#217 - Behind our brand evolution to TM Legal Atelier®
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After six and a half years of building this business, we have evolved into TM Legal Atelier®. This is so much more than a rebrand. This is a brand evolution, where our brand is finally catching up to what the business has organically become: a specialised legal practice serving creative and service based businesses with bespoke, tailored solutions in a heart led way.
When I first launched my legal practice, I was focused on creating a business that would allow me the work-life balance I was seeking while serving clients meaningfully. What began as "Tracey Mylecharane Solicitor" has grown into something far more specific and intentional than I could have imagined back then.
Why "Atelier" Captures What We Do
The word atelier is associated with bespoke craftsmanship. And that is exactly what I do. I have a passion for crafting tailored legal solutions for creative business professionals like interior designers, stylists, and architects.
We don't do templates. We don't do one-size-fits-all contracts. Every agreement we create is custom built for the specific business it's protecting, much like the meticulous work our clients do in their own creative fields.
This approach comes directly from my 12 years in litigation. I've seen what happens when generic contracts fail and that experience informs every document we craft. It's a perspective not every lawyer brings to the table and it's become our signature.
The Support System That Made This Possible
Since launching TM Legal Atelier®, I’ve had so many people reach out to me asking about who supported me during the brand evolution. Although I don’t work with a business coach, it certainly hasn’t been a solo journey. My business strategist, accountant, bookkeeper and business besties have all played crucial roles in guiding me through the challenging moments - the same kind of support I strive to provide my own clients.
Building a business requires surrounding yourself with people who understand your journey and can offer perspective when you need it most. This evolution happened because I had that foundation in place.
Evolution, Not Reinvention
I deliberately chose the term "brand evolution" because this wasn't about starting over. Our services haven't changed. They've simply become more refined and focused. The name now matches the reality of what we have been building all along.
What This Means Moving Forward
Six and a half years ago, I couldn't have predicted this path. But looking back, every step has led naturally to where we are now: a specialised legal practice serving creative businesses with the bespoke attention their work deserves.
If you're considering your own business evolution, whether it's a pivot, a rebrand or simply refining your focus, my advice is to surround yourself with people to support you as you journey onwards. Your business will tell you when it's ready to evolve. The key is having the right people around you to help you see it clearly and move forward with confidence.
What evolution is your business ready for? Sometimes the biggest transformations come from finally acknowledging what you've already become.
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[00:00:48] Tracey: Hello everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Rise Up in Business podcast. We've had a break for a few weeks following the launch of our brand evolution and in today's episode, I wanna share with you everything that was behind that brand evolution and what it means and why I did it. I had always planned to do an episode like this.
[00:01:08] However, after launching the new brand, the amount of feedback, congratulations, the warm, beautiful messages that I've received have really blown my mind to be really honest. I knew there'd be some, but I hadn't appreciated just how much support it would receive.
[00:01:27] What I've also loved is the clients and even some business owners that aren't clients who have reached out to me to ask me whether I'd be kind enough to share who supports me in my business and how I was able to do it. Oh, I'm so touched. I love sharing, and I love being able to offer value wherever I can.
[00:01:45] So I'm going to incorporate that into this episode as well, I'm so excited with the brand evolution. It was never about a rebrand. It was about the brand evolving. So that's why I use really intentionally the [00:02:00] phrase, the brand evolution, because that's, to me, what it is.
[00:02:03] The backstory to it is when I started this business, it was very much a fly by the seat of my pants thing. I'm going to be really honest. It wasn't something that came about after many, many, many months of planning and considering and thinking and all the things. There was one particular day, and I remember it really well, where I was sitting in the chair in the bedroom and my second child was about to start school the following year.
[00:02:28] And she'd be there five days. And I thought, gosh, here I am at a NU teaching into the college of law. It's really great. I'm privileged. I love being here, I love doing this. I need to make a decision. Do I wanna stay here at a NU? Because if I stay for much longer, I'll never be getting out. Or do I want to launch a business my way?
[00:02:47] And when I left practice, and if you've been a long time podcast listener here, you will have heard this before, but when I left practice after having my son, it was very much, uh, an intuitive decision that I took at the time because my plan when having him was only ever to take three months maternity leave and then head back into my litigation practice.
