Get to know Hemisphere: Founder Interview
Get to know the Hemisphere Consultants team!
Our content specialist, Tameka Mortimer, sat down with co-founders Zoe Mortimer and Alexandra Geelan to explore who they are and why they decided to set up Hemisphere Consultants.
In this article, “ZM” is co-founder Zoe Mortimer, and “AG” is co-founder Alexandra Geelan.
Hemisphere Consultants co-founders, Zoe Mortimer and Alexandra Geelan.
Who are you?
ZM - We are a female led legal consultancy. We are two senior lawyers who have previously worked together and have come together to create a legal consultancy where we work with other female founders and minority led founders in a corporate/commercial setting.
Alexandra is from Australia and I’m from UK, which is why we’ve called it Hemisphere.
We are tired of working for other people and mainly working in a male dominated spaces where ultimately things aren’t really changing despite the intentions of some of the men who are in the field.
Where have you come from?
AG - We both had traditional legal careers to date. Hemisphere has come from our frustration of working in male dominated and stuffy spaces which don’t serve the needs of women and minority led businesses at all - both in terms of the outputs they deliver and the way they deliver them.
We want to work in a way that embraces diversity and work in the way our clients work. Our clients shouldn’t have to squeeze themselves into white, male spaces - we want to provide a space where they don’t have to do that and we don’t have to do that either.
Why are you here?
ZM - The reason is two- fold: the way we work and like working together and the things we like from a client perspective. One is the work ethic: working to live rather than living to work. Enjoying our jobs and wanting to continue enjoying our jobs and how do we do that? By embracing how we work together as well as working with other people who will be able to embrace our ways of working. They don’t have to turn up in a suit, in a white, male dominated space. They can share with us how they want to build their business and we can support them in that while respecting that they are not on call for each other. We want it to be more of a partnership with the clients we work with. Be with them throughout the life cycle of the business.
AG - Adding to that, it’s about opting out of the narrative that (a) work has to be your defining feature and that’s where you have to get your value from and (b) it [running a business] has to be about growth, striving, scaling to be bigger like a rat on the wheel. We are opting out of that, and saying that, actually, our value is in us intrinsically and not in us as workers and that’s the same for our clients.
What do you want to say to a mentee/ young person? What are you trying to say through Hemisphere?
AG - Reject the part of the work and society that doesn’t serve us anymore and craft the work we want to be doing. That doesn’t look like what it looks like in a traditional setting, so it’s a broader picture. We all need to reflect on who we want to be and the world we want to inhabit.
What is your previous experience that you can draw upon to ensure that Hemishere is going to be different?
ZM - There has to be another way, once you step out of traditional way of thinking, traditional trajectory of life being all about progression. Once you step away from that, your job can be whatever you want it to be. People are setting up businesses all the times and they're always different. There has to a different way of doing this, there is always an alternative way of working like a 4 days week, not being tied to your desk 8 hours a day, there has to be another way so why can’t we be the ones to do it?
AG - As companies grow they lose sight of their values and no one has sustainably found a way of holding it, of being able to grow but still hold on to their values. Our measure of success won’t be double growth every year, our measure of success is: are we happy, paying the bills, are the clients happy? Our incentives are different from other businesses.
What will you offer your clients?
ZM - Doing good work with good people, paying it forward and generating goodwill. Being enough in their lives that they trust us to be with them throughout the lifecycle of their business, we become the confidant and trusted advisors to them.
AG - Our outputs of legal work will be the same - like contract reviews of good quality - but our experience of engaging with clients and being people who genuinely care about them and business beyond the fees.
What are your values?
AG - Work to live. Professional lives are part of life but not our whole lives.
ZM - Pay it forward. Working with founders, there will be times where we may have to do work cheaper than more established companies, but as they grow, they pay it forward. One good turn deserves another. I’m aware that we are not in control of how people respond to gestures of goodwill but I hope it works.
AG - Community is very important, incorporating paying it forward. Transparency is very important, we’re keen to be very transparent with who we are working with, what the fees are, if its in the wheelhouse of work we can do, not pretending to be something we’re not.
ZM - Between AG and I, another value would be integrity. We hold each other accountable, we win as a team, lose as a team. Not falling foul to growth and remembering why we have set this up, keep going back to the origins.
[For our see values, see About Us]
If you could leave this world with one piece of advice what would it be?
ZM - The most important thing is to love and be loved.
AG - Figure out what success and happiness looks like for you. In such a loud world, it's hard to hear yourself. What does it look like for you? Have it as your north star.
Why each other?
ZM - First of all, Alexandra showed her core values when she went to bat for me at our previous law firm where I was facing discrimination and ultimately, along with her own reasons for wanting to leave, part of that reason for leaving was because of that behaviour towards me. Having an ally as a mixed heritage woman, you can’t get much stronger than that.
Also, I have worked with her for the past year, I’ve seen how great she is as a lawyer: she is incredibly talented lawyer but also in terms of the way she compliments my skills, she is a planner, and very organised in terms of what she wants and most importantly how she goes about achieving that. I am not always a planner, I am more of a gut feel person, but to work with someone who is planner it gives me a benchmark and also, I know that there are skills and things that would have been thought out beyond what perhaps I would have thought about.
Lastly, it’s very easy working with Alexandra, I always said in the last firm that I loved working with Alexandra and through all the other faults, I never once had an issue with working with her. It was just her and I in the office and we worked as a team together and a partnership. We leveraged each other strengths and as a whole we are quite formidable.
AG - So many reasons, but I’ve narrowed it down to two main ones: one of them is her professionalism and we are very aligned in our values and what we want out of work and life, but not necessarily thinking the same about how we approach business and how we do things. We trust and support each other because we are on the same page for our vision, but we bring different ways of working together and it is a complimentary relationship.
On a personal level, Zoe is incredibly warm and giving, and has this ability to create community wherever she goes and is such a good connector of people, which is absolutely amazing in and of itself and is the counterpoint to me where I can be a bit more reserved. She’s great.