In this protective episode, Jeff Holman, Founder and CEO of Intellectual Strategies, shares fractional legal strategies for business protection. If you struggle with legal blindsides or IP risks as a startup, you won't want to miss it.
You will discover:
- Why early legal audits prevent costly disputes in stage 2
- How fractional teams deliver expert advice without overhead
- What IP roadmap aligns with your growth goals
This episode is ideal for for Founders, Owners, and CEOs in stage 4 of The Founder's Evolution. Not sure which stage you're in? Find out for free in less than 10 minutes at https://www.scalearchitects.com/founders/quiz
Jeff Holman, founder of Intellectual Strategies, is changing the way startups and scaling businesses access legal support. As the creator of the first Fractional Legal Team at Intellectual Strategies, he’s made it possible for companies to tap into expert legal advice at key points in their growth—without needing a full-time, in-house team. This innovative approach means businesses get exactly the help they need, when they need it, and without the hefty overhead. His Fractional Legal Team model is revolutionizing how companies access the legal support they need, empowering them to focus on their core business. At the same time, he handles the complexities in the background.
Want to learn more about Jeff Holman's work at Intellectual Strategies? Check out his website at https://www.intellectualstategies.com/ to sign up for a free 30-minute consultation and learn more about how you can benefit from a fractional legal team.
Mentioned in this episode:
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Scott Ritzheimer (00:00):
Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again
to the start, scale and succeedpodcast. It's the only podcast
that grows with you through allseven stages of your journey as
a founder, and I'm your host,Scott Ritzheimer, and I've seen
this happen all the time.There's founders who've
successfully built a thrivingorganization. They're leading
their team, they're setting biggoals, they're taking ground.
(00:21):
Maybe they're even writingmagazine articles about you,
we'll see. But then suddenly,like, out of nowhere, they're
blindsided by a legal issue theynever saw coming. And in my own
experience and what I've walkedothers through the in their
coaching relationship, I haveseen nothing take the wind out
of your sails faster. It justlike, like, literally sucks the
(00:42):
blood from your head and it justlike, all the all the things,
all the things, I'm feeling italready, I gotta stop all right,
but the question is, like, whatdo you do about that? Can you
avoid all of it? When do youavoid all of it? And what you'll
realize is, hey, we've beenspending a lot of time growing
the business, but we've notspent a lot of time protecting
it, and now it's not like thoseearly days when you had nothing
(01:05):
to lose. We actually havesomething to lose, and we need
to learn how to protect it. Andso here to help us do exactly
that is the one and only JeffHolman, who is founder of
intellectual strategies and ischanging the way that startups
and scaling businesses accesslegal support, as the creator of
the first fractional leaguelegal team at intellectual
strategies, he's made itpossible for companies to tap
(01:27):
into expert legal advice at keypoints in their growth without
needing a full time in houseteam. This innovative approach
means businesses get exactly thehelp that they need when they
need it, and without all thehefty overhead. His fractional
legal team model isrevolutionizing how companies
access the legal support theyneed, empowering them to focus
on their core business at thesame time, he handles the
(01:48):
complexities in the background.Well, Jeff, welcome to the show.
Excited to have you here. Youknow, we've kind of opened up
with this, but like it justfeels like nothing can stop the
train, and right at the momentthat it does, all of a sudden, a
wheel falls off. Why does thishappen? And what do we need to
do to think differently about itas founders?
Jeff Holman (01:54):
Yeah, no, Scott, thank you for having me. It's a
pleasure to be here. You'respeaking my language. Scaling
companies is awesome, and it'schaotic and it's fun and it's
(02:19):
full of surprises. Sometimes thebad surprises, like you talked
about, there's really tworeasons why, why legal issues
pop up into the business anddeflate the leadership a lot of
times. The first ones may bemore obvious, and that is,
people let these things fester.They know they should have done
something before, and theydidn't do it, and it sits in the
(02:40):
background, and all of a suddenyou start to see success, and
one of your former employees, oran employee who's on the edge,
comes and says, Hey, where aremy stock stock options? You
promised me stock options? Well,you knew you hadn't done it.
