A Marketing Novice

I’ll confess I’ve floundered around a bit on the best ways to market myself.  This was certainly the arena I knew the least about when I embarked upon my self-employment path, and the task I find the most intimidating.  After all, employees don’t need to market (unless that’s their job, of course) – they just need to show up and do their jobs well.  So I’ve had to take a “crash course” in educating myself about how to market my freelance paralegal business.  I’m quite sure I still don’t have this figured out, but I’ve tried to keep moving forward in marketing efforts.  I wrestle with the temptation to do nothing until I’m sure I know what to do; I'm afraid of doing it wrong.  However, I realize that is deadly.  I believe that instead when it comes to marketing, I need to do something, almost anything, to keep my momentum going.  Any of my local efforts will probably bear at least some fruit (they already have!), and I can learn from my mistakes and fine-tune my approach as I go along.

In addition to face to face networking (more on this in future posts), my current efforts are focused on a very targeted direct mail campaign.  I spent a couple of weeks writing brochure copy.  A number of friends were very helpful to me in this regard, brutally editing down my text (“honey, no one is going to read all that!”), and giving me helpful ideas about what to focus on.   I’m happy with the end result, and friends in the marketing industry have given my brochure a positive review.

I’m in the process of carefully selecting firms and attorneys who work in litigation, and who would benefit from my services.  And I’m mailing my brochures out to this list, city by city, accompanied by hand-written notes.  I’ll be at this for a while, until I’ve blanketed my target area at least once (major cities in my own and two neighboring counties).  And I've gotten some business from this effort already!  Meanwhile, I’m trying to strategize about follow-up efforts, be it a second direct mail piece, an email campaign, phone calls (a daunting thought – that would be a heck of a lot of calls!), or something else.  I realize that with my particular business model, law offices aren’t necessarily in need of my services the moment my name/brochure/business card/etc. comes to their attention.  So how do I stay on their radar, so that they remember to call me once that need arises?

Any advice?

Thanks for reading.

Self-Employed At Last

As I was working through all those business books (see previous post) and trying to decide what form of self-employment I wanted to pursue, I tried a lot of different possibilities on for size – for example, resume writing or litigation support work.  And of course, I brainstormed about how I could put my love of cooking and wine to work for me in money-making endeavors.  It was helpful, I believe, to initially spend time pursuing avenues that were a departure from anything I had done before, a completely fresh start.  However, after a lot of thought and exploration, eventually I concluded that the most logical thing was to continue working as a paralegal, but this time as a freelancer rather than an employee.  After all, I already have the needed skills; I’m good at it; and while I may have become weary and disillusioned of law firm life, I do like the work itself.

I concluded that two important factors could contribute to my success in this endeavor.  The first is technology.  Technology now enables a lot of work in the legal industry to be done remotely.  This means it's less important to have a lot of sizeable law firms nearby; if I can work from a home office, I don’t need to be in close proximity to a client. This means that I can live wherever I want and still find work.  The second factor, ironically enough, is the recent and ongoing economic downturn.  I believe this very difficult economy is actually a great opportunity for me, because firms of all sizes are loathe to add to their payrolls right now (in fact, many have been reducing staff dramatically), but they still need to get work done.  Hiring a freelancer instead of a permanent employee is a very economical solution for them.

Perhaps the most important added benefit of a freelancing business, though, is this:  After over 20 years of paralegal work in law firms, I felt I had reached a point where I really couldn’t learn much more.  There were few if any new substantive skills to acquire.  I couldn’t really advance much further.  However, in starting my own business, there are so many new things to learn, so many new challenges to tackle, a huge number (sometimes a frightening number!) of new skills to acquire.  Instead of dragging into the office to perform the same tasks I’ve been performing for years, now I struggle to work through all the new decisions and activities which go into striving to make a new business work.  I’m a novice at this; I’m once again wet behind the ears!  And I’m finding that exhilarating!

