Growing a company and ensuring its success demands not only innovation and strategic foresight, but also a deep understanding of the industry landscape.
Lawpath, a trailblazer in the legal services sector, recognised this challenge early on.
Established in 2014, Lawpath's legal platform is the go-to spot for online legal software. They provide businesses with legal support, award-winning software, and access to legal services anytime, anywhere. They believe every business should have access to affordable legal protection, so have developed an offering that includes innovative solutions at a fraction of the traditional cost and time.
Hockey Stick Advisory enabled Lawpath to define and understand the partnership opportunity, marking a significant milestone in their growth trajectory with the collaboration defining their strategic alliances and paving the way for enhanced scalability and impactful growth opportunities with and through partners.
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Understanding the need to adapt and thrive in an ever-evolving business ecosystem, Lawpath recognised the untapped potential of strategic partnerships.
"We've always looked at partnerships as an area we've wanted to gravitate towards," Tom Willis, Lawpath's CMO, explained.
This marked a pivotal shift towards leveraging partnerships for accelerated growth and expanded market reach, driven by the need to innovate and enhance customer acquisition strategies.
Before engaging with Hockey Stick Advisory, Lawpath's partnership efforts were characterised by a lack of strategic direction and operational inefficiency.
"Inconsistent and reactive," as Tom described, their initial attempts at forming partnerships lacked a coherent framework, leading to sporadic successes that couldn't be systematically replicated or scaled.
During this phase of thorough introspection, a significant realisation surfaced, underscoring a key disparity between ambitious aspirations and practical execution. This underscored the need for a comprehensive strategic overhaul to effectively bridge the current gap.
Lawpath faced several barriers to effectively enable partnerships as a growth driver, including aligning ambitious partnership goals with concrete, actionable strategies, and managing the complexities of partnership dynamics effectively.
"We struggled...from reconciling some high-level goals," Tom disclosed, highlighting the difficulty in translating visionary objectives into tangible outcomes. This realisation underscored the necessity for a structured approach to partnership management.
The discovery of Hockey Stick Advisory was a fortuitous convergence of necessity and opportunity.
Hockey Stick Advisory was an active customer, when Bryan Williams and Tom discussed the partnership challenges facing Lawpath at the time.
The pre-existing customer relationship between Lawpath and Bryan laid some solid groundwork for a seamless partnership. Tom emphasised, "Bryan is a Lawpath customer...He knew our systems really well."
Driven by Bryan's track record and intimate knowledge of Lawpath's business, the decision to engage Hockey Stick Advisory was a strategic one. Tom reflected on the choice, noting, "Definitely the track record...it felt like it was the best choice," underscoring the confidence in Bryan's ability to guide Lawpath through their partnership strategy transformation.
From the outset, Lawpath's team was infused with optimism and a renewed sense of momentum. "We were really pumped, it was great to hear from someone with Bryan's experience on how big the opportunity was" Tom shared, expressing excitement at the structured approach and strategic insights provided by Hockey Stick Advisory after their initial workshop.
This set the tone for a successful collaboration and this moved into the crucial preparation phase, involving the alignment of expectations and the organisation of resources to ensure a successful collaboration.
This stage was also pivotal in defining deliverables and setting the stage for a productive engagement, with Tom highlighting the importance of clarity in the strategy and the strategic outcomes to work towards their goals
The entire Hockey Stick Advisory experience was characterised by deep immersion and mutual accountability. Tom appreciated the hands-on nature of the collaboration, stating, "It was really good, and I think for us, I really liked how immersive things were." This approach facilitated a shift from a reactive to a proactive strategy, fostering a culture of accountability and strategic focus.
Taking the journey together allowed the Lawpath team to build confidence in the strategy, and the ongoing accountability ensured that the early momentum that was developed with Hockey Stick carried through after the project was completed.
The collaboration with Hockey Stick Advisory had a profound impact, reshaping Lawpath's approach to partnerships. The strategic shift led to significant achievements, notably the increase in value from referral partners.
Tom marvelled at the unexpected outcomes, "We are now getting equivalent, in some months more value from referral partners," highlighting the strategic and operational shifts facilitated by the engagement.