[00:03:06] And after he was a couple of weeks old, I knew very well. I'm never going back to litigation. Didn't have a clue what I was gonna do, but I knew it wasn't that. So I made the call there and then that's how instinctive and intuitive that decision was. And in a sense, the decision to launch this business was much the same.
[00:03:23] I'd been toying with the PhD pathway during my time as an academic at ANU, and I was considering starting that, or not starting that. I wasn't really drawn to it, but probably what I should do if I'm gonna stay in academia, uh. I really knew deep down, I didn't integrate all that well into academia.
[00:03:40] Let's be honest. I did not integrate well at all. it just wasn't for me, my style of thinking, my directness just didn't necessarily lend itself well to that very well established institution called, a NU and Academia. Sitting in that chair that day in my bedroom, I said to myself, do you wanna stay in academia and go down the PhD [00:04:00] path or not?
[00:04:01] Because now's the time. And it was not, I didn't want to. And what I really wanted to do though was launch a business that was conducive to the sort of life I wanted to build for me, my husband, my children and I didn't want to be one of the really stressed parents that I saw too often at pick up and drop off at school.
[00:04:20] I didn't wanna be that. So I thought, gosh, what do clients really want? And what do I really want and how do I merge the two? And I've spoken on previous episodes in more detail about what went into that. But the short version is I decided to launch this business to see if it was what clients wanted. So there wasn't really much thought that went into the name.
[00:04:41] In fact, the first iteration was my full name, Tracey Mylecharane Solicitor. That was the first iteration of the business name, the URL, all the things. About 12 months after that when I realised this really is something that clients want. This could be really fabulous. Let's evolve it and up level is when my brand and web designer said to me, this name's way too long.
[00:05:05] It needs to be shorter. Let's do TM solicitor. I said, okay. That is literally how TM Solicitor came to be, and I just rolled with it. I never loved it, but I also didn't really care that much because I was more focused on delivering the service that I was delivering each year. Of the anniversary of the business, I would look at the name and think to myself, oh, I can do better than that.
[00:05:28] But as I've shared so openly on here, I'm not a creative. I love working with creatives and supporting creatives. They're at the very core of my business. I myself am not creative in that way. So those conversations I had with myself each year about a different business name didn't go very far because I couldn't come up with anything, and the few things that I was drawn to are already being used, and I then just parked it and just kept focusing on the delivery, which is where I get my joy.
[00:06:00] this year same thing happened and I was actually having breakfast out with my husband one morning and I said, oh, I'll probably park this again, but I'll just float it with you. Now. I always kick around the idea of a name change about this time of year, but can't come up with anything. I wonder whether I just park it again.
[00:06:17] My husband is very creative, he's the creative in the family, and my daughter takes after him very closely. He started kicking ideas around and it was really fun. the rest is history because as soon as we started talking about things and I realized this is really possible, I then started articulating why I thought it was time to evolve the brand.
[00:06:39] And that's what I'm gonna share with you. That's how it happened. And this was back in July. So this has been many months in the process, our brand evolution. We started just that way and then I started writing down and articulating to Heidi, my fabulous business manager, what I wanted to achieve. My very dear friend, Kate Adamo was my sounding board on, I think it's time to do this.
[00:07:03] What do you think? Oh no, I'm not going to worry. And I actually got to the point where I'd gone a little, a little way and I'd landed on the name that I love and I'll talk to you about the legal atelier. I landed on the name that I love and then I'd said to Kate, no, this is all too hard and too much work and I don't wanna do it.
[00:07:21] And in her very Kate way, she pointed out to me why that was not necessarily the right reason. If I didn't wanna do it, that's fine, but I can't just not do it because it all too much. That just is not okay. And she's right and my gosh, I'm glad that she had said that. so here we are.
[00:07:37] Legal atelier. It's something that feels so grounded for me, and it really is a representation of where the business has evolved to. When I started the business, it was very much general legal services for all small businesses. It was litigation, it was dispute resolution, it was trademarks, it was contracts, it was leases.
