It’s never the wrong time or too late in your career to start a new venture. Mike is President, Co-Founder of Caseroads. Caseroads is a cloud-based practice management platform for law firms.
After a long and successful career in management consulting with prestigious firms like EY and Capgemini advising other companies on business transformation, Mike took the entrepreneurial plunge. Is it different giving advice to others vs sitting in the owner, operator seat making daily decisions? According to Mike, absolutely!
“The variety of things you have to do to make a company real; from talking to potential clients, building things. understanding what the functionality of the system needs to be. Making tradeoffs on features, functionality, and cost. Finding partners to work with us, looking for different channels, and then being able to quickly change that strategy.”
With all his experience, Mike still looks to mentors for advice from his extensive professional network: “People need advice. When you start a company, you don’t know what you are going to hit. I rely on these people left and right.”
Finally, I asked Mike to give advice to others contemplating a similar journey. Specifically, long term career professionals with an itch to start a business either based on their subject matter expertise or something new and different.
“Have some idea of your core competencies. When you are starting your business, you should a good have a pretty good understanding. That said, be very flexible. You have no idea when the journey is going to take. You can start off thinking you have this brilliant idea. The next thing you know you have learned something, and you got to change course. Be very flexible, don’t be set in your ways, be ready to adapt and adjust as the market demands. The market tells you which way to go, you just got to be in tune with it and listen to and follow that path."
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