IAM2481 – Founder Helps Business Owners Get the Right Legal Support

Speaker 1

00:00 - 00:19

Usually people will reach out to us at some point when they say, hey, I've got a couple problems. I've been avoiding these. I'm maybe a little embarrassed to share that I haven't solved these and I've got somebody who's mad at me or I promised this and I haven't delivered it yet. Or I got a letter from the government or another party, something.

Speaker 1

00:20 - 00:47

Usually there's something that's piled up a little bit. Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Grush values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of.

Speaker 1

00:48 - 00:56

This is the I am CEO podcast. Hello, hello, hello. This is Greg from the I am CEO podcast, and I have an awesome guest on the show today. I have Jeff Holman.

Speaker 1

00:56 - 01:01

Jeff, excited to have you on the show. I'm really glad to be here. Thanks for having me. Yes, I'm super excited to have you on.

Speaker 1

01:01 - 01:33

And of course, before we jump in and have a phenomenal conversation, what I want to do is read a little bit more about Jeff so you can hear about some of those awesome things he's been working on. Jeff is the founder of Intellectual Strategies and is redefining how startups and scaling businesses access their legal support. As the creator of the first fractional legal team, he enables companies to get expert legal advice without the need for a full-time in-house team. With degrees in electrical engineering, law, and an MBA, Jeff blends technical experience and expertise with strategic legal insight.

Speaker 1

01:33 - 02:02

Admitted to practice in California, Utah, and before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, he specializes in intellectual property, business strategy, and technology law. His innovative approach empowers businesses to focus on growth while he navigates the legal complexities. And one of the things that I read before preparing for this is that Jeff is super passionate about bridging the gap between innovative startups and the legal expertise they need to scale and scale confidently. I love that I was listening to one of the interviews.

Speaker 1

02:02 - 02:22

He describes himself as an experimenter and a learner. He has a wealth of experience in different things that he's done outside, I would say, the box of the legal industry. And one of the things I read is that he builds legal teams that function as an extension of their business. They're not just advisors, they're partners in your success, committed to delivering legal support you need to innovate and to grow.

Speaker 1

02:22 - 02:27

So, Jeff, excited to have you on the show. You ready to speak to the IMCO community? Yeah, let's do it. Let's do it.

Speaker 1

02:27 - 02:44

Let's get it started then. So to kind of kick everything off, what I wanted to do was rewind the clock a little bit, hear a little bit more on how you got started, what I call your CEO story. How I got started, I got started like everybody else did, right? Came from a family that didn't have any attorneys in it and decided to go to college, get an engineering degree.

Speaker 1

02:46 - 02:55

wanted to go get an MBA. I had a bunch of really great schools that told me, no, not yet. Although one of them did tell me, no, you don't need to reapply. Uh, it was kind of funny.

Speaker 1

02:56 - 03:10

Uh, and I thought, well, I'll take a break and I'll reapply for, for business school later. And three or four years after the you know, experience that they say you should get. And, and that's where everything changed. I, I went on this huge detour that I'm still on, uh, through law.

Speaker 1

03:10 - 03:32

So I'm here now, 20, gosh, 20, uh, 25 years later, uh, practicing law with startups and I'm loving it. Yeah, I absolutely love that. Especially, um, hearing that those detours are so funny. Like, um, I always loved the Steve Jobs commencement speech where he says, sometimes you can't, you can only connect the dots by looking backwards and, A lot of times we were thinking, Hey, this is what's going to happen next year.

Speaker 1

03:32 - 03:40

This wouldn't happen in 10 years, five years, we have it all planned out. And then we go on those detours and they end up sometimes being better than what we even could have thought that could have been. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1

03:40 - 04:04

The last time I made a plan like that, I mean, I've, I make plans all the time, but one that really stands out was when I decided to transition from patents, you know, cause it was very niche in patents and innovations. And I, and on my career journey, I said, well, I've got this five-year plan to get into a general counsel role, something that was broader business-based. And that five-year plan turned into a five-month plan. So, you know, that's just how plans go.