It'd been sitting in thebackground. You were going to
get to it, and it just didn'thappen. So one, you let things
kind of slide, because you're ingrowth mode, or you're in, you
(03:00):
know, just startup modegenerally, and those things pop
back up later. The other is kindof interesting phenomena that
we've seen, and that is when,when you start to see success,
people out in the world start tosee that you're seeing success,
and when people out in the worldstart to see that you're seeing
success, sometimes they want apiece of your success. And so we
see a lot of people who get hitearly on, after they've, you
(03:24):
know, they've hit their stride,and then they start, you know,
they start to say, hey, let's,like, get out there more broadly
in the world. Let's expand ourmarket share, whatever. And they
get hit with some of these kindof, what I would call nasty
lawsuits, these nuisance, nastypeople, other attorneys, who
come out and they say, Hey, I'vegot somebody who's going to sue
you for ADA compliance issueswith your website, or I'm got
(03:45):
somebody who's going to sue youfor, you know, whatever your
business is, they're going tofind some regulatory issues,
federal or state, and they'regoing to say, You owe me some
money for that. They want 10 or15 or $25,000 from you and and
you know that may or may not be,you know, gut wrenching for some
businesses, but it's like, what?Why does this happen? You know,
and it's, it's probably too, toonaive to say that it's just part
(04:11):
of the business. But it reallydoes come. You know, success
brings some of these challengeswith them.
Scott Ritzheimer (04:16):
I think one of the things that makes it so hard
is you sometimes, like, thedollar number can be like, game
ending, like, that does happen.I don't want to downplay that.
But even if it doesn't, like,even if it's 10 grand and like,
that's a rounding error in yourstrategic planning process, if
that, there's something aboutthe principle of it that just
(04:38):
goes to the heart of a founderand so here's where I want to go
first, actually, is like, how doyou deal with that? How do you
deal with the emotion of, hey,this just hit, and I, if I let
it, it's going to take all of mythought process. It's going to
take all of my time. But is itworth it? How do you help folks?
(05:00):
Through those that that firstearly window?
Jeff Holman (05:02):
Well, you're absolutely right, because it
does. We see we see really busy,really successful people who get
totally sidetracked on this.They're like, Hey, I read
through this, and I was readingthrough this, and I did some
research, and I came back, Ithink this is what we should do.
And I'm like, that's totallyfine. Let me tell you, we've
seen this before. We've handledit before it's going to probably
(05:22):
work out this way. There mightbe a little bit of posturing
back and forth. So a lot of isreally just working with people
who've been there and done that,right? Yeah, and having see it's
just like a coach. It's likecoaches seen either themselves
or working with lots of peoplethey've seen behind lots of
different curtains. And so youyou can help people who haven't
seen around those same curtainsknow what to expect when, when
(05:42):
we pull the curtains back, it'sgoing to be okay and and there
is a, there is a playbook forthis. The other side is
following their own playbook.It's similar to what we've seen.
So it's really just knowingthat, knowing that there's some
confidence in going down thatroad, and that it probably most
of these things are manageable.They're, you know, not fun, and
(06:05):
you don't want to pay any moneyif you don't have to. But
they're, but they're financiallyfeasible to tackle and overcome.
And there's, there's a lot moreto your business to be focused
on than some of these hiccups,
Scott Ritzheimer (06:16):
Right, And that brings us to a lot of the
work that you guys do there isRitzheimer mentally to save
folks from that time. There's somuch. It's not just the emotion
of it, but it's the time of itthat it can get sucked into the
endless Googling and now theendless chat, GPT ing. So the
(06:37):
problem with that, though, isgetting the when in because
there's kind of two equal butopposite extremes. You could
bring a bunch of people in tooearly, pay a ton of money and
not really ever amount toanything. Your business doesn't
grow, and there's nothing toprotect. Be in the extreme. Or
the other extreme is we waituntil you know, not. We've not,
we've been sued or had the thenotice, but like, we've tried to
(07:00):
fight it nine different ways,and it's like on its very last
breath, and then we bringsomebody else in. There's these
two kind of wide extremes.Somewhere in the middle is the
Ritzheimer and the right way tobring in someone to help you
out. What is that? Right timeand right way?
Jeff Holman (07:14):
There's 2.1 it's not the it's not the last one
that you described. It's notafter the fact, after
everything, everyone'sentrenched. The issues become
bigger than it needs to be.That's that's not the one. The
two points are this one, getsomebody in early to roadmap.
