IAM1964 – Former Litigator Helps People to Structure Their Business and Protect Assets

Why it was selected for “CBNation Architects”:

In this episode, the guest is Scott Smith, the founder of Royal Legal Solutions, an asset protection firm. With significant experience as an aggressive litigator against major insurance companies, Scott now utilizes his knowledge to help clients set up business structures that protect their assets while saving money on taxes and state fees.

Key Points:

Background: Scott Smith, a former litigator, founded Royal Legal Solutions to assist clients in structuring their businesses and protect their assets. With a clientele consisting of both first-time investors and seasoned real estate investors, Scott ensures optimal property protection and cost savings.

Royal Legal Solutions: The rapidly growing law firm currently has over 40 full-time employees and offers extensive services that cater to clients' individual needs, focusing on the right system for acquiring property and protecting assets.

CEO Hack: Scott recommends a daily habit of working out, journaling, and meditating. Additionally, he suggests making regular visits to the sauna for relaxation and reflection.

CEO Nugget: Scott's advice to fellow entrepreneurs is to stay calm and focus on doing the next right thing.

CEO Defined: For Scott, being a CEO encompasses being a servant to one's people and fulfilling their needs.

Scott Smith Teaser 00:00

The power is in the synergy. When you get everything working together in the right way, you end up with this huge benefit. That's what it takes, the deep knowledge about knowing who your customers are, what are the challenges they're facing? Do you have the knowledge to break down not just the individual things they need to do, but how do they link together?

Intro 00:18

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview?

If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of.

This is the I AM CEO podcast.

Gresham Harkless 00:46

Hello, hello, hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast, and I appreciate you listening to this episode. If you've been listening this year, you know that we hit 1600 episodes at the beginning of this year. We're doing something a little bit different where we're repurposing our favorite episodes around certain categories, topics, or as I like to call them, the business pillars that we think are going to be extremely impactful for CEOs, entrepreneurs, business owners, and what I like to call CB Nation architects who are looking to level up their organizations.

This month, we are focusing on finishing it out, fighting the good fight and closing out the job. I think just as important as it is to start something, it's even more important in how you conclude it or finish it out. So if you think of the different things that you can finish out, it'd be everything from a project, it could be from a day, it could also be from a business in and of itself, and it could also of course be for the year. So when you think of finishing out, I want you to really think of these episodes because what we're going to really focus on is the last question that we really ask, which is defining what it means to be a CEO.

All the creative, innovative, and I think truly insightful questions that we received from this question is really what we want to highlight during the show. But of course, we want you to enjoy the entire episode and think about how you're going to finish things out and how you're going to finish things out strongly. So sit back and enjoy this special episode of the I AM CEO podcast.

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast, and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Scott Smith of royallegalsolutions.com. Scott, it's awesome to have you on the show.

Scott Smith 02:17

Yeah, what's up, Gresh, great to be here, brother.

Gresham Harkless 02:19

No problem. Super excited to have you on. What I want to do is just read a little bit more about Scott so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's doing.

Scott is a real estate investor, asset protection attorney and owner of Royal Legal Solutions, the fastest-growing law firm in the country growing from four to forty full-time employees in only two years.

Scott, it's awesome to have you on the show. You ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

Scott Smith 02:40

Yeah, let's do it.

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Gresham Harkless 02:41

Awesome. So the first question I had for you was to hear a little bit more about what I call your CEO story and what led you start your business.

Scott Smith 02:48

Yeah, so I was actually a law student. My second year, I bought my first piece of real estate. It was a transmission auto repair shop. So it's my first foray in real estate and my first foray into like real business ownership. Now I've been building like cutting lawns and stuff since the time I was a kid. I was trying to do, just hustling for those dollars wherever I could grab them. That's what we all do. If you're an entrepreneur, you're trying to look like, where can I pick up that easy money cause getting that nine to five sucks. Everybody knows it.

So when I jumped into being able to do that while I was in law school, that gave me my first like taste of what is it like to be able to run these business and rehab buildings. I ended up flipping the building and the business out of law school and graduated without any debt. I was the only one in my class to do that from law school. So I went to go do litigation after that suing insurance companies, come to find out that certain insurance companies are really great at accepting their premium payments, but really bad at actually paying out. All right. So we were suing the hell out of these guys because they don't pay out on valid claims which is really cool except for the fact it's a really grindy piece of work.

I was like, no, I want to get back into real estate. So I got back to the real estate investing game only to find out that everybody in the world actually needed help with so much more than just the real estate. There was like the taxes. There was the LLCs. There was bookkeeping. What they needed was somebody that comes with a start to finish solution that says you want to invest in real estate, here's all the things you need to do from a legal tax and business perspective. I've already mapped them out for you because I already did it for myself.