But back to nuts and bolts, as it were.  Having made the decision to build a freelance paralegal business, I thought long and hard about a business name, bought my domain, and had a website put together.  I did – and continue to do - plenty of research on any technological tools I might need to perform paralegal work from a home office.  I began sketching out a business plan (OK I admit, it’s still not very detailed).  Once I had relocated back to Northern California, I started working on additional logistics of my new business – a business license, a business phone and address, business cards, a brochure.    I’ve also spent time researching local trends in the legal industry, local court rules, local pricing, and local advertising.  I’ve looked into who my competitors are (there are some other very talented contract paralegals out there in the North Bay!), who the local attorneys are.  And I’ve begun, slowly, to get business! 

I still dream of building new businesses (“multiple profit centers” Barbara Winter calls them) involving cooking and wine some day.  I have other skills and talents I’d like to develop in income-earning ways.  But right now, I need to focus on building my freelance paralegal business.  More details to come in future posts.

Endings and New Beginnings

A mere six months ago, I was living in Los Angeles, and working full time as a senior litigation paralegal at a well-respected law firm with about 200 talented attorneys. This law firm was the fifth law firm I had worked for in my 20+ year legal career, and one that enabled me to gain valuable experience in Intellectual Property. However, the commute was long, as were the hours at times, and the fact was I had grown weary, not so much of this firm in particular, but rather of both the pressures and stress, and routine and “sameness” of my long career.

Moreover, while living in Los Angeles was huge fun and I had wonderful friends with whom I cooked and entertained and visited museums and heard jazz and opera and did any number of other wonderfully entertaining things -- living in LA is expensive. I was living reasonably well to be sure, but I was making no headway at all toward my goals of buying a house and retiring early, nor was I likely to. In fact, it was looking as though I was going to be slogging away in this routine for many years to come before I could afford to either buy a house or retire, if I stayed on this trajectory. This was becoming an increasingly unpleasant thought.

A revelation came to me perhaps 1½ years ago when my money advisor convinced me that if I could just see my way clear to relocating somewhere with a cheaper housing market (lots of places are cheaper than El Lay, friends), and use my sizable down payment to buy a house for only a small (or zero!) mortgage, my retirement outlook would improve dramatically. It took a few months for that idea to percolate and explode in my head, but once it did, I started planning my escape.

I began spending time in the evenings researching cheaper real estate markets. Recall that this was during the early stages of what as we all know became a serious plummeting of real estate values nationwide. Realizing I wasn’t interested in leaving California, I focused my investigation here, and made a spreadsheet of real estate prices in cities all over the state. I mulled these locations over, trying them on for size in my head, and pondered what, in addition to cheaper real estate, would make any of these locations desirable for me to live in.

One of the particularly salient facts I had to recognize as I studied these real estate trends was that the cheapest houses were to be had outside of the major mega-population regions of Los Angeles, Orange County, San Diego or the San Francisco Bay Area, which meant much less access to the kinds of jobs and salary to which I had become accustomed. In fact, when I discussed my fledgling brainstorms about places to relocate with friends, often the first thing they said would be, “Yes, but there are no jobs there!” (Of course, at the moment there are few jobs anywhere, but that is a topic for another post.)

However, this is where the next piece of the puzzle came to light. Along with my weariness with life in large law firms came an increasing hunger for some other means to support myself. As many of us know, paralegals have a great deal of responsibility, and there might be a good deal of work satisfaction and recognition, but there is little control over one’s schedule or workload or environment. I wanted more control over my working life. So the next big project I began delving into was researching, brainstorming, dreaming about how I could earn an adequate living working for myself.

Mind you, ten or perhaps even five years ago, I would have found this prospect entirely daunting. I believed that I didn’t have the requisite drive, or motivation, or “entrepreneurial spirit” to pull that off, and preferred being someone else’s employee. But witness the difference that a few more years of growth and experiences can make – now, I think that indeed I DO have those requisite things! Or where they’re lacking, I at least have a very strong desire for greater control over my own money making endeavors, which provides a lot of motivation for this effort! (But I’m getting ahead of myself.)

So I began to buy and read books! (They’re listed at the end of the post.) I read books that provided inspiration for thinking differently about employment, working, money, and lifestyle. I spent evenings and weekends writing out the numerous exercises in these books, pondering what my answers said about me, giving myself permission to consider without judgment as many ideas as could rush into my head about what I loved to do, what I was passionate about, what I was skilled at. And some themes emerged.