[00:07:58] It was everything because [00:08:00] when I started, I didn't know if this is something that people were going to want. Then of course running a business, I didn't know where the next matter was going to come from. So I would say yes to everything. I think that's a familiar story for all of us business owners but as the years evolved, more and more work came in and I was able to take confidence that this is my purpose.
[00:08:21] My purpose on this earth is to serve and this business is one of the vehicles within which I can serve and this is a way I could serve clients and I started getting really clear on the work that lit me up and that I loved and what I didn't wanna do anymore and that was a natural thought process and the type of work that I wanted to niche into happened really organically.
[00:08:51] I'm so blessed and fortunate and I feel really privileged to be able to say that. I gravitated to creative business owners, interior designers, stylists, architects, graphic designers, web designers. The creatives and I gel so well and I have such a love and passion for contracts and agreements. They don't generally speaking so it worked and it has continued to grow that way. Coaches and consultants and their contracts are other business owners that I love to work with and so I focused more on that and then that's where the business niched into organically, as I say, it was a journey that was so organic based on what I loved and I magnetized it in some way. So that's where I ended up.
[00:09:40] So the name TM Solicitor started to feel really generic. It started to feel very generalised, not particularly refined. Not finessed at all in terms of niching and I really feel like the business evolved and it was time for the brand to catch [00:10:00] up. And that's where the project started, around the brand evolution. I realized that my niche and my passion for strategic tailored advice to my clients was something worth celebrating and I say it a lot, but I suppose I thought it was very run of the mill.
[00:10:21] Everyone wants to give strategic guidance. Everyone wants to give this level of support. Everyone wants to niche, but I've come to learn over the years that that's not the case. Not all lawyers like to niche and not all lawyers like to give strategic tailored advice at all and I learned over the years that this really was very unique to me because of the passion that I have for it, drawing on my background and this is where the passion came because my background was in litigation for so long, I really have seen all there is to see when it comes to what can go wrong in business. And so capturing that in a way that I could use it to empower my now clients to avoid ending up in litigation like that was really special to me because I was able to draw on all that experience such that it wasn't wasted. I was putting it to good use, but it was equally valuable to clients because lawyers that they'd worked with in the past didn't have that unique perspective and lens on the work that they were doing. You know, there's contract lawyers and there's contract lawyers, there's even lawyers who like to sell templates and I stand against that on so many levels and you know that if you're a long time listener.
[00:11:32] This is where Legal Atelier came from. What I do is bespoke. It really is tailored to the individual business. It really is personalized. It's a craft that I have. It's a passion that I have a deep seated passion. I have a unique framework that I've trademarked and been utilizing for a very long time in my business, legals By Design, it all led us to [00:12:00] Legal Atelier, so I feel like the business had evolved and the brand was catching up, not the other way around.
[00:12:07] Some people have said to me, oh, a rebrand suggests a new direction and I suppose on some level it probably does. This brand evolution wasn't that. This brand evolution was the brand catching up to where the business already is because the business had already taken the organic path of niching into supporting creative and service-based businesses in a really heart led way to create tailored contracts and agreements that really work and that are tailored for each unique business.
[00:12:41] There's no place for DIY in an Atelier. There is no place for piecemeal and cookie cutter templates in an atelier. So when I started playing around with the name Legal Atelier, it became clearer and clearer to me over the days and weeks that I was toying around with that, that this really was like a coming home for my business and for me. This is where we needed to be, to be able to accurately reflect to my community, to my audience, to my clients, where it is that we are now, which is very different to where we started six and a half years ago at Tracy Mylecharane solicitor, and then TM solicitor. Going to what I said earlier in the opening, clients have reached out and asked me, who's your business coach? Who helped you get the clarity to get here?
[00:13:31] I don't work with a business coach and no one helped me get the clarity to get here. It wasn't a project, as I say, which was a let's rebrand, right, who do I work with? The most value I can share with you in answering who got me here? It's about the journey. It was about the journey of the past, let's say five years because we evolved after year one into TM solicitor.