So I was a professional that also knew how to do business that these people were in. And so then they were like, Oh, this is a natural fit for clientele, went out of bigger pockets and then boom, Royal Legal Solutions was exploded onto a national stage and now we help clients in all 50 states, over 3000 clients, currently with us now. Now I have a team of about 40 people which I can tell you is probably the hardest thing I've ever had to do in my life, way harder than being an attorney. Being an attorney is easy compared to being a business owner.

Gresham Harkless 04:37

Yeah, absolutely. I can imagine just all the different egos and personalities and different goals and all those things you make sure that you take care of all that.

I know you touched on a little bit. Can you drill a little bit deeper and tell us exactly what you're doing with Royal Legal Solutions so that the listeners can understand?

Scott Smith 04:50

Yeah, so Royal Legal Solutions is the first time first company of its kind or law firm. What we're doing is we're looking as a one-stop shop for entrepreneurs, real estate investors so everybody that comes in and interacts with us, where we can map out for you what your life is going to look like over the next 20 years and all of the things that are going to come up. This is really important for people because the one question we always have when it comes to like legal tax and business issues is what is it that I need right now?

That's what we're doing as we're building the roadmap for people of here's when you're going to need certain things. Here's why you're going to put them in place at certain times. And of course, we're going to be able to do that for you because that's the way we make our money. But what we're going to do and what we're built on a foundation for is just like Google. We default to open with all of our information. We give everybody the full playbook of here's what you need to do, why you need to go do it.

If you want to have somebody else go do it, or you want to do it yourself, God bless you, go do it. A lot of people don't want to do that. That's when they have us be able to put it all together and that's what led us to our huge growth is that we give away all of the secrets. That's what we're about. We blow up all the secrets. We give away all the information. We're working to make attorneys have to move up the value chain because we're not going to allow people to make money off of just other people that don't know the information, about Oh, how do I do little things?

No, we give away all that stuff so that way everybody now has to form at a higher level professionally. What we find is, at those levels, everybody has a better relationship. We have lifelong relationships with our clients.

Gresham Harkless 06:16

Yeah, that makes perfect sense because a lot of times, whenever as a business owner, you're starting a business, you always want to work and focus on the core of exactly what it is that you do so you don't have to worry about all those additional things. So it's great to have you guys be able to take on a lot of those things that provide that playbook and provide all the secrets that everybody wants and is looking for.

Now I wanted to ask you for what I call your secret sauce. You might have already touched on this, but this is what you feel just distinguishes you or your organization.

Scott Smith 06:40

Yeah, the secret sauce is defaulting to open. I read that book. I forget. It was by the founders of Google and it changed the way that I think about what it is that we actually are creating as attorneys and professionals. My viewpoint on it is saying that what's up until before Royal Legal Solutions is that attorneys and CPAs new staff you didn't. So then you had to pay them after royal legal solutions. What I do here is I, we're all going to get the same playbook of what the information is and exactly what people need to go do.

Now that gives the consumer, the customer, the investor, the entrepreneur, all the power to know, here's exactly what I need to go do. I don't have to, quote and quote, just trust some guy, right? I actually could think through all of this. The secret sauce comes down to actually being able to educate. I was a Montessori teacher actually, before I went to law school and saying, how do you take really complex subjects and then break them down in a way that everybody can understand and that they make sense. It's not just me thinking like, this is the way I break it down for a customer. It makes sense.

I break it down to other attorneys and CPAs because I have to educate them about how do things work at the highest level? Because these things don't work just one offs. People think law and business taxes are just one off little things that you buy. No, no, no, the power is in the synergy. When you get everything working together in the right way, you end up with this huge benefit, and that's what it takes. The deep knowledge about knowing who your customers are, what are the challenges they facing? Do you have the knowledge to break down? Not just the individual things they need to do, but how do they link together in a way that they can understand and say, okay, cool, now I actually see what it is that you're trying to do at the very highest levels.

I tell you what, there's probably only a handful of people in the country that are like me that are actually doing that and teaching that.

Gresham Harkless 08:20

Yeah, absolutely. Because like you mentioned, being able to give the power to the people, so to speak, where you actually have and are empowered to be able to know all that information, where usually there's people that charge people for that. You have to call me in order to get your whatever taken care of, your taxes or your legal entities taken care of. So that is awesome that you guys are able to do that.

I wanted to switch gears a little bit and ask you for what I call a CEO hack. This might be an app, a book or a habit that you have, but something that makes you more effective and efficient.

Scott Smith 08:48

Yeah, work out every day. Yeah every day. You don't give it up. You can do six days a week, take one day off, work out every single day. If you're working for one thing that like actually moves the dial, man, that's it. Because what it does, it resets your mind. It gets you like thinking, right. It gets your testosterone up. So you're a lot more confident. Your head's a lot more clear. It's super important for us. There's just all kinds of studies about there and all just comes down to working out. If you're too like beat up to work out or you got injuries or whatever, go sit in the sauna. 30 minutes in the sauna at super high temperatures, your HGH, your testosterone goes through the roof, your recovery goes up.