Speaker 1

04:04 - 04:23

Yeah, absolutely. So I know you touched on a little bit on like how you're serving with your clients. Is there anything more like as far as like when clients would call you or reach out to you that you can kind of give us a little bit more insight into what that looks like and some of the problems they might be kind of going through? Usually people reach out to us at some point when they say, Hey, I, I've got a couple problems.

Speaker 1

04:23 - 04:34

I've been avoiding these. I'm maybe a little embarrassed to share that. I haven't solved these and I've got somebody who's mad at me or I, or I promised this and I haven't delivered it yet. Or I got a letter from.

Speaker 1

04:34 - 04:54

you know, the government or another party, something, usually there's something that's piled up a little bit. And these CEOs, they're wearing 17 different hats to run every part of their business, right? Grow something from scratch. And they've just kind of put these off to the side and they said, ah, I'll do that someday.

Speaker 1

04:54 - 05:06

Or maybe if I ignore it long enough, it will go away. And sometimes things do, but most of the time these things don't. So a lot of people will actually come to us when they realize, I need some help. I need some guidance.

Speaker 1

05:07 - 05:19

I need to be able to offload some of this pressure that I'm feeling. And that's where we step in, right? We're really good at taking that pressure. We're not going to judge somebody for what they did or what they didn't do and what situation they're in.

Speaker 1

05:19 - 05:43

That's just what we do. We're here to help people. clean up their messes, look down the road further, align legal actions that they may or may not have known about with the business milestones they've got coming up, and just really be a partner to people. So it's, you know, that's not, that's a really high level overview of how, of the philosophy we take to try to work with clients.

Speaker 1

05:43 - 05:58

And we just know that startups and scaling businesses are, there's a, there's this element of chaos that just surrounds them. There's too many things in a business. Um, and I kind of categorize it really broadly. You've got to, you've got to validate your technology, make sure your product works right.

Speaker 1

05:58 - 06:25

You've got to validate your market, make sure that people are going to buy whatever it is you're selling at a price that makes sense for them and for you. And then this third category is freedom to operate your business. And that's where people like me come in, you know, make sure you're not infringing somebody, make sure you're protecting your rights so that, If somebody infringes you, you can keep them out of your space. But everybody talks about validation of your business model, meaning your product and your market.

Speaker 1

06:25 - 06:48

Very few people talk about freedom to operate your business. And we see, not to use scare tactics in any way, just the reality is we see a lot of people who who run into known unknowns and unknown unknowns in the legal side of things that end up really impacting their business in a negative way. And it doesn't always need to be that way. Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1

06:48 - 07:10

And so I almost wonder, do you feel like that's part of what I would like to call your secret sauce? It could be for yourself, your firm, or a combination of both. But is that ability to kind of see the forest for the trees, to understand the human part, to understand the business part, to understand the legal part, and be able to bring all that together? So at the end of the day, like you said, helping people to innovate with confidence because they have and understand the legal aspect of it.

Speaker 1

07:10 - 07:31

They understand the business part, but they also understand that human part, which is so necessary too. I am going to adopt that. I have not in the past referred to that as a superpower, but I'm going to from now forward, I I've always told people, cause I get this question sometimes, you know, other podcasts, what's your superpower? And I've always said, well, I'm, you know, it sounds silly, but I'm a translator.

Speaker 1

07:31 - 07:47

I translate between engineering and technical and business and legal. And I, and I'm pretty good at, at bringing those together for people. Maybe that's not really the superpower though. I think you might've just identified level two.

Speaker 1

07:47 - 07:58

Level one is translating for people. Level two is, I guess I probably do that to try to bring the human element to it, like you said. So I love that. I'm gonna adopt that.

Speaker 1

07:58 - 08:12

And the answer now is yes, that is my superpower. No, I absolutely love that. But to be able to use AI, be able to have conversations that are kind of, outside of ourselves, ask ourselves, what am I missing? Here's all of what I've been thinking about with this solution, but what am I missing?

