know that's very rudimentary, just kind of like business 101, but making sure that your capital strategy is leveraging all the possible options. It can. And to your point earlier too, not being so restrictive in your spending, whereas you're not giving yourself enough actual runway to do things and to try new things. I think that's important too.
Brett Colvin:
And one thing I'll layer on too, when you're thinking about that capital allocation strategy and how you manage costs, we're fortunate to be in a situation where everybody on the Goodlawyer team got a raise recently. We're super excited to move into one of the coolest buildings in town with a couple other scale apps going to be in the Telus Sky starting Monday. Yeah, pretty excited about that. But one of the ways that we have also managed costs is being generous with our employees on the equity front, especially in those early-ish days when you've got a team, maybe it's the co-founders, you're up to 10, 12 people really thinking strategically get a good lawyer to help you with it, but really thinking about how you can use equity as both a compensation and alignment tool to keep costs a little bit lower and get people committed in the overall success over the long term.
So that would be another one that I would layer on into that. If I can just throw one other thing in there. When it comes to the startup community, as much as the sort of startup economy or broader community is in a situation where cash is tighter, investments are going to be fewer than they were historically and probably smaller than they were in '21, Calgary, Alberta is so hot right now. I think we just hit another record in terms of quarterly investments and we've got companies moving here. Calgary is the most exciting version of Calgary that I've ever been a part of.