So, you can be injured and still get all these positive psychological benefits. What you notice is something I just talked about with Grant Cardone last week on the Real Estate Nerds podcast, which is my show. We're doing these live shows now like every day with celebrities. It's incredible. But one of the things that we talked about with him on the show was about saying that, what are the things that you're doing that lead you to your best decision making. We all know we made mistakes and we know we made decisions before in our life that we said, I know I shouldn't have done that and I did it. Anyway, why did I do that?

There are things that you're building into your day to say what prepares me to make my best decisions. For me, one of those things is working out, meditating and journaling. Those are my core foundation. I say when I do those things, I know my mind's out of 10. I know my physicality is out of 10. I know my emotional state is out of 10 of where it is I want it to be.

Gresham Harkless 10:08

I love that. And I think it makes perfect sense to be able to try to vibrate higher as quickly as possible and to be able to do those hacks like working out, journaling. And you said meditating as well, too. I believe those are all great things that are great CEO hack.

So now I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO nugget. And this is a word of wisdom or piece of advice. Or if you can happen to a time machine, what would you tell your younger business?

Scott Smith 10:28

Oh, yeah, just relax, relax and do the next right thing. Just relax and do the next right thing. You can't solve tomorrow's problems today, but what you can do is just relax into it.

Do the work, you need to get done today and tomorrow will take care of itself.

Gresham Harkless 10:41

Absolutely. Yeah. Sometimes , there are so many things that are moving on, you can get very overwhelmed, but the important part, like you said, is just to make sure that you're doing your CEO hacks, just like you touched on and then making sure that you're really at cause that all goes hand in hand.

Now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're hoping to have different quote and quote CEOs on the show.

So Scott, what does being a CEO mean to you?

Scott Smith 11:03

It actually means being a servant to your people 100%. That's what it is to me. Every day that I wake up and I got all these people, what's my job? My job is to serve them and to empower them to get the most out of what they can possibly do for me, which means that I'm also at the top of the food chain. I'm also at the very bottom.

It means that I'm here giving directions and orders of saying this is where I need things to go. Guys, here's the clarity of the vision. I need us to echo execute over there, and the next moment could be somebody's crying on my shoulder about something that's happened and that ain't working for him.

I got to counsel them through that because they need me to. It's very much into that same kind of zone where at the top and the bottom all at the same time. You think you can make people do stuff they don't want to do. You're just freaking fooling yourself because that ain't how real life works.

Gresham Harkless 11:50

Exactly. It's very, very short-lived if you think you're going to do that. But what's the quote that goes if you help enough people get what they want, you can get what you want. So that makes perfect sense, in alignment with the top and the bottom of the food chain, as you talked about.

So Scott, I truly appreciate your time. What I wanted to do is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional you want to let our readers and our listeners know. And then of course, how best they can get ahold of you.

Scott Smith 12:11

Yeah. So, one of the coolest things that we're doing right now at Royal Legal Solutions, that every single member to the firm is going to receive a free anonymous LLC. These are top-tier companies that be able to protect your assets, protect your wealth, protect your credit score. If you're in business for yourself, I'd be able to do that. We have this all part of every single member that comes in. So it's not just for the free LLC, but you're people get live access to be able to talk to our guests directly, like Greg Cardona meets celebrities to get access to our deal network.

They get wholesale pricing on thousands of different legal products. That is cheaper than legal zoom, cheaper than rocket lawyer. Once they're a member, they get access to our form database to be able to get the legal forms that they need every single month and it only costs 49 bucks. There's a ton more things that you get for free, like in there, as well as, security and information audits and screening to find out what is your public information that's out there. But that's what we're doing like right now. That's what I'm super excited about in our new offerings from there.

You can get it by just going to royallegalsolutions.com/freeLLC. Or calling us at 512 757 3994. Seriously, free LLCs. I've been talking about even paying the filing fees for people because we're on a mission to get every single person protected and get everybody moving in the right direction of what they need to in an affordable way because, at the end of the day, the more people that we can get active, the more people we can get moving, the more people we can get off the ground, taking action to build their businesses, the healthier we all are as a country, as a people and just as a community.

Gresham Harkless 13:36

Absolutely. Absolutely. I love that mission and we'll make sure to have that link and that information in the show notes as well so that people can follow up with you and hear about all the awesome things you're doing. And of course, get their free LLC.

So Scott, appreciate your time. what I wanted to do is just see if there's anything additional. If not, I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

Scott Smith 13:52

Yeah, man, I'm good. Everybody, royallegalsolutions.com/freeLLC. Go into the show notes and grab it today.

Outro 13:58

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO podcast, powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co. I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community.

Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, Google Play, and everywhere you listen to podcasts, subscribe and leave us a five-star rating. Grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO podcast with Gresham Harkless.

Thank you for listening.

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