You know, it's just like, itdoes not cost a lot, whether, if
it's 500 bucks, 1000 bucks,$5,000 like, get somebody to
(07:35):
roadmap, what you're working onin your business for the next 18
months, and say, Where are mylegal issues going to come up?
What are the critical things?Right? There's because you
mentioned risk. Like, it doesn'talways have to be like
significant consequences to therisk, and it doesn't always have
to be a high likelihood thatrisk is going to happen, but
some combination of, will ithappen and how hefty will those
consequences be? You've got tokind of balance those out. So if
(07:58):
you roadmap, like, there, thereare, you know, just like you do
stages in the business, thereare definite points of, you
know, like a businessobjectives, people working
towards movement, actions thatthe teams are going to take,
that you can say, well, you'relikely in the next 18 months to
have these five items come up.That's big things you would
(08:18):
imagine, fundraising, hiringpeople, firing people, bringing
on a new strategic partner, youknow, new suppliers, launching
new products. You know,reworking your brand, like those
are, those are major mile pointsthat are likely to have some
legal impact to them. So roadmapping those out in the first
instance will give you, I think,a lot of clarity and hopefully,
(08:39):
a lot of comfort in knowing thatyou have at least a heads up as
to what's coming down the road.Then when things do pop up, you
know, getting somebody involvedearly again, even if it's just a
quick phone call to say, hey, wehad this happen. Should I be
worried is this? Is this likelyto blow up? What, you know, what
should I be thinking about? Youdon't necessarily need memos
(09:01):
and, you know, filings andeverything for every little
issue that comes up, but a quickphone call, five minutes, 15
minutes, an hour, depending onthe issue, can really save you.
And that's, I'll admit, that'swhere the legal profession has
really failed its clients. To alarge extent, we have created
some of the biggest obstacles,either financially or
(09:22):
psychologically, even to say,hey, if you've got an issue,
call me. I want to be accessiblefor you. And instead, people are
like, I don't know he's going tobill me 15 minutes for a phone
call. And I like, we've made itso people don't want to call us
to get our advice. And that'sabsolutely the opposite of what
it should be.
Scott Ritzheimer (09:39):
Yeah, I want to drill a little further on
that, because it can feel,especially with the way that a
lot of founders are wired, thatyou're kind of damned if you do,
damned if you don't. Right.Sometimes you're like, Hey, can
you look at this contract forme? And it's like, you know, as
soon as you send it, they'regoing to write it back with
like, 100 things wrong. And.Somehow, like, it's worse than
(10:01):
never having children orsomething. There's this kind of
like, it feels like anoverreaction to a lot of
founders who just like, how hardcan it be? Like, let's move on
past it. So I'm gonna use adifferent group that we have a
similar problem with asfounders, and that is, never ask
a development team, can we dothis? Okay? Right? Because the
answer is always yes. It's thereal question is, how much is it
(10:24):
going to cost to do this? Yes?So is, what is the parallel of
that in the attorney world? Howcan we get founders and
attorneys communicating moreeffectively?
Jeff Holman (10:34):
That's, that's the key, right there. I think you
know every founder that you gotyour sales guy or your technical
guy, right in a lot ofbusinesses. And then the other
people that they bring on reallyreadily and easily is some
finance guy. They like, hey, weraise money. Hey, we need to do
our bookkeeping, we need to payour taxes. And they bring a
finance guy on. I think foundersneed to start thinking of legal
(10:56):
at least like finance, like it'sjust a function that you bring
on because they because not onlyis it a service, but if you've
got the right attorney, youknow, just like your CFO is
doing financial projections andhelping you anticipate where
some of those cash flow issuesmight be, your legal guy should
be doing the same thing. Itshould be, Hey, you guys are, as
I said, road mapping, and youshould be anticipating when
(11:19):
those things are coming up, notjust reacting to them. You know,
the key is, how do you get tothat point with your legal guy
when you're used to knowingthat, you know you don't want to
talk to legal let alone talk tomultiple legal people, if you
have multiple issues going on atonce?
Scott Ritzheimer (11:34):
Yeah, there's this. There's a thing that
happens at this stage forfounders, when they're kind of
building out their leadershipteam. They're looking at who
they're gonna allow to advisethem on their decision making.
