Have you ever experienced the feeling of knowing you have built a great, profitable business, and it’s fine…but it’s just that. It’s fine.   

I came face to face with this exact question with one of my companies, the Creative Law Shop® in 2023.  And what happened next was a wild ride, to put it lightly. 

In the last 8 months, I’ve taken a business model that I was frankly tired of and increasingly resentful of, and turned it into a first of its kind Ai-powered platform. More importantly than that, though: the impact of this business model is going to have a drastically more potent impact than the original business model. This will impact an industry.

However, what happened behind the scenes is the real story. Because I know I am not alone in that feeling of deep discontent that accompanies pouring blood, sweat and tears into a business that you know isn’t living up to its full potential. Feeling stuck- not creatively, but because you sense untapped potential.

The answer is rarely to “do more”- it’s finding a way to flip the script. To take what you’re growing resentful of, and find ways to challenge your own status quo, and ask yourself, “what would I do if I had visionary creative license to do anything I want with this”. 

 “Flipping” a business is a concept that I want to encourage every entrepreneur to be willing to even contemplate. Discontent is a signifier, and in the same way that you’ve likely heard the saying “learn to rest, not to quit”; be willing to challenge the “shoulds” or the “industry standard”. 

Everything I’ve learned about business has come from either my own trial and error, or the lessons shared from colleagues and those who have gone before me. And with that, I want to share the real story of how we took a common, industry standard business model, and transformed it into a first of its kind AI-powered platform. It’s going to change the industry, and it wouldn’t have happened without years of discontent, gritty, boots on the ground work, and a (healthy) level of dilution in knowing you have a good idea, and instead of saying “someone should do this”, instead say….”Why not me”?

The Foundry

This month, the Foundry™, by the Creative Law Shop® hit the market. For the first time, entrepreneurs can access a custom-coded platform, which allows you to build your own agreement, or edit/negotiate your contracts, client by client. IE, if client A allows you to hold onto your copyright rights, but client B requests to purchase them, you no longer have to get on our waitlist to work with me 1:1, or wonder how to explain a provision of your contract with a client. Gone are the days of sitting down and filling out a template alone, or listening to yet another podcast and then going back to double-check for the referenced language. Now, you have every answer I could provide at your disposal, and I’ve simplified appx. 100 questions into 5 per section. The control is entirely in your hands, and you can build a contract that suits your exact business needs.

On its face, a “foundry” is defined as “found materials or small parts, forged under fire, poured into a mold to establish the base…many of the ordinary objects in your life have parts that were produced in a foundry.” All of these seemingly random pieces have to come together and be forged under fire.

However, I love the broader definition of “where founding is carried on”….in other words, where founders are made. Contracts are the cornerstone to business, and we refine our direction with each client lesson. Now, each lesson carried over from each client can culminate, and be used to refine every new venture.

This is going to be a linchpin tool for so many founders- quite literally, we’ve created an app that equips anyone with the information and tactics they need to strategically grow their business. This app will forge each business lesson each client teaches you, and forge an even stronger contract and thereby, your business as a whole.

But that’s not where we started.

For the last 7 years, The Creative Law Shop®  has been a go-to contract template resource for creative entrepreneurs. Honestly, it was a business I never intended to start. It was an entrepreneurial solution to an exposed need. Within weeks of starting my law firm, my reputation from my previous career as a contract litigator inadvertently took off like wildfire. I received inquiries from around the world asking for assistance with drafting contracts for various creative businesses. There were just a few problems:

• Ethically, attorneys cannot write contracts across state (much less international) lines
• Startups typically cannot (or I would argue, should not) pay an hourly rate for an attorney to draft a contract
• Most creative entrepreneurs were unaware of the hours that went into each contract- the wedding industry is nuanced and emotional, so contracts in this space must be finessed. 

So, about a month into starting the firm, the Creative Law Shop® was born. Over the years, every contract I’ve written for myself or a client has been redacted and added to the Shop. This has been the solution to get startups off the ground, without hamstringing them financially. Legally sound resources, without the hourly rate®.

Fast forward 4 years, and the pandemic hit. The Shop became more than just my “side company”- it truly carried hundreds of creative entrepreneurs through a sudden mass breach of contract disputes, etc. 

Something else happened in 2020: I watched literally hundreds of creative entrepreneurs use my contracts, but use them incorrectly. Edit them incorrectly; try to “shorten” them and instead hamstring the effectiveness of the language, etc. It caused a deep discontent on a seismic level for me. 

