ST10 | Azmul Haque On Carving Out A Profitable Niche Within A Highly Competitive Market

We all have business ideas from time to time. At least I know speaking for myself, I think I get one every week. But when we think of it, we convince ourselves that if the market is too crowded, there won’t be any takers. Yet another shop, another consulting firm, another podcast even. So with so many well-established choices available, why would a customer want to try yet another option? And yes, that may be true in the broad sense. But who says you have to go broad? When you’re starting out, you don’t need much to be successful and success could well come from targeting underserved niches. Segments of the market that others haven’t spotted or cannot serve effectively or profitably.

Discussion Topics: Azmul Haque on Carving Out a Profitable Niche Within a Highly Competitive Market

• Differentiating your business in the crowded market
• Finding talents and keeping them motivated
• Going All In to your sphere
• Being expert in your field and getting first few customers
• Doing your own forever is not the only way

Transcript: Azmul Haque on Carving Out a Profitable Niche Within a Highly Competitive Market

Today we talk with Azmul Haque, Founder and managing director of Collyer Law, a Singapore-based law firm, specializing in startups and entrepreneurs, a market segment that, strangely enough, no established law firm really focused on before. We are going to discuss his career journey and how he came upon the opportunity that he’s now building into success at par with older, more established law firms that he used to work with. So, with that said, Azmul, welcome to ShopTok. It’s a pleasure to have you here with us today. And maybe we could start with a quick intro and a little bit about Collyer law as well.

Thank you very much. Thank you for having me on the show. I’m very excited to be one of the first few guests on ShopTok. Collyer is a professional services organization focused on emerging tech and the innovation economy with high-growth start-ups, serial entrepreneurs, and others who are always pushing the envelope and doing something innovative and disrupting the really big players in any market. We also advise larger organizations on complex legal issues associated with technology and its deployment. You could say we are completely focused on the technology sector.

Yeah. I’ve worked in tech over the last few years and I do know that the way you approach lawyers is very different when you try to push the envelope rather than simply mitigate risk. Now, let’s start at the beginning. You’ve been a lawyer for 20 years or so. How did you get started and what was your early journey like?

I qualified as a lawyer in 2001, which was just after the dot-com crash, and I started my career with a large international network called Anderson Legal, which was the sister organization to the Anderson accounting firm. I was a lawyer associate in the technology media and telecoms practice, but it wasn’t so much a practice as it was an industry-facing vertical that served clients who are in that vertical. So in some ways, I’ve always been associated with the wider technology, media, and telecom industry sector.

I spent my early years as a lawyer in the trenches such as working on legal due diligence reports, and client calls that stretched well beyond the official nine-to-five working hours but I really value those years because they taught me a lot about the law and the application of the law to solve business problems. But it also demonstrated to me the importance of having more senior lawyers teach you the tricks of the trade.

In my view, it’s not possible to be a good lawyer if you don’t have great training, fantastic mentors, and complex work that you’re only able to learn on the job. I’m very grateful for having learned the ropes because it’s simply not possible for you to graduate from law school and be good at what you do. Law school, like most academic degrees, just gives you a flavor about the specifics but it doesn’t really teach you about the life or work-related skills that you would need as a practicing lawyer.

Essentially, you’re saying that the early years are actually a substantial part of your career, necessary to build up to what you’re doing now. It’s not possible to have done this any earlier, or at least not to have done it with any degree of credibility or confidence. But it sounds like overall you were doing well, right? You worked in a variety of places with a broader and broader remit. So why did you decide to give that up and do your own thing?

Absolutely, so it is the ten-thousand-hour rule that applies to the legal profession. Without spending those ten thousand hours honing your skills you may not be in a position to add value. Once you have that, though, you are in a better position to test the market and see what you can use your skills for. For me, there are two things that are playing on my mind.

The first was a term called YOLO, which is “You only live once.” Maybe it is in my DNA because I’m comfortable taking risks. When I realized I’d finished 14 years, I could see the next 14 years very clearly. I knew exactly what would happen. I was already a partner so it wasn’t a case of me going up the ladder anymore, it was a very different type of future that I wanted to foresee for myself. Being an entrepreneur, the legal services business is high-risk.

The ability to scale is not very easy and creating a niche in the market to monetize is dependent on a lot of things because you primarily rely on human talent and their ability to solve problems for their clients that have a commercial impact. I was, obviously, very constrained. The principal problem with me taking a chance at things is that I didn’t want to leave the law. I enjoy advising clients, being creative with legal issues, and trying to find a solution.

So, I didn’t want to leave the law but I certainly wouldn’t start a tech startup either. I wanted to found a law firm with many full-time employees at different levels, have the infrastructure, get insurance, licenses for technology we use, a website, and a fully functioning business. It was impossible to do this as a side business for a month or a quarter. It was a very big decision.

