You’re an entrepreneur. You’ve taken the risk and made the investment in time and capital to start and grow your small business. This is no small feat, you had to be cost-conscious to get where you are now, not to mention the professional, personal and emotional price paid as a rite of passage. I get it.  

As you began to scale, you realized the paradigm shift involved. You know you can no longer do everything on your own, especially as complexity becomes more of a factor across the programmatic, functional and growth areas of your business.  

But scaling needs to be done smartly. It is easy to over-commit too early — and that runs counter to everything that got you to this point.

The legal services marketplace doesn’t cater to your small business (not even a little bit)

With success, your focus is now turning to growth (BD, capture, B&P) and you need to delegate much of the transactional work you used to manage, as well as get a handle on new requirements born of your expansion. Good problems to have, but challenging, nonetheless.  

In some of these areas, legal support is part of the answer. Teaming agreements, contracts, NDAs, non-competes, operating agreements, and bid proposal reviews are among the many areas where there’s value in legal counsel. Obviously, the in-house counsel model of the big WMA federal contractors is not the right fit until you make it to the big leagues. And paying the exorbitant hourly rates of DC and Virginia’s big corporate law firms is equally unattractive. Under that model, you pay high hourly rates for even the simplest transactional work. This doesn’t make sense for you but it’s great for the law firm, which will charge you for every email, every phone conversation, every second.

A general counsel model that works for you

How about a third way? What if I told you there is a model specifically and exclusively designed for where you are right now in your small business trajectory? A model where you can get the focused support you need (no more, no less) at predictable, pre-set prices that map logically to the type and complexity of work involved.

That’s the GuideOn Legal Services model. It’s built to serve you (I know, a novel idea) and is premised on the idea that not all of the legal support you need requires the same level of expertise, research, or manpower. Prices should reflect that reality. And with GuideOn Legal Services, they do.  

We offer a fixed fee schedule for the most common small business legal needs (TAs, NDAs, contract/subcontract/lease reviews/operating agreements, to name a few). We can do this because we know how much intellectual effort, time and tailoring is required to provide quality in each of these product and service areas. No extra charges for phone calls and emails and no add-on hourly rates leaving you to wonder what the final bill might look like.  In other words, no surprises.  

So let’s say you are sold on the model and it makes sense for your small business needs.  Why choose GuideOn Legal Services? What’s the discriminator that would set it apart from another law firm offering exactly the same approach (incidentally, there is no other law firm offering this approach but let’s go with it anyway). The answer, in a word, is experience.

GuideOn Legal Services founder, Jack Grimes has more than 20 years of experience in small business law, estate planning, business formation, and succession planning. Following his military and Intelligence Community service, he was recruited by a Fortune 500 company where, as a Vice President, he successfully managed more than $180M in revenue across 20 contracts and 300 employees, providing vital services to the US Government. He is also the founder and owner of two small businesses.

So, would you rather have a lawyer who learned all he or she knows about business in law school? Or does an experienced business executive and small business owner turned attorney sound better?

Let’s talk when you are ready.

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The author is GuideOn Legal Services (GLS) founder Jack Grimes, a military veteran, former Intelligence Community executive, small business owner, and JAG Corps Reserve Officer with over 20 years of experience in estate planning. He is among a limited number of attorneys in the country with an LL.M. (Master of Laws) in Estate Planning and Elder Law.  The GLS motto  Live Long, End Strong® epitomizes the full life-cycle approach our firm takes to estate planning. It starts with the end in mind, and then builds a lifetime and legacy plan,  culminating in the peace of mind that comes with protecting your family's future by  preserving assets from taxes, probate costs, legal issues, and unnecessary financial risk.