So, I decided to pour more into the business. More education; more updates, “lifetime” updates. This was a huge undertaking, but from an integrity perspective, it  was right at the time. After 7 years, we have a strong, and successful business model. We reached the point where I genuinely knew we could not do more to raise the “standard” of our work product- to this day, I literally receive emails from attorneys thanking me for providing their clients with such a strong foundation at such a low price.  

As our profit margins grew, our customer base grew, and we continued to refine and challenge our work product…inexplicably, my discontent grew. 

I think more of us experience this sentiment than we realize: I grew flat-out resentful of my own, profitable business model. I was resentful of every minute spent on emails answering the same questions, when all I wanted to do was advocate and actually practice law. Resentful of watching the templates be inadvertently misused. Resentful of the keyboard warriors who felt successful for telling a lawyer off, as if their opinion was inexplicably superior to judicial holdings. 

It’s not that I lost interest in the business- I never really wanted this business model, and I became an expert at dialing in on the flaws of the business model in how it truly served the industry. 

It was a bizarre experience, because the more I studied this question, the more I saw a widening gap between how effective a contract template could really be for creative entrepreneurs (with no additional support). At the same time, I saw more and more contract shops pop up, and seemingly find overnight success. Now, throw a rock at an online law firm, and you’ll hit a template shop.

I felt like I was losing my mind a bit, and some wondered if it was burnout. It wasn’t. It was a deep-rooted frustration that grew over time, because I knew I was steering the ship away from its potential. Even if I was doing “everything I was supposed to.” 

I couldn’t ignore the discontent

Practicing law remained, and will always remain, my vocation, and what I love to do. I was using these same documents in everything from pre-litigation disputes, to mergers and acquisitions, startup support, etc. Point being, It was this boots on the ground approach that allowed me to gain a different perspective on this business model.

Clients in 2024 are savvier. What worked pre-pandemic doesn’t anymore. Now, a couple getting married know that the event could be rescheduled. They know what force majeure is. B2B businesses are skeptical about the use of AI. I could go on and on, but put simply: business has changed in the last 3 years, and every client-based business owner will tell you that. 

I was also growing tired of hearing my own self complain about something, and not follow it up with words. I daydreamed about being free of it; I joked about the wild things I wanted to try with the business model, “if I could do anything”. Then, in 2022-2023, something so odd happened: I was approached by a handful of interested parties who were interested in purchasing the Shop. I thought this may be the solution: every business should be built to be sellable, and I’ve built this one since day one with that in mind. I was actually positioned to sell it, quickly. And it almost happened, right when I needed the cashflow the most. Right when I needed to free up more time to build a new team with the Firm. It was an incredibly enticing offer (or so I thought). But what happened next surprised me the most:

I said no. 

It made absolutely no sense, and was not something I had even premeditated. It was like my intuition spoke for me, before my brain could catch up.

This has happened only once in my life, but it was the linchpin that changed everything. A year or so into practicing, I was approached about my “dream job”….and I said no. I realized I wanted to start a law firm. 

Sometimes, we don’t need to ask for one more opinion, or sit and overthink something. We just know. 

I revisited the ideas I’d joked about 

Because when you joke about something for more than a year, you’re probably not joking anymore. Through my work practicing actual law, I knew what the missing link was between the contract template model, and the actual online business industry.

It was the very obvious fact that businesses are dynamic, ever-evolving, and usually when change occurs, it happens fast and requires immediate attention. Most entrepreneurs don’t have attorneys on retainer. Most don’t realize you have to, in order to get on a lawyer’s calendar. Our days are spent, on some level, just prioritizing which fire to put out first. 

When business changes and evolves, your contract; the link that literally binds you to your clients, must evolve as well. And you typically don’t realize that until a dispute occurs, and the lessons are learned the hard way. 

In order to be operational by non-legal practitioners, contracts need certain triggering events built into the backend, so that a change that is made to one paragraph does not negate a different portion of the agreement, etc. Contracts are a game of chess, not checkers, and a good lawyer reading paragraph 13 remembers a few words from paragraph 7 that could negate that section. 

The answer is beautiful in its simplicity, and it was just sitting there the whole time. 

So, how do you build a “dynamic contract” that operates by way of triggering events?

You turn it into an app.

