Law Firm Ambition comprises a website, plus webinars, and (since 2023) an annual conference ... all aimed at 'Making it easier to grow your law firm'.It is a fun and hugely satisfying collaboration between some very impressive people.The seven top legal sector brands that fund and support Law Firm Ambition are Travelers (the UK's No.1 insurer of law firms and the cornerstone of the whole project), Lloyds Bank, Armstrong Watson, Hazlewoods, Cashroom, etiCloud and Codex Edge. The content is produced with a team of over 100 hand-picked experts from the legal sector.The whole collaboration is based on the Know->Like->Trust->Buy->Recommend mantra. If you show your sector expertise and are generous with your free advice, your customers and prospects will thank you and will buy from you.Law Firm Ambition is owned by Atom LFA Ltd, which was spun out of Atom Content Marketing in 2023 to focus on the legal sector.

(Note: Atom Content Marketing was previously called Business Hotline Publications and then BHP Information Solutions until July 2013.)These days the bulk of Atom's revenues come from lead generation for brands that want to get in front of our start-up and SME audience. We get paid per-click or per-action as well as some display advertising.But we also license our content to banks, law firms, accountancy firms, universities and colleges, chambers of commerce, local councils, LEPs/growth hubs and enterprise agencies across the UK. Typically, our content comes with its own web platform, which sits behind your organisation's main website.Hundreds of experts have collaborated with us on the content, in fact it must be over a thousand by now. We are now building up a core team of experts who will work as commercial partners with Atom.Some organisations liked our platform so much that they ditched their own website and tweaked our platform to become the main website. But this is unusual, and we have no intention of going into the mainstream business of building websites.In 2023 we competed our current 'big project', the complete re-building of Atom Vault - the online publishing system that lies at the heart of our company. We create the original content on it (optimised for SEO), attribute the correct authors and editors, and schedule a regular update cycle for each page. Once a page is 'published' it is automatically pushed out to all the Atom/client websites that have that page, with the correct HTML and the correct indexing instructions for that site.I founded Atom (originally named Business Hotline Publications Ltd, then BHP) in 1991. Nowadays what we do is called 'content marketing' and almost every marketing agency is doing it; but Atom is pretty unique in terms of having been doing content marketing for over 30 years.

Riza was the UK element of a small existing Japanese company called Riza International. In fact I was based in Tokyo and our main activity was providing (our) administrative staff to large companies in Tokyo on an annual contract basis. Although it was a very easy way to make a living, I ended up deciding that this business partnership was not one I wanted to continue ... and furthermore I decided against a Japan-related career full-stop, despite having gone to the trouble of learning to speak Japanese by then.I published two Japanese language books during this period: Things They Don't Teach You At Japanese Language School (a highly practical language book with 4 hours of tapes that I published myself) and Reading Menus In Japanese Restaurants (with a leading Japanese publisher called Aruku, three editions printed).I also had four months travelling through Africa, having earlier done a two-and-a-half-year working-my-way-round-the-world trip when I was 17-19 (between attending Dalhousie and Cambridge universities).

Based in Tokyo, my job was to identify undervalued stocks on the Tokyo Stock Market and to then write reports on these opportunities. I had to learn to speak and read Japanese, and passed an in-house exam as part of this. While I always viewed the stock market as simply a stepping stone to a more fulfilling career, it was an interesting and enjoyable job for a couple of years. It was also ridiculously over-paid, which is why most people never manage to leave. (Smith New Court was subsequently acquired by Merryl Lynch.)

An amazing job in venture capital. It involved reading hundreds of business plans each year, picking out a few management teams to meet each month, then selecting the likely winners from that small pool and investing 3i's money in them in return for a minority equity stake.By the time I left 3i I was also looking after our investments/ loans in 66 local companies. In those days 3i had a UK portfolio of about 2,500 equity investments (including masses of start-ups) and the same number of loan customers. It gave me a lot of insights into what works and why businesses fail.Years later I broke all 'the rules' when I started up Atom: a start-up in a difficult and rapidly changing market, in which I had zero experience or contacts, with no obvious way of quickly building up reliable contractual revenue streams, and with no management team around me for the first few years. It just happened to be what I absolutely wanted to go into, and I am a great believer in the saying that "someone who loves their job never has to do a day's work".