Speaker 1

08:12 - 08:33

Do you feel like being able to go through those exercises could be a hack and something that can make people more effective and efficient? That's a great question. I feel like I might've planted that question even somehow, because this last couple of weeks I've been working on some ideas around insight, like the concept of insight. It has nothing to do with legal, but when you start to think about it, like everything business-wise from a strategy perspective comes from insight.

Speaker 1

08:34 - 08:42

Kind of going back to what I said, you know, you don't get new things by doing old things. You need those insights. You need to figure out how to, how to achieve them. I work with innovators.

Speaker 1

08:42 - 08:57

I've done it for 25 years. I've done it for more like 30 years. Cause before that I was working with people, you know, in the construction industry, designing, building, you know, cool commercial buildings, homes, things like that. So I've been working with people who are creators and insightful people for a long time.

Speaker 1

08:57 - 09:13

And I, it really made me stop and think, how do we develop the practice of insight in our lives, because different people have different types of insight. I think I've identified seven different insight profiles. I myself, I'm a maverick. I'm out there.

Speaker 1

09:13 - 09:24

I'm not going down the normal trails. I'm kind of like, oh, here's a spot between trails. I'm going to go down this trail and just see where it goes. It's an experimenter, explorer type mentality, but there's others.

Speaker 1

09:24 - 09:51

And I think we have the opportunity to, if we want to make it intentional, we can figure out, well, what is my profile and how do I become insightful? How do I find those, maybe like you said, blind spots, right? Maybe how do I identify that blind spot and look into it, see what's there and see something that maybe I wouldn't have seen if I just ignored the blind spot. So that, I love the blind spot concept.

Speaker 1

09:51 - 10:00

So thank you for bringing that up. Absolutely. So what would you consider to be a little bit more of what I like to call a CEO nugget? So this could be a word of wisdom or a piece of advice.

Speaker 1

10:00 - 10:14

I like to say it might be something you would tell your favorite client, or if you hopped into a time machine, you might tell your younger business self. Here are the two things I would say. Number one, from a legal perspective, we need to be better at documenting things. So many things we just don't document.

Speaker 1

10:14 - 10:32

And the AI tools are there and getting there, where documenting things properly is going to be maybe the number one superpower of a lot of CEOs. I've known people who document every phone call. They have a log, they write everything down. From a normal behavioral standpoint, that might sound boring.

Speaker 1

10:33 - 11:17

From a legal perspective, as a CEO, you're in so many conversations and you're speaking at such a high level that I think there's a lot of opportunity to get maybe some unintentional misalignment with other people. And then when that conversation comes back up, if you don't have any notes from it, you haven't documented it, you haven't written an agreement down, whatever it is, You find out later that you and another high-level person you've been talking with are on different pages. And that's where some of the big disputes really happen for CEOs is just because of this misalignment. The other one that I would share is And I'm gonna approach this from a slightly different perspective because I have advised a lot of CEOs.

Speaker 1

11:17 - 11:36

I see a lot of CEOs running their companies and I've run my own business. I know what it's like to be the CEO of sorts at the top. You feel like you can't talk to people about things. You have issues, you have goals, but you can only talk to some people about some of them and can't talk to anybody about any of them.

Speaker 1

11:36 - 11:55

And then your wife or your spouse, here's the rest of them at home, right? And so I've, I've actually gone into CEOs offices a few times and I've, and I just said, Hey, we're kind of in between stuff right now, but, um, I know that you're probably dealing with a lot of stuff right now, just cause I see in the business I've seen behind the curtains. I know what's going on.

Speaker 1

11:57 - 12:28

And I, and I say, Hey, if you, if you need to, you know, if it'd be helpful and if you want, I'm happy to be a listening ear once in a while for you. We can talk about legal all you want, but if you've got anything else on your mind that you want to just chat about, I'm a good, confidential, secret-keeping guy and happy to be a listening ear because I've been there to some degree and, and I've seen others who are there. And I think being lonely, I think being at the top is, is lonely for a lot of people and it doesn't have to be.

