Grandiose ideas

Posted by / March 16th, 2015 / No responses

Here at Serenwood, we love working for small, entrepreneurial companies and particularly those with ambitious goals and grandiose ideas.

After all, if you don’t have grandiose ideas in this life, how will you ever produce anything useful?

It’s a well known fact that the early stages of building a business is where specialist legal advice is often most needed. It’s essential to put in place strong contract foundations from the outset, to protect ideas and products as they are developed, and to embed a culture of commercially-savvy thinking within your team.

Unfortunately, it is also the time when most small entrepreneurial businesses fail to seek legal advice because financial resources are scarce, and the temptation is to cut corners in order to cut costs. Understandable – there are always so many more exciting things to spend your money on than legal advice.

However, for the future of UK business we need to solve this conundrum. Half of our businesses are failing within the first 3 years of trading, and common reasons are:

  • lack of cash flow and poor management of bad debts;
  • entering into commitments and contracts which they don’t understand and ultimately can’t deliver against;
  • choosing the wrong partnerships when growing the business or not protecting their own position in doing so.

All of the above problems can be fixed by seeking high quality contractual and commercial advice during the early days of trading.

We believe that this is where Serenwood comes into its own.

You see, we are a business consultancy, not a law firm. Therefore we have low overheads and no flashy offices, so we get to provide high quality and practical advice to you at a fraction of what you pay when the clock is tick-ticking away at a traditional law firm.

However, you don’t compromise on quality. Our team of consultants are made up of qualified solicitors and commercial/procurement specialists with years of experience and we founded our business because we believe that quality advice should be accessible to all at a reasonable price. We appreciate that small companies need to work to a budget, so we aim to give price certainty : this can be fixed cost for set tasks or monthly payment models for ongoing projects. We even offer flexibility around timing and structure of payments.

But this is not just about being affordable and accessible.

As we work outside of the constraints of a traditional law firm, we are free to be commercially focussed in our consultancy relationship with you. As a result we pride ourselves on providing hands-on, practical support which adds tangible value. We can use our legal experience and expertise to focus upon pushing your ideas forward quickly and we understand that you need us to have a pragmatic, sensible approach to risk. We will analyse the boring legal documents (so you don’t have to) and then we equip you with factual information so you can make decisions swiftly. We do all the time-consuming and mundane legal work such as:

  • checking contracts before you sign them;
  • negotiating deals on your behalf and creating contract documents for you;
  • managing and monitoring the obligations in those contracts so you can sleep easy knowing you are keeping on top of commitments;
  • liaising with suppliers and customers to ensure that payments are flowing and obligations are being met;
  • keeping on top of your intellectual property rights, protecting those precious assets;
  • supporting you in bids and tenders as you put together your commercial proposals.

We are all about helping young businesses to stay on the right side of the law whilst you grow and fly up high.

After all, there’s not much point reaching for the stars if you get burnt by the sun on the way up, is there?

(And of course, we very much hope that you stay with us once you become a household name, because we think long term relationships are key to happy, healthy business.)

So what are your grandiose ideas? Get in touch and together we’ll turn them into commercial reality.

hello@serenwood.co.uk