Wendy Jaffe | Dealmaker

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How does a successful attorney become co-owner of eastern Ventura County’s premier daily deal site? Through a very long and winding road…

While Wendy Jaffe was growing up, her father -one of Los Angeles’ top divorce attorneys-  would come home from work every night and talk about his day. He would tell wonderful tales about his clients and how much he loved helping them and all sorts of magnificent things about being an attorney. Naturally Wendy decided to go to law school after graduating UCLA.

But becoming a lawyer didn’t turn out to be the dream job she thought it would be.

“My father always painted such a positive picture about being an attorney. What he never mentioned were the negative aspects like the crying clients, the ugliness a lawsuit can bring out in people, and the incredibly long and often boring hours.”

Wendy had always considered herself to have an entrepreneurial spirit and was unhappy practicing law. She decided to take a risk and quit her stable job at a Santa Monica law firm and started her own candy company called Cool Chocolate. The company marketed a green chocolate M&M look-a-like candy called “The Green Ones” based on the aphrodisiac myth of the green M&M. The product garnered a lot of press and attention when Mars sued Wendy for copyright infringement. They settled out of court and she continued to successfully market the product under the changed name of “Greenies”.

She later went to work for her father to write material for his business for presentations given at the American Bar Association and California Bar Association. She enjoyed writing and started freelancing for several publications including the Los Angeles Times.

Wendy combined her skills as a lawyer and as a writer and wrote a book with an original twist titled The Divorce Lawyers’ Guide to Staying Married.

“I interviewed the top 100 divorce lawyers in the country and asked them the main reasons that people get divorced and it seemed the reasons were surprisingly similar regardless of where people lived, where they worked, or how much money they made.”

Wendy is currently a consultant on the website Divorce.com and writes a monthly column in Tribe Magazine, owned by the Jewish Journal.

“I like to write about what everyone thinks about, but no one talks about,” she says about her column.

So how exactly did she end up being CEO of Conejo Deals, Ventura County’s first daily deal site?

“About a year and a half ago when Groupon was still fairly new my brother Rob came up with the idea of starting a hyper local daily deal site. Groupon is great, but at that time there was nothing like that out here. We focus on local businesses; businesses people will return to even after the deal they purchase is complete.

Rob also wanted to help out the community we live in by giving money back to local schools and non-profit organizations. And he was insistent that if he was going to start a business he wanted me to be his partner.”

Conejo Deals focuses on local businesses in the Western Los Angeles and Eastern Ventura Counties. The company also gives $1 to a local school or charity of your choice with every purchase. Since their launch date on April 12, 2010 Conejo Deals has donated over $48,000 local organizations.

As CEO of Conejo Deals Wendy capitalizes on her skill set by handling all of the legal work and writing up the daily deals for the website. She also distributes money to the school program and tries out the services the site sells so she can accurately write them up.

“I should look like a seventeen-year-old with all the facials I’ve had,” joked Wendy.

Wendy is happy to be working in an entrepreneurial capacity again and loves running Conejo Deals with her brother, even if it took her a bit of a winding road to get there.

“It’s funny, people ask you what you want to be when you grow up, but the great thing is, whatever you choose, you don’t have to be that thing forever.”