Breaking Free

Here is a question from a Breaking Free reader….

Dear Brian,

Your book inspired me to start up my own business based on your Start Breaking Free model.

I was a lawyer working 80 hour weeks at an international firm, doomed to spending the best years of my life behind a desk. I was depressed and my confidence was taking a battering from my unhappy, over critical, negative, unhealthy and institutionalized colleagues.

After reading your book I started to ponder how, if at all, I could escape the rat race.

My answer came a few short weeks after reading your book. If I was working 80 hours a week and making less than a third of my billing target, where was the rest of the money going? After weeks of research I found out that it was going to a combination of a) the under worked over paid partners b) the lazy and inefficient staff and c) the office, stationary, IT and other such expenses.

I decided to setup a service that has none of these expenses and that offers lawyers a better life and businesses a cheaper more efficient service. I set up Matrix Law Group which places lawyers with businesses on a temporary employee basis and which allows those lawyers to work either remotely or from the business’ office (so no office).

I advertise in a few small business publications over here and then hire someone, including myself out (like a temp agency) and charge businesses a low hourly rate (we have no overheads so can undercut traditional law firms). I now work about about 7 to 10 hours a week at £100 an hour and because of more favourable tax treatments, I make a decent wage but a less than I did when I was working 80 hours a week. But guess what? I am much much happier and healthier.

I won’t lie, getting business is not easy, specially since I have to do all my marketing myself.

My question to you is whether you can offer me any advice on marketing myself and my business? My website is www.matrixlawgroup.com, other than that, and a few adverts, I have no other marketing tools. Law is one of those industries that works on a word of mouth basis. I am therefore trying to approach people, such as yourself, to get advice.

Thank you for inspiring me to change my life.

Keep breaking free.
Patrick

Hey Patrick,

Wow I love it!  I think it’s a great idea and will save people lots of money (the perfect sales pitch at this time).

I’m not sure if you designed the site like this intentionally, but it came across somewhat web 2.0 ish or futuristic.  At least for me I’d prefer to see something more professional and old fashioned looking for a legal site, that instills a sense of quality.  Up to you of course, just thought I’d mention it.  Did you think about listing the available lawyers on the site as well with some sort of profile?

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I met up with a few entrepreneurs from Dublin, Ireland this week in Buenos Aires.  They have a web business based around the voiceover industry.  If you don’t know, the voiceover industry is a bit like acting or modeling in that people typically have agents – except they get hired to record their voice for commercials and things like this.

You can see a sample of one of their pages here.

By the way, their logo looks a bit strange, but apparently that is the tonsils on the back of someone’s mouth (their piehole).

Really, it’s a similar business model to UniversityTutor.com or Haystack.com which I’ve talked about recently.  Simply put, you get a bunch of listings from some sort of service provider, try to get traffic from people who need to find them, and then you charge the service provider a subscription to get work through your site.

The challenge is establishing your site as the dominant one in that niche by getting lots of traffic and good search engine rankings, but once you do it’s difficult for a new comer to overtake you.  There are high barriers to entry in that sense.

These types of sites aren’t very complex technologically, but I think they do serve an important purpose: they are making markets more efficient by eliminating agents.

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Students in this entrepreneurship class at Stanford were given $5 and two hours to see how much money they could earn.

Some of the ideas will surprise you.  Great example of thinking outside the box (especially the last one)!  The video can be viewed here or click the image below.

The 37Signals guys launched a new site this week called Haystack.com.  Here is their post explaining the launch.

It’s a simple idea: create a directory of website design companies so clients can quickly find a good one to work with.

The idea is not particularly brilliant and original, but they absolutely nailed the execution on this project.  Let’s look at a few reasons why this is going to be (and already is) a big success.

At the end I’ll show you exactly how much money they’re making from this just a few days after launch (it’s a lot).

1. It’s Passive

The first reason this business makes sense is that you build it once and it runs on it’s own.  You aren’t trading hours for dollars working with individual clients.  What time you do spent on it after launch is spent ON the business, not IN the business.  This is an important distinction and one of the keys to building wealth.

2. Freemium

They also used my favorite business model on the web: freemium.  People can try it free, but if you want some additional benefits they ask you to upgrade for $99 per month.

This might be worth it to any web design company who gets at least that much new business from it each month.  It’s basically a marketing tool for them. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve noticed a trend of sites coming out recently that are built around the idea of taking short, funny, user generated content.  Often users can submit them as text messages or emails.  Sort of like Twitter but on a particular topic.

It might sound stupid, but some of these sites are getting over 1 million unique visitors a month, and probably doing about $1 million a year in advertising revenue from it.

For example, fmylife.com let’s people submit funny one liners about how much their life sucks.  Users rate them or bury them based on how funny they are.

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