And there's kind of the obvioussales and the obvious
operations, and then there'sjust, like this junk drawer of
everything else, right? Like, wethink of administration as
(11:55):
legal, HR, technology,financial, like, all of it kind
of gets GNA, yeah, sgna, all ofit, and and so the question is
like, well, who in the world cancan answer all of these things?
Because if you get someone who'svery technically sound, they
don't know anything about thelegal aspect of it, and vice
(12:16):
versa. And so what I really likeabout the way that that the
industry is developing,especially fractional, is that
you can, you can kind of addressthe junk drawer approach with an
equally kind of dispersed set ofhelp. And so here's, here's
because there's the I've seenfolks who've come through have
(12:38):
been fractional legal, you know,fill in the blank. What I
haven't seen is a fractionallegal team, and you've really
stressed that in a lot of yourwebsite and the work that you
do. So tell us a little bitlike, this isn't a fractional
attorney. This is a fractionallegal team. What's the
difference?
Jeff Holman (12:54):
Yeah, I mean, that is the difference. It's a team
approach. The reason it's a teamapproach several things. First
of all, you don't have one legalissue in your business. You have
multiple across sales andemployees and investors and your
corporate entity, and you nameit. Legal is there. It may not
be an active issue, but there'sa potential for it to become
active, and not one attorneyshould be handling all of that.
(13:16):
For you, my background ispatents. I'm excellent at
patents. I'm really good withtrademarks, and I've become very
proficient as a general counsel,helping to guide small
businesses in all their illegalissues. But I'm not the guy
who's going to do youremployment stuff, you know? I'm
not the guy who's going to dosome of your really hyper
technical privacy things. And Irealized that early on, right?
(13:37):
So I'm like, Hey, why am Itrying to do and manage all
these things. When any realcompany, when you get to the
right stage, you're going tohave a small team of attorneys
with the experts that you needin different places. So that's
one. The other is a lot offractional people. They're
passing through. And I don't,you know, I don't say that to
say that's wrong, but they'reoften in between jobs, and
(13:58):
they're like, hey, I'll pick upa few clients. You know, we've
picked up several clients frompeople who were passing through
momentarily and six monthslater, after they'd, you know,
really been onboarded into acompany. They're like, Oh, I
found a full time job. I'm goingto go work there. And that
company is then left, you know,saying, Well, okay, I guess
we'll restart hiring process,you know. So there's no
longevity with single fractionalpeople is harder. Burnout is
(14:22):
higher. And so that's anotherissue that we try to tackle. And
then the last one, really, isgatekeeping. You know, when you
go to, and this is more relatedto, you know, a law firm, law
firms, people are like, Hey,Jeff, how come? How come all
these law firms, with all these,you know, hundreds of attorneys,
don't just do this and and wipeyou out of business. I'm like,
they should. Like, theyliterally should. They're not
built for it. Their businessmodel is different. Is different
(14:43):
and doesn't really support theway to do it. But the other
really big thing, and it's tiedto their business model, is
they're mostly really siloed,gatekeepers in the business,
right? The rainmakers in thosebusinesses, they they're super
protective of their clients.They don't want. Their
associates talking to the to theto the clients. And so I'm like,
(15:03):
Hey, listen, there's nothingmore. Again. I don't want to
block communications between theclient and the legal team.
That's counterproductive. Iwant, I want our clients to feel
like they can go talk to me.They can talk to anybody on the
team, as if we're just down thehall from them. Poke your head
in the door for the Ritzheimeror if you don't know who it is,
any person ask them, you knowyour question, and let's deal
(15:24):
with it as a team. We'll get theright resources to the right
place at the right time. So it'sjust, I don't know. As I was
doing this, I kind of fell intothat fractional General Counsel
solo role, and it didn't take metoo long to realize there's a
better way to do this. And so Istarted building it into the
team approach, and it's beenfantastic.
Scott Ritzheimer (15:42):
Yeah, yeah. I love that. I really do. There's
this idea, especially from folkswho've not had legal issues in
the past, that kind of attorneysare attorneys. It's kind of like
doctors or doctors, you know,it's like, to some extent, they
all have some basic training,but like, if you broke your
foot, you wouldn't go to a heartdoctor. It doesn't really work
that way. And so I love thisidea of being able to provide
(16:03):
that kind of combination of careall under one umbrella that is
fantastic and highly needed formost founders at this stage.