[00:13:55] But the last five years, the people that supported me are the ones that [00:14:00] got me here, wasn't just the last couple of months. And because this has been such a popular question because this is something I have been asked a lot over the last few weeks. I'm actually going to bring some guests onto the podcast over the next little while and share them with you and share with you the context and how pivotal they've been to me on my part of the journey.
[00:14:21] I won't say more on that now, but that's to come. So I have a business strategist who I've had for five years, and she has been pivotal in my evolution on so many levels. I have an accountant who's so important to me in terms of knowing my structure and my affairs are in order. It's so important. I'm going to do an episode with my accountant very soon. I can't wait to share more about that with you. I have a bookkeeper who I've had for five years who has become a very dear friend of mine, and that business relationship has been so important in me building my confidence and resilience when it comes to numbers.
[00:15:07] My visibility over my numbers and the confidence I have in framing my path and the next steps in the business. It's those relationships that have been the ones to keep me focused, soundboard ideas, ones that don't work, ones that do work, direction, all of the things. They've been the externals that I work with to help get to this point. That's something I really wanted to share. So I say so often on the podcast, who you surround yourself with in business matters, and it does on so many levels, not just the day-to-day advice or the monthly and quarterly advice, but the journey, they're a part of it. And that's what I've become for so many of my clients, a part of the journey.
[00:15:55] My clients often reflect to me that they need to make decisions in relation to team, growth, [00:16:00] clients, direction, exit strategies, so many things. A phone call or a session with me is really important to be able to give them clarity on options, strategize in relation to what? What happens if this, what happens if that, let's consider what's the end in mind?
[00:16:16] All of the things. So I love that I play that role for my clients, but I love that I have people that play that role for me too, and that I can share that with you here. When it comes to the actual design of the website and the new brand. Absolutely, that was a very special person with a very special set of skills and I've shared openly on my Instagram who I worked with, and I worked with Nicole at January Made for that brand development and for the new website, and Heidi, my business manager, managed that whole process. Without her, I'm quite sure I wouldn't have been able to get here, so there were people that were instrumental in it.
[00:16:54] Nicole has a craft that was so special and so nuanced into exactly what I wanted to achieve to reflect the positioning of the business and who the business is now, who I am now, and who we serve now. So there was definitely that element to it, but this was a lot longer. This process was a lot longer than engaging a brand and web designer and managing a project. There was a lot more to it, and the journey was so wholesome and so fulfilling and so authentic that when we got here and I started having that conversation with my husband over breakfast about the name, it morphed into something that I was not expecting but I'm ever so grateful that it did because here we are.
[00:17:39] I shared an episode on the podcast recently with Kate Adamo, and we were talking about rebranding in business and when do you know if it's time to rebrand? And I didn't say anything on that episode about my own rebrand that we were getting ready to launch because I wanted to save that episode for you so that you could take away from that episode with Kate the nuggets of gold that resonated for you, in your own [00:18:00] business on your own journey. This episode is about introducing you to the brand and the story behind it, and I'm so thrilled to have launched the new brand. I'm so thrilled to have been able to share with you in this episode the story behind it and the process behind it. If it's something you're thinking about, rebranding, business has taken a different path to where you started. You're not sure if it's time, what's next? I'm hoping that there are some nuggets of gold that you've taken away from this episode where you've been able to identify what's important to you, what might be missing from your team of supporters or advisors, or what you need to do next in order to support you on the path to a rebrand or a brand evolution.
[00:18:45] If there's anything more you would like to know, please don't hesitate to reach out to ask me. As I say, I've received lots of requests from clients and a couple of not yet clients, just about the process and who was supporting me, and if I can add value and share, I will. So please don't hesitate to reach out to me to ask.
[00:19:04] If you know other business friends that are in a similar situation or that you think might get some little nuggets of gold from this episode or that there's something in here that might resonate, I would be so grateful if you would share the episode, because that's how we get the podcast into the ears of more business owners that we can help support and add value.
[00:19:23] As I say, there's some really great episodes of the podcast coming up with some people who have been instrumental on my business journey, and I cannot wait to share those with you. Thank you as always for joining me on this episode, and I'll catch you next time. [00:20:00]
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