When it came to skills, I realized that there are many aspects of being a litigation paralegal that I’m really very good at and that I really do enjoy. I love mentoring junior staff. I enjoy teaching, imparting my knowledge to others. I’m good at factual investigation, and compiling the data gained thereby. I’m skilled at project management and team leadership. I wanted to find a way to continue using many of these skills in a self-employed context.

When it comes to passions, I realized I am passionate about food, cooking, wine and entertaining. For years, my social activities and creative expression had revolved around these things. I had helped start a supper club with a group of friends who were similarly serious cooks. I had embarked upon wine tasting trips in all the major California and Washington wine regions with fellow wine lovers. I had hosted wine parties, and wine and food pairing dinners and events. I had read countless cookbooks and wine and cooking magazines. I had fallen into the habit of inviting friends over, on pretty short notice, for impromptu dinner parties every time I happened upon a recipe or wine pairing I wanted to try. I had surrounded myself with friends who were passionate about all those same things.

This led to another important realization: a very prominent criterion for my relocation was that it had to involve wine and great food. I decided I needed to move to one of the state’s many wine regions!

This in turn led to a series of weekend reconnaissance trips with wine loving friends, the purpose of which was to taste wine, look at real estate in likely towns, and generally try to answer the question, “Could I, should I, live here?” My friends and I made multiple trips to the Santa Ynez/Santa Barbara/Santa Maria valleys, sampled lovely wines, and drove through numerous neighborhoods in various towns. We made similar trips to the San Luis Obispo/Paso Robles area. In almost every tasting room we visited, I’d ask, “I’m thinking about moving here, what advice to you have for me?” The comments I got from local folks were always enlightening.

I thought quite seriously about San Luis Obispo and surrounding towns for a while, because it has become a favorite emerging wine region of mine. But prior to my stint in LA, I had lived and worked in the Bay area for years, and already had an established network of family and friends and legal contacts there. So eventually, my search took me north to Sonoma County, where another “recon” trip, this time with nearby family, clinched my decision that this would be my future home.

Finally it was time to begin putting my year of research, dreaming and planning into action. I researched and bought a web domain, and established my first (of what may turn out to be many) website. I started to write a business plan. I began making plans to relocate. AND I quit my job.

I have read countless writers on business and self-employment who advise against this. They say, don’t quit your day job yet, work on your new self-employment gig evenings and weekends at first to get it going, make sure you can succeed. Very sound advice, except that since a big chunk of my plans required moving to wine country, I just didn’t have that luxury. I had to take the Big Plunge on multiple fronts all at once. Crazy? Time will tell I guess! After all, after six months into this adventure, I’m nowhere near operating in the black yet, and don’t expect to be for a while. But I’m hopeful! I’m not giving up, I’m pressing on! I’m determined to figure this entrepreneur thing out!

To wrap this long story up, I moved to Sonoma County in mid-summer, bought my business license, began plugging away at a freelance paralegal business (more on this in future posts), brainstormed about additional income sources (more on this in future posts), and began settling in to my new home (you guessed it – more on this in future posts).

You’ll recall that this journey began with my desire to speed up my timeline for retirement. Well clearly, quitting a job in order to improve one’s retirement prospects seems counter-intuitive, and the jury is still out, as it were, on whether in the end I will have sped up retirement at all. Perhaps not. But the point is that even if I’m still hard at work at age 90, if I’m doing it for myself and enjoying what I do and the life I’ve created, is that such a bad thing?

More musings to come. Thanks for reading.

Reading List:

Homemade Money: Starting Smart!, by Barbara Brabec. New York: M. Evans & Co, 2003.

Finding Your Perfect Work: The New Career Guide to Making a Living, Creating a Life, by Paul and Sara Edwards. Tarcher, Revised ed., 2003.

Small Time Business Operator, 10th Edition: How to Start Your Own Business, Keep Your Books, Pay Your Taxes & Stay Out of Trouble (Small Time Operator), by Bernard B. Kamoraff. Willets: Bell Sprints Publishing, 2008.

Making A Living Without a Job: Winning Ways for Creating Work That You Love, by Barbara J. Winter. New York: Bantam, 1993.