Since having Hockey Stick Advisory work with the Lawpath partnerships team, the positive response from the wider team and senior management underscored the success of the collaboration.
Tom noted the comprehensive engagement across the organisation, "It's been really positive" reflecting the unified approach towards partnership strategy.
“I truly appreciated Bryan's approach in involving the senior leadership team throughout our journey. He would present at various times and engage in conversations with my co-founder Dominic, to ensure he was informed about the ongoing changes and their commercial implications, alongside operational adjustments.
This inclusive approach allowed us all to interact with Bryan, ask questions, and grasp how these changes impacted different areas within our management and wider teams. By positioning himself in this manner, everyone felt involved and part of the process, fostering a sense of unity and shared purpose. This significantly contributed to enhancing our collaboration and overall engagement, elements that I had perhaps not fully appreciated before.
Once you grasp the extent to which partnership components are interconnected with the broader business, a holistic shift in company mindset is crucial. It goes beyond isolated team efforts, requiring a collective approach to gaining traction.”
Speaking to the learnings that have come from their experience alongside Hockey Stick Advisory, Tom says that the team is much more equipped to scale their partnerships function moving forward.
“We are feeling much more at ease. Bryan greatly assisted us in establishing criteria and a scoring framework for evaluating potential partnerships. This guidance has proven to be incredibly valuable in helping us prioritise partners to engage with.
I particularly appreciate our aim to increase partnership-generated deals to around 40% of our total user acquisition. Until now, we lacked a clear roadmap for achieving this target, but we are now making progress in defining the path forward. It was always a bit of an operational, nice to have type of goal. That's totally different now.
We've just got a few key streams that we need to focus on and get a certain amount of uplift and we can get there. That's really great to see, and I think it's put our minds at ease that this isn't gonna be a bridge too hard. There is a clear way of being able to get there.
I think it's really exciting because I think we always thought we’d have to go above and beyond to hit our goals, but now we know that we can make incremental gains that will get us there over time.
The process has got us really well set up for partnerships - how we're tackling things and how we prioritise them. It's a framework that was applied, which can also be applied to all areas of go to market as well.
It's still going to be hard work, and we're not going to get everything right, but we feel like we're much further along in being able to do that. The future is bright.”
“This has probably been the first time within our whole go to market function that we've said, ‘can we tap into a resource and expertise we don't currently have in the business’”, says Tom
“I probably didn't quite realise how beneficial that was going to be, and how far along on our journey is that would accelerate things. Having access to someone who's able to do these things within businesses similar to ours on a regular basis was a game changer.
We've been slugging away at things for the last 3 or 4 years and really trying to get partnerships going, and I feel like over the 3 months that we engaged Hockey Stick we accelerated things far beyond our previous efforts. I think what makes something like this successful is the effort that you're willing to put into it, just as much as what you're expecting to get out of it.
So, make sure you're in a position where you've got them the time to focus on delivering the outcomes when needed. Bryan has a really unique approach to help you kinda crack along in getting to those outcomes too. I think that’s really unique to the approach that Hockey Stick takes.
It'll elevate you far beyond what you know, the ability to be able to download so many insights in a short period of time and then have a really clear roadmap to success is super valuable - I wish I did it a lot earlier on. I'm really glad that we ended up doing it.
Bryan is a great guy, on a personal level as well. I always enjoyed jumping on to any meetings with him and having a chat and seeing what was going on. He's someone who is really in the startup ecosystem, he's really got his finger on the pulse and is always talking to so many people. He's connected me with so many people as well just through conversations that we've had. “
Lawpath's journey with Hockey Stick Advisory offers a blueprint for leveraging strategic partnerships as a growth lever. Through this collaboration, Lawpath not only navigated its initial challenges but also unlocked new pathways for expansion, setting a new standard for success in the realm of legal tech partnerships.
As Tom says “He's a great guy to know so if you can get him and the team involved to work something for your business, you'd be mad not to do it!”
If you're looking to elevate your partnership strategy, we're here to help.
Let's have a chat and get you up and running to enable partnerships to drive growth!