Karen Renee, CEO of eCourtReporters, says that she and her business partner Judy Gerulat run their business the same way they ride their Harleys — full-speed ahead, with no reverse.
Renee joined The Savvy Entrepreneur radio show to share some of the bumps in the road, as well as some of the many successes as eCourt Reporters got started and has grown rapidly. eCourt Reporters was founded to help lawyers more easily find available and qualified court reporters. Finding those reporters is not always easy, something that Renee, who formerly ran her own court reporter agency, knew from personal experience. She wanted eCourt Reporters to be essentially an “Uber” for court reporters.
She also felt that court reporters deserved a bigger piece of the pie, because agencies take up to 50% of the fees paid by lawyers.
eCourt Reporters now sources qualified court reporters in all 50 states, and is growing quickly. The lawyer/court reporter matching platform is appealing because it is free for both court reporters (and legal videographers) and lawyers to use — eCourt Reporters only gets paid when a court reporting job is successfully completed & the court reporter is paid.
A complex matching platform like theirs, one with hundreds of users and growing, and with many different parameters that can be searched, wasn't easily built and took resources of all kinds.
Renee found as well that pitching was a challenge, although (like everything in her business), she ultimately found success.
She talks about the helpful resources she found along the way, and offers some very candid tips for entrepreneurs — especially for women entrepreneurs, for entrepreneurs needing to build a tech platform, and for those pitching for funding.
Click on the arrow to listen to the show — you'll be pulled in by Renee's candid, no-nonsense style and sparkling sense of humor. Or, go here to read a transcript.
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