Follow the green lights

Around Q3 of 2023, I knew it was time to jump. It actually made no sense whatsoever; it was around the same time that I experienced nearly-destructive business emergencies within my law firm. But I started quietly brainstorming the feasibility of making the Shop an app. I didn’t know if there was any way to even do that, or how to build an app, but I’ve never seen an entrepreneur who was given permission. So, I figured I might as well at least follow the green lights, to see what kind of opportunity I could uncover. This was going to be very literally bootstrapped, but I knew I’d need at least 3 critical components: a developer, a designer, and the support of my team.

And then, the oddest thing happened. A dear friend; someone I hold in the highest regard as a business owner herself, offhandedly mentioned that her husband was a developer. I hadn’t even told her about this idea. I started asking some questions as if for a client, and discovered he was literally the perfect fit. Greenlight number 1.

Next, I reached out to one of my closest business friends, who also happens to be one of the best designers I know. The type of friend I’ll fly across the country to see. One night around Christmas, I hopped on a call with her and told her about this crazy idea. She agreed it was, in fact, crazy, but immediately agreed to come onboard. Greenlight number 2.

Next, I had to present this idea to the team. This was hard, because I was telling them I was flipping the business on its head, and gambling our entire business model with an idea that had no proof of viability. No direct competitor analysis exists on the market, so not only are we traversing the literal “road less traveled”, we are doing so at a time when the business is showing growth month after month. Put simply, what we had works. Well. But luckily, I work with a team of entrepreneurs, who understand that zigging, even when everyone else is zagging, is precisely why we’re in this industry. Greenlight number 3. Just because we’ve grown accustomed to a certain modus operandi didn’t change the fact that business has changed in the last 4 years. What used to work no longer does.

Do you start over with a new company, or transform the original?

The business concept behind this model came to me like a lightning bolt, but determining the actual business structure of the concept was difficult. It became clear, almost immediately, that if we maintained the preexisting business structure, it would cannibalize the new model, and vice versa.

Turning away from a successful business model is hard. But, I had to come back to the truth of why we’re making this move in the first place: the integrity of the business model of a contract template shop isn’t the same that it was pre-2020. This is not to say that there is anything wrong with contract templates, or shop owners. But for myself, personally, once I saw the gap in client interactions pre-2020 and post-2020, I couldn’t “unsee” it. On an integrity level, it didn’t make sense to maintain the business that I knew was no longer serving customers the same way, and create a new business for this app. 

The same thing that caused me 4 years of discontent, and feeling like I always had “one foot in” the law firm owner, and shop owner side of business proved to not be wasted time after all- it took that buildup of tension, while not forsaking the day to day work as an entrepreneur myself to uncover this new, yet more simple way of doing business. The answer wasn’t adding “more”, it was stripping the company down to provide what really matters: legal resources that grow with a company.

Become an expert at the “boots on the ground” of practicing in the industry that you’re selling to, and you never know what new angle you’ll uncover. 

I’ve found myself calling this my legacy project when speaking of it recently- not because of any perceived success (this is in its MVP phase, traversing uncharted territory, so who knows). But, the lesson this evolution has taught me is invaluable, and that is the type of work that leaves a legacy. No matter the success, not a minute spent on this project has been wasted, and has turned me into a different entrepreneur. 

And to my fellow entrepreneurs, I want to shout this from the rooftops: if you are feeling discontent with your business, that is ok. These challenges will refine you as a business owner. Hold your plan with a loose grip, build it with integrity….and hold on to that little bit of delusion that leads us to break down our own imaginary barriers. 

Bio:

Paige Hulse received her Juris Doctorate from The University of  Tulsa, and is the owner and lead attorney of Paige Hulse Law, the founder of The Creative Law Shop®, the Creative Law Foundry™, Co-Founder of the Special Forces Support Fund™ and the owner of Fairway Stables®.

As a passionate serial entrepreneur, her work enables her to provide smart and strategic entrepreneurs with legal strategy to create enduring businesses. After working as an energy litigator while building her own businesses on the side, she formed her law firm in 2017, and serves clients with intellectual property counsel worldwide.

As a Trademark and Business Law practitioner and trusted speaker, she’s been immersed in the creative business field for a decade, and is able to impart her immense knowledge with each client. When she’s not providing intellectual property counsel or negotiating for her clients, she’s spending time in the barn with her husband, riding horses, or building businesses.

Connect with Paige on her website at paigehulse.com or find her on  Instagram at @paige.l.hulse and @creativelawshop.