Jeff Holman (16:12):
Can I build on that just because I've talked to
people? You know, you get it.You get somebody who's like a
real sophisticated patient,right? Or has a lot of, a lot of
needs, you know, cancerpatients, and they've got all
these issues you don't have,like you'd mentioned, you don't
have one doctor just treatingthem, right? They will
conference with each other.They'll get into a room and
they'll say, Okay, what's theissue going on? And what do you
think? And what do you think?What do you think? And they all
(16:34):
have their specialties. I mean,that's, I've used that analogy
before, and that's, that's agreat analogy to say, This is
what a team should look like,you know, working for the
client, as opposed to, you know,I, I just canceled my
appointment this morning fortomorrow. I got a cortisone shot
last week because I'm gettingolder, I guess, blew out a disc,
and it's caused some nerveissues for me. I'm, I'm sure
(16:56):
some of your listeners canrelate. And, you know,
everything's good, but, but mythey're like, Hey, we got you
scheduled for a follow up. AndI'm like, Yeah, that's fine.
Cortisone shot in my back is notwhat I need, right? I've got a
different issue. Cancel that.I'm going to go schedule with
somebody else who who can tellme about the nerve issue, not
about the disc issue. So, right?You know, just got to move to
(17:18):
the right, move to the rightperson for the right issue.
Scott Ritzheimer (17:20):
Right, and being able to get that through
the expertise of another isextremely helpful, especially
when they have your bestinterests in mind. So Jeff,
there's this question I ask allmy guests, and I'm gonna ask it
of you here as well. I'minterested to see what you have
to say. So what would you say isthe biggest secret that you wish
wasn't a secret at all? What'sthat one thing that you wish
(17:41):
every founder watching orlistening today knew?
Jeff Holman (17:44):
Can I share two? Yeah, I've got two, because so
the first one might be obviousfrom my website. If you go to my
website, if you ever get anemail from me, it says, innovate
with confidence. I think thathelping people to overcome the
fears involved with doingsomething new, and that's what a
lot of our clients are doing.They're they're disrupting
because they're doing somethingnothing. They're doing something
(18:05):
nobody has done before. And sodoing that new stuff is there's
a lot of fear involved. And Irun into a lot of inventors,
specifically, who who arefearful, and you see this great
invention, and then they just,they just freeze up. So the one
thing that I would say to a lotof those people, to summarize a
lot of other things I've said,is, you know, action dispels
(18:26):
fear, right? So you've got totake action to get over the
fear. If any of your if any ofyour people, are at a stage
where they're saying, I don'tknow, I just, I just can't do
this, like, think it through,make up an action plan and take
the action that'll dispel thefear, because fear is just fear
of what's going to happen thefuture. And once you've taken
the action, there's no morefuture to be afraid of. Yep, the
other thing that I think isreally it's something that a lot
(18:51):
of people should be doing moreof, and that is strategy. This
whole discussion of strategy, Iwas kind of a big issue for me.
I got into it thinking about IPstrategy in the beginning, and
how that fits into businessstrategy and all this stuff
going through my MBA program,like a whole journey I've been
on for 10 years. The thing thatI think, I wish a lot of
(19:11):
founders knew was that thisconcept of strategy, strategy is
actually something you canachieve, right? There's, there's
like, really complex, disjointedteachings out there about
strategy, but there are someapproaches where you can, you
can really articulate yourstrategy in a way that's super
helpful. And you know, we don'thave time to go into that today.
(19:32):
I've got a thing I call the fivefactors of business strategy
that I came up with because itdidn't exist out there, similar
to the fracture legal teams, Icame up with it because it
didn't exist, and I talked to alot of my clients about it,
because about it, because itmakes strategy, you know,
reachable. It makes it somethingthat you can actually talk about
for your business and implement.And so I guess those are the
(19:52):
types of things that I wouldleave, you know, take action to
dispel fear and really thinkabout how to be strategic in
your business. And. And realizethat it's something you can do
if you have the right framework.