Speaker 1

12:29 - 12:47

But, um, I think we create it that way and we feel like we can't share our, our problems with, you know, not that we don't, not that we want to keep them secret. Maybe we do. I don't know. But, but I think even if we don't care about the secret side of it, we care about the, You know, we don't want to be a burden on the team with the things that we're dealing with.

Speaker 1

12:47 - 13:13

And so a lot of CEOs, unless they've got a peer group, they don't have anyone to turn to. So I would, you know, if you have the right attorney who's not going to bill you $2,000 an hour for for every phone call, you might find a listening ear with your attorney. And if it's not your attorney, find somebody else. CEOs really need someone they can turn to a peer group, a trusted advisor, a friend, whoever it is to, to, to be able to talk through some of these issues.

Speaker 1

13:14 - 13:29

And, you know, maybe a lot of people are already doing that, but I I've seen a lot of my clients who it seems maybe don't have that available to them. And, uh, You know, when things get tough, what do you do? You don't call your investors and tell them how bad it went. Right.

Speaker 1

13:29 - 13:43

You don't call your advisors and tell them that you screwed up and you didn't listen to their advice. Who do you turn to? So I think everybody needs that. And, you know, I guess I'm just suggesting find, find your, uh, find your listening partner.

Speaker 1

13:44 - 13:55

If you don't have one already. Yeah, that's such a huge thing. And I appreciate you sharing that. So now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO and our goals have different quote unquote CEOs on the show.

Speaker 1

13:55 - 14:09

So Jeff, what does being a CEO mean to you? Being a CEO, I'm going to stay away from like sides of business and all of that. And I'm just going to say being, I mean, a chief executive officer, executive is taking action, right? You've got to, you've got to create the vision.

Speaker 1

14:09 - 14:40

And you've got to decide what actions and which direction those actions are going to go for your team. So if you're, you know, if you're in any business environment and you're the, and you're the one who is effectively creating the vision, taking the team by the hand, leading them down a path and taking the first step, I think you're the CEO. Yeah, I absolutely love that because I think so many times. When we talk about innovation ideas, sometimes it's the ideas, but really it's the action, the people being able to execute on those things, which really takes it to another level.

Speaker 1

14:40 - 15:03

Whether we're talking about a huge innovation or we're talking about just problem solving within our organizations, that action is being such a huge part of everything that we're doing. Absolutely appreciate that definition, of course, Jeff, and I appreciate your time even more. So what I want to do now is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know. And of course, how best people can get a view, find out about all the awesome things you and your team are working on.

Speaker 1

15:04 - 15:14

Yeah, for sure. Well, if I something I could leave with your with your audience, it really is that that concept of innovate with confidence. You know, whatever you need to do to get there, to be an innovator and to have confidence doing it. That's what I would leave.

Speaker 1

15:14 - 15:23

If somebody wants to chat with me, I have them on LinkedIn a lot. Just look for Jeff Holman. It'll say something about building fractional legal teams. You mentioned that earlier in the show.

Speaker 1

15:23 - 15:29

That's me. Nobody else is doing it. I wish everybody was doing it. All these law firms should be doing it, but they're not yet.

Speaker 1

15:29 - 15:46

Um, they will eventually they'll, they'll figure it out. Uh, so I'm building fractional legal teams on LinkedIn, you know, find me there. And, and if anybody wants, you know, we do a free 30 minute strategy call for potential clients. So you can get on our website, which is intellectual strategies.com and you can, you can find my schedule there.

Speaker 1

15:46 - 15:58

You can book a call and I'm happy to sit down. I want to hear, I want to hear about the cool stuff you're building. I want to hear about the messes that you've made. And I want to hear about, uh, the milestones that you're working towards and see, see if there's something we can do to help.

Speaker 1

15:59 - 16:09

Yeah, I absolutely appreciate that. And of course, to make it even easier, we'll have the links and information in the show notes as well, too, so that you can follow up, book that time. and have that phenomenal conversation. But now I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

Speaker 1

16:09 - 16:14

Yeah, thank you. I'm just trying to keep up with all the innovators around me. So thanks for having me on your show. It's been great.

Speaker 1

16:30 - 16:50

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