The Challenge of Working with Entrepreneurs
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I had the opportunity of knowing Wolox from its early stages, even before the founding team of seven friends decided to embark on the adventure of making their ideas come true. Thus, they insisted on putting together their startup against all odds. Each year, they set new professional and personal goals nonstop.
Almost four years later, I can notice the growth that sharing this road with Wolox meant to me. I am thankful for the possibility of acquiring and spreading some of this entrepreneurial spirit they carry in their DNA.
Related post: A Flock of Entrepreneurs
From a professional standpoint, being able to work with entrepreneurs is a privilege for a lawyer like me. A gift that entails important challenges. How to minimize risks and optimize conditions is one of the main lessons you learn at Law School. That means guiding our client to take no risks and be protected against future events or claims, this is the key in a negotiation.
However, growing up alongside an entrepreneur gives you a different perspective. It’s through them that you learn and experience this outlook, like how they are able to put life on hold to pursue an idea, how much care they put into adding value to society and how the world works, and the art of how they can create something big from something small. Deciding when to leap into this way of thinking and take action, is another story.
For a lawyer whose main goal is to prevent headaches for their clients, working with entrepreneurs turns into a challenge. It is a chaotic task where you don’t want to lose business opportunities but, at the same time, you need to work under conditions imposed by the market’s biggest players against the smaller ones who want to come into the game.
Over the course of this adventure, the lawyer faces a great challenge within an ecosystem such as the entrepreneurial one: Developing their creativity because they have to be ready, generating new ideas and studying different contractual frameworks to learn about each of the businesses they are dealing with.
I have come to the conclusion that in order to keep up with their competitive successors, the lawyer must commit to being a part of the team, believe and not give up on the project possibilities, provide support through legal advice with the objective to protect their most important assets, their motivation and state of mind.
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Being a lawyer for entrepreneurs is an experience that resembles that story about the Japanese bamboo tree that takes seven years to grow. Many who purchased a seed ended up throwing it away, thinking it will never grow as it shows no signs of life throughout the first years. But there are some, maybe the patient ones, maybe those who understand the essence of the Japanese bamboo tree that are persistent and water the seed until they see the beautiful tree it turns into.
Therefore, when supporting an entrepreneur, you need to understand these are people who will always be chasing a carrot in front of them. Forever testing boundaries, they will surprise you by how much they can achieve without giving up. You learn a lot, and it is thanks to entrepreneurs that we keep fresh and forever young.
Posted by Florencia Williams (florencia.williams@wolox.com.ar)