That’s interesting. For many kinds of businesses, you can start small on the side and if it proves value or profitability, you can onboard full-time. But, as a lawyer, you can’t exactly be advertising on Craigslist. What was the idea that you thought you could commit in such a big way?

Back in 2015, when I started, the opportunity I saw was to be a trusted counsel or advisor for a group of serial entrepreneurs who were underserved. These were really smart tech folk who knew exactly what they were doing in developing technology that could disrupt industries, but clearly, they had never dealt with a lawyer before.

They never had an occasion where they would need to consult a team of lawyers, unlike large MNCs who oftentimes have in-house teams and the largest law firms on their side. We needed to approach them with a different mindset; I wanted to be a trustworthy advisor and get their back when they go and disrupt the world. We had to be viable financially and aware that early-stage startups can’t afford to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.

And that’s a very critical part of the business model. We can’t be applying an hourly rate to many of our early-stage clients because that wouldn’t work from an affordability point of view.

Law firms work on helping clients avoid problems or risks whereas the whole concept of a startup is to take the risk and run towards it. Is that also a thought process or a mindset you had to adopt?

Absolutely. We have to put ourselves in the shoes of the clients we advise because we have to keep in mind that, whether it’s a large multinational corporation or a high-growth tech company, the client isn’t really interested in the legal merits of our advice if it is not commercially feasible. It does take a different mindset to say, “This is what you’re trying to achieve, and here’s the current regulation on the topic. Maybe there’s a way to achieve what you’re trying to do without flouting the law or affecting the current legal regulation.” That’s the part that brings me back every day to my desk and drives me.

So, for this group of clients who are looking for a solution-oriented approach, you have figured out the niche that they need somebody to partner with them to solve the business problem versus telling them why it couldn’t be done. Since an hourly rate is not going to work for these people, you had to adopt a different pricing model. So, what was the different pricing model?

The first pricing model is a fee estimate with assumptions and qualifications model, which we’ve done hundreds of times so we can tell you exactly how much it costs. So we give them a fixed fee estimate, which, for the most part, is a cap on fees. However, we have assumptions and qualifications and those relate to things that are outside of our control so clients, on a transparent basis, have a great deal of certainty on the amount of fees they would pay.

The other model is called the retainer model or the prepaid hours model where the clients agree to fees on a monthly basis. With this model, the client knows that we are on call and there’s always a team at CollyerLaw that is looking at their business and anticipating any problems that may arise. Essentially, the client has in-house counsel, but we’re on the outside.

This makes sense. Essentially you’ve differentiated yourself in terms of culture and the approach that you take with the client. With your pricing, you’ve figured out the problem you want to solve. So when you decided to take the plunge, did you have any doubts or were people telling you something may or may not work? And how were you thinking and what were you feeling at that time?

I never had a doubt about the market need for something like this or whether I truly wanted to do this. The self-belief that I would give it my best shot really helped me launch this at the time I did. I think timing had a lot to do with our success. At that time, Singapore became a center for technology business, sort of the Silicon Valley of Asia, and were a small organisation, we were in a position to move and make decisions quickly.

For future entrepreneurs and especially for entrepreneurs and professional services, I have to say that you need to have a poker player’s mentality with going all-in. If you don’t win big unless you go all-in. In my case, I set aside a year’s salary to make sure my family had enough support for the next year so that I don’t have to go back on my entrepreneurial journey. For this period, I didn’t want to have any niggling doubts about whether I wanted to do this, and that mentality is extremely important for new entrepreneurs.

I like the poker player analogy where you go all-in even if you don’t know what’s on the other side of the table but you can mitigate the risk, which you did by setting aside money to financially cover your family. Let’s move on to the customer side. How did you get your first few customers after you’ve gone all in?

Professional services are a word-of-mouth industry, so we get a lot of referrals from former clients and intermediaries who worked with us on related aspects of transactions on M&E or financing, etc. Very often, people in your extended social network may have a good sense of what you do based on how you display yourself.

So I’ve never called myself a full-service lawyer. When you do that, you limit your identity because people don’t have a good idea of what you do. Unfortunately, their idea of what a lawyer does may be quite influenced by TV shows. I make it a point to be quite specific about describing what I do and what our objective is. Our objective is to help high-growth technology companies, that are going from idea to exit, navigate legal issues in the most cost-effective way and I think that has a really clear message.

I know other ways in which I can spend the next 20 years of my career but the reason I’m doing this is because we want to make a difference in the fortunes of this early-stage economy which might be the giants in the next 15 years. We want to make sure we play the role of an ecosystem builder, an enabler of this technology and innovation economy that is being built in Southeast Asia. We simply want to be known as very good at what we do and help that part of the economy in a big way.

First of all, you want an established firm with multiple people and those people have to be tuned towards working with startups which is a very different mindset from what they’ve been trained to do. How did you find good people when you were in a small law firm and maybe had little or no brand recognition at the start? How did you keep them and how do you continue to grow?

