Lawyer Karin Galldin. (Darren Brown, OBJ)

Karin Galldin and Jamie Liew were on their way to becoming lawyers through the traditional route, taking summer jobs and articling in different law firms, as well as working for a senator for the federal court. But they both felt that they wanted to focus more on what mattered to them, helping the community from a feminist perspective.

Last August, the two lawyers took the plunge and opened their own firm, Galldin Liew LLP, a feminist legal practice. According to Ms. Galldin, it wasn't easy and even described one bank as giving them a "pat on the head" instead of the financing they wanted. Undeterred, they knew that there was an untapped market, and just a few months later, their business is moving along quite nicely.

OBJ: Tell me about your business.

GALLDIN: We are a feminist legal practice that offers general practice services to men and women in the Ottawa area with the exception of family law. The idea is that while we do represent both men and women in most areas, there are certain areas in which we won't represent men because of our desire to promote awareness and advocacy for women specifically, and we would also like feminism to inform the way we work with clients on their files. Right now, we won't represent men in criminal defence.

I do civil litigation, labour and employment, human rights law and Jamie does immigration, criminal defence and administrative law.

OBJ: Where did you get the idea to open a practice that focuses on this?

GALLDIN: We both identify as feminists and had worked in workplaces that didn't have feminist objectives as their primary motivation for the way they dealt with clients. We started to think about the types of services that were offered to women in Ottawa and thought there were probably some big gaps in terms of services available to women of different incomes ... The whole notion is that we want to empower women, and we feel that ranges from transferring information to them so they can make their own decisions to being able to represent them appropriately on a range of issues.

OBJ: Did you do market research before setting your business up?

GALLDIN: After talking to each other about where the gaps were in our own practice and talking to other practitioners about where they thought gaps were for women in Ottawa, we to put together a pretty exhaustive business plan. We looked at things like, if we wanted to practice immigration law, what kinds of services are out there for women? Or say we wanted to do corporate law for small, women-owned businesses in Ottawa. There are certainly a lot of corporate firms who can work for women out there, but for a woman who is setting up her own business at my age, there's not as much available.

We drew on our own experiences and spoke to lawyers and people who would access legal services. We also talked to women who had started their own businesses. We asked them what kind of challenges they had when they put together a (business plan).

We've realized that it's really important to get credit and respect from the legal community and that has certainly happened to us. But it is also very important for us to be supported by women who recognize the challenges and rewards of running their own business because they can offer us important moral support as well as eventually being a source of work for us.

The whole time we were setting up this business plan and seeing who the competition was and where the gaps were, we had to tailor our philosophy to conservative banking institutions. For these banking institutions, this was about how it was going to bring in money, rather than how is this going to bring feminism to law.

OBJ: Who did you go to for financing?

GALLDIN: We did approach the Women's Credit Union ... unfortunately, right now they are not geared towards online banking, which is very important to us.

Then we went to the bigger banks. There was one bank in particular that gave us the runaround and we felt very much that we were just being patted on the head.

We had to be firm in what we felt we needed and we ended up going to RBC. We heard they have a fantastic program for small business owners and other women had really great experiences with them. They were a good fit for us.

We approached at least four different institutions and we got a very wide range of responses from them. You want to be confident that you will find someone and reassure yourself that this is about you looking for someone to fit your needs, it's not about you fitting into a hole that all the other pegs can fit into.

OBJ: How is business going?

GALLDIN: It's going really well. We have benefited from a lot of goodwill from our community. But at the same time, there are a lot of people who want to support us but luckily don't have the pressing legal issues to forward on to us. So they will ask us to do their wills or contracts for them. We want to be able to say that we have a diverse range of legal skills and we are able to put them to work for you.

So for the first few months we said, while we might not be getting the big client files that we expect to get eventually though networking, we can do the nuts and bolts legal work for people and create goodwill. It's important for small businesses to realize, there's probably going to be short, medium and long term goals and you have to be realistic in what you achieve in that time.

OBJ: What are your final words of advice for people as to the lessons you've learned?

GALLDIN: I would say never be afraid to put the message out there as to what you believe in and what your business philosophy is and what differentiates it from the other businesses and competitors. We could have just white-washed the whole feminist ideology and presented ourselves as two really strong women who practice law and happen to be feminists. But we have engendered so much support and so many people are ready to engage with us because we have identified as feminists. If it's hard to say at the beginning, it becomes that much easier the more times you enunciate it as your business grows. It's kind of corny, but say what you believe in and people will respond to that.

THE EXPERTS SAY

When I work with people, I usually focus on the first three years of business because if you get through the first three or four years, then you can usually make it. It's those times that people run into problems.

They need to make sure they have a niche, some businesses don't work because there is already too much of that service in the market. For instance, there are a lot of business coaches out there, so I focus on helping women who run their own business and have fewer than seven employees.

Small business owners should have a financial advisor. I myself own a high-end retail store with my husband and we didn't have a financial advisor in the beginning. We had a bookkeeper and an accountant but we should have had a financial advisor. That way, business owners can save on taxes and learn how to better run their company. One of the things we found when we sat down with our financial advisor is when he looked over our profit margins and did analysis, he saw things that we couldn't see. We found out that our margins were too big in our retail store, so we were losing money.

It speeds up your success because you are getting other points of view and they can see blind spots you can't see. That's why you see some companies just take off and others struggle.

Lisa Rickwood, business coach, author of Escape the Pace

In my opinion, (when dealing with banks) the only way over the intimidation factor is to have superior confidence and belief in what you are presenting. There is neither a person nor thing that can intimidate someone who is confident in what they have to offer.

Being intimidated by the banker is an internal mental response to a perceived external situation. Even though you may be totally confident, the bank may still not give you the cash. And that is when you have to dig deep and keep moving forward. There is no mental space for intimidation.

Look at the authors of the Chicken Soup series for example. They were rejected by publishing houses dozens of times, but because of their confidence and belief in the revenue it would generate, they kept going. The rest is history. And that is only one of dozens of stories about confidence and belief (leading to success).

If you aren't confident, find someone who can help you become more confident such as a consultant to work on improving the details, a coach to help your mindset, a mentor with previous experience – whoever and whatever you need. Do whatever it takes.

Until then, don't even bother stepping across the bank's threshold. And if all this sounds like too much work, keep your day job.

Nancy Morris, achievement specialist