Caveat is a legal services consultancy business that's run on a platform business model. What we do is to create a marketplace where clients have access to lawyers, and we provide the infrastructure for that to happen.

Having grown up in a profession where the lawyers have decided what the market wants and what the market is going to get, that's where the opportunity came in for us to make a proper change.

It was easy and completely out of my hands. My background is litigation. I could not get involved in any of the work that comes into the business because it is all commercial work, and I'm not qualified to do it. As a result, I've only been able to run the business and it's provided a very good separation, which has been really necessary.

We are extremely agile, flexible, nimble. We can put together a team of lawyers for a client depending on the size of the engagement or the size of the deal, and even once that engagement or deal is underway, we can still tweak it and make a little changes. 

An important thing when it comes to scale is simplicity versus complexity. The more complex your business, the harder it is to scale; the more simple your business, the easier it is to scale.

I spoke to a number of entrepreneurs and asked them what their biggest pain points were. Without fail, the two biggest pain points were people and cash. So one of the decisions that I made on the basis of that was we're not hiring people and we're going to keep this very basic. 

Most lawyers actually just want to sit in a quiet place and do a good job on this brief, that brief and the next one. They don't need to be involved in the strategy discussions and they don't want to be managing juniors. In our setting, I don't need the lawyers to be onside on all of the business decisions and moving their way up the ladder.

There are things that you can do to improve culture unity and to have a unified voice, and we do all of those as best we can. We've obviously made sure that all of our marketing materials, but also our internal communications have a unified voice.

We started email marketing quite early. Today we’re covering email marketing, paid advertising on a few different platforms, social media, Google ads. We're pretty much covering the whole spectrum of marketing activities.

In my journey, I have realised that the only people who should be building their own tech are tech businesses. When people say that they are building their own tech, that indicates to me that they are naive.