What we’ve tried to do to attract, retain and continue to inspire the human capital that we employ. We tried to build a sense of community, and collegiality to help each other with our broader life goals and become friends outside of work. For example, If we know one of our employees is someone who likes a social catch-up once in a while, we try to make sure that happens.

The whole firm could go out and have a good time. Before the pandemic, we would go out and have a meal every quarter. We would do bi-annual corporate events that would involve laser tag or race or treasure hunts. We do fun events to show that we care about our community more than how many hours they put in. But I think the single most important thing is probably the sense of purpose and we are acutely conscious that millennials need more than just money.

We’re not a social impact company, but we are using our skills, our training, and our education as lawyers to make that social impact happen through tech companies that grow in scale. These tech companies could potentially transform the way you live. I can’t think of a single large tech company today that hasn’t fundamentally affected the way in which we do things, and that to us is our sense of purpose. We realise that we aren’t doing something that everyone gets to do.

We catch them young, we work with them and we’re often a sounding board as they strategize their plans. In fact, we grow with them. For example, we took on a company in 2019, when they had a small seed run of barely $500,000. Two years later, they’re a unicorn several times over and that gives us a tremendous sense of satisfaction. We had a role to play in their success.

That also means that you get in touch with the tech and startup industry in general.

Yes. Industry knowledge is critical to what we do. We encourage our lawyers to build the habit of learning trends and industry knowledge by listening to podcasts, audiobooks, or reading newsletters. There are many industries that we may not directly deal with but have an impact on our clients. For example, we had a client in the travel tech business who aggregated holidays, and they had a huge market in the Middle East for travel related to The Hajj.

They were on the path to becoming a unicorn with the valuation they are getting in December 2019 but unfortunately with COVID, by March 2020, it was very clear that there would not be an industry for traveling. The founder called me worried and asked if he should hold back the fundraiser or raise the full amount of capital that he was raising. I remember telling him that he should actually raise as much as he could at the same valuation because there was a big chance that COVID would affect the travel industry.

So, it’s extremely important for us to be aware of what’s going on in the world and the tension or the industry breakthrough at a particular pattern that’s going to revolutionise digital health. You have to apply all sorts of holistic approaches to advising clients on the law.

Effectively, if they were under-raised, I don’t think they would’ve lasted two years through this. We’ve talked about the basics like how you differentiate, how you find the best people and keep them, and how you get customers. You’ve figured it all out fairly early. What are some of the challenges that you have right now in running the business?

We had a fairly good run and we’ve advised more than 450 different legal matters for more than 250 clients in the last six years and many of them are repeat customers. I think we see a potential challenge or threat from international law firms that have offices in many countries and are honestly able to afford a far more broad-based legal service.

I would equate us to a speed boat that is very agile but can’t navigate the open sea as well as a larger vessel. So, we are probably looking at a legal joint venture, merger, or a combination with a larger international law firm that would enable us to continue to do what we do well in Singapore as their Singapore office but have that network of offices and many other tech centers set up which would help us with innovation in the future.

This would help us a lot with the network effect, as a lot of what we do now relates to a cross-border legal issue. For example, when we advise a digital health company to make an acquisition of a business in the UK, being able to engage with UK legal advice would help make that transaction. We better position ourselves to help headquartered companies that are expanding globally in the provision of legal services.

It makes a lot of sense. The natural behaviour of the clients, especially tech startups that you support, is to grow up and that means geographic expansion, business line expansion, and so on.

So, thanks a lot, Azmul. This has been a fantastic conversation. Let me summarise a few key takeaways for our listeners.

Number one – you need to do something for a period of time before you can claim to be an expert in many service businesses. That expertise is what is going to let you do it on your own. Therefore, take the time to learn the business, build credibility, and build the potential client base.

Point two is that in every sphere or every market, there is a way to stand out, however crowded or established it may be. You need to pick one way to stand out and if that works well in your favour, you have found that niche, continue to specialise in the niche, and go deeper towards becoming the person who does that niche extremely well. And your innovative business model, the way you deal with clients, and your entire approach to supporting that niche, which other people obviously will struggle to replicate.

The third thing is that once you’ve made up your mind, go all in. Maybe you should have a safety net but you can’t be doing the stuff half-heartedly in a definitely in your sphere in many service businesses.

The fourth point I appreciate is the way you continue to innovate in HR like motivating your team and making your company a different and more interesting place to work for millennials and sting abreast of new technology, new trends, et cetera. So continue to be innovative in that regard.

Finally, I think you are saying that to expand further in the future, you are open to the idea of working with other players. It is not as if you must do it alone forever. This is a valid way of expanding any. Thanks again Azmul for sharing these with us. We were Azmul and Amit with ShopTok. See you next time.