Scott Ritzheimer (20:04):
Yeah, yeah, Jeff, there's some folks
listening, and it's, you know,it's, it's time. They could use
the help. And they love the ideaof a fractional team, but they
don't exactly know what thatmeans just yet, and they'd like
to know more about it. Where canthey connect with you? Where can
they find more out about thework that you and your team do.
Jeff Holman (20:22):
Yeah, best place is to reach out to me on my
website,intellectualstrategies.com I do
a free 30 minute kickoff call,strategy call with people. We'll
start to talk about yourroadmap. We'll figure out, you
know, what are the messes thatyou've got hiding, maybe under
the bed that you've been puttingoff starting to lose sleep over
some of the things coming up,and we'll just walk through that
(20:43):
in 30 minutes. Have a call andsee if it's a right fit, if it's
the right time for for them tobring somebody on board in some
capacity. So that's a freestrategy call at
intellectualstrategies.com.
Scott Ritzheimer (20:55):
Fantastic, fantastic. Well, Jeff, thanks
for being on the show. Really aprivilege and honor. Having you
here with us today. Love thework that you do, and couldn't
encourage folks more to check itout, get some help, and Jeff's a
great place to start. And forthose of you watching and
listening, you know that yourtime and attention mean the
world to us. I hope you got asmuch out of this conversation as
I know I did, and I cannot waitto see you next time. Take care.
Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again
to the start, scale and succeedpodcast. It's the only podcast
that grows with you through allseven stages of your journey as
a founder, and I'm your host,Scott Ritzheimer, and I've seen
this happen all the time.There's founders who've
successfully built a thrivingorganization. They're leading
their team, they're setting biggoals, they're taking ground.
(00:21):
Maybe they're even writingmagazine articles about you,
we'll see. But then suddenly,like, out of nowhere, they're
blindsided by a legal issue theynever saw coming. And in my own
experience and what I've walkedothers through the in their
coaching relationship, I haveseen nothing take the wind out
of your sails faster. It justlike, like, literally sucks the
(00:42):
blood from your head and it justlike, all the all the things,
all the things, I'm feeling italready, I gotta stop all right,
but the question is, like, whatdo you do about that? Can you
avoid all of it? When do youavoid all of it? And what you'll
realize is, hey, we've beenspending a lot of time growing
the business, but we've notspent a lot of time protecting
it, and now it's not like thoseearly days when you had nothing
(01:05):
to lose. We actually havesomething to lose, and we need
to learn how to protect it. Andso here to help us do exactly
that is the one and only JeffHolman, who is founder of
intellectual strategies and ischanging the way that startups
and scaling businesses accesslegal support, as the creator of
the first fractional leaguelegal team at intellectual
strategies, he's made itpossible for companies to tap
(01:27):
into expert legal advice at keypoints in their growth without
needing a full time in houseteam. This innovative approach
means businesses get exactly thehelp that they need when they
need it, and without all thehefty overhead. His fractional
legal team model isrevolutionizing how companies
access the legal support theyneed, empowering them to focus
on their core business at thesame time, he handles the
(01:48):
complexities in the background.Well, Jeff, welcome to the show.
Excited to have you here. Youknow, we've kind of opened up
with this, but like it justfeels like nothing can stop the
train, and right at the momentthat it does, all of a sudden, a
wheel falls off. Why does thishappen? And what do we need to
do to think differently about itas founders?
Jeff Holman (01:54):
Yeah, no, Scott, thank you for having me. It's a
pleasure to be here. You'respeaking my language. Scaling
companies is awesome, and it'schaotic and it's fun and it's
(02:19):
full of surprises. Sometimes thebad surprises, like you talked
about, there's really tworeasons why, why legal issues
pop up into the business anddeflate the leadership a lot of
times. The first ones may bemore obvious, and that is,
people let these things fester.They know they should have done
something before, and theydidn't do it, and it sits in the
(02:40):
background, and all of a suddenyou start to see success, and
one of your former employees, oran employee who's on the edge,
comes and says, Hey, where aremy stock stock options? You
promised me stock options? Well,you knew you hadn't done it.
It'd been sitting in thebackground. You were going to
get to it, and it just didn'thappen. So one, you let things
kind of slide, because you're ingrowth mode, or you're in, you
(03:00):
know, just startup modegenerally, and those things pop
back up later. The other is kindof interesting phenomena that
we've seen, and that is when,when you start to see success,
people out in the world start tosee that you're seeing success,
and when people out in the worldstart to see that you're seeing
success, sometimes they want apiece of your success. And so we
see a lot of people who get hitearly on, after they've, you
(03:24):
know, they've hit their stride,and then they start, you know,
they start to say, hey, let's,like, get out there more broadly
in the world. Let's expand ourmarket share, whatever. And they
get hit with some of these kindof, what I would call nasty
lawsuits, these nuisance, nastypeople, other attorneys, who
come out and they say, Hey, I'vegot somebody who's going to sue
you for ADA compliance issueswith your website, or I'm got
(03:45):
somebody who's going to sue youfor, you know, whatever your
business is, they're going tofind some regulatory issues,
federal or state, and they'regoing to say, You owe me some
money for that. They want 10 or15 or $25,000 from you and and
you know that may or may not be,you know, gut wrenching for some
businesses, but it's like, what?Why does this happen? You know,
and it's, it's probably too, toonaive to say that it's just part
(04:11):
of the business. But it reallydoes come. You know, success
brings some of these challengeswith them.
Scott Ritzheimer (04:16):
I think one of the things that makes it so hard
is you sometimes, like, thedollar number can be like, game
ending, like, that does happen.I don't want to downplay that.
But even if it doesn't, like,even if it's 10 grand and like,
that's a rounding error in yourstrategic planning process, if
that, there's something aboutthe principle of it that just
(04:38):
goes to the heart of a founderand so here's where I want to go
first, actually, is like, how doyou deal with that? How do you
deal with the emotion of, hey,this just hit, and I, if I let
it, it's going to take all of mythought process. It's going to
take all of my time. But is itworth it? How do you help folks?
(05:00):
Through those that that firstearly window?
Jeff Holman (05:02):
Well, you're absolutely right, because it
does. We see we see really busy,really successful people who get
totally sidetracked on this.They're like, Hey, I read
through this, and I was readingthrough this, and I did some
research, and I came back, Ithink this is what we should do.
And I'm like, that's totallyfine. Let me tell you, we've
seen this before. We've handledit before it's going to probably
(05:22):
work out this way. There mightbe a little bit of posturing
back and forth. So a lot of isreally just working with people
who've been there and done that,right? Yeah, and having see it's
just like a coach. It's likecoaches seen either themselves
or working with lots of peoplethey've seen behind lots of
different curtains. And so youyou can help people who haven't
seen around those same curtainsknow what to expect when, when
(05:42):
we pull the curtains back, it'sgoing to be okay and and there
is a, there is a playbook forthis. The other side is
following their own playbook.It's similar to what we've seen.
So it's really just knowingthat, knowing that there's some
confidence in going down thatroad, and that it probably most
of these things are manageable.They're, you know, not fun, and
(06:05):
you don't want to pay any moneyif you don't have to. But
they're, but they're financiallyfeasible to tackle and overcome.
And there's, there's a lot moreto your business to be focused
on than some of these hiccups,
Scott Ritzheimer (06:16):
Right, And that brings us to a lot of the
work that you guys do there isRitzheimer mentally to save
folks from that time. There's somuch. It's not just the emotion
of it, but it's the time of itthat it can get sucked into the
endless Googling and now theendless chat, GPT ing. So the
(06:37):
problem with that, though, isgetting the when in because
there's kind of two equal butopposite extremes. You could
bring a bunch of people in tooearly, pay a ton of money and
not really ever amount toanything. Your business doesn't
grow, and there's nothing toprotect. Be in the extreme. Or
the other extreme is we waituntil you know, not. We've not,
we've been sued or had the thenotice, but like, we've tried to
(07:00):
fight it nine different ways,and it's like on its very last
breath, and then we bringsomebody else in. There's these
two kind of wide extremes.Somewhere in the middle is the
Ritzheimer and the right way tobring in someone to help you
out. What is that? Right timeand right way?
Jeff Holman (07:14):
There's 2.1 it's not the it's not the last one
that you described. It's notafter the fact, after
everything, everyone'sentrenched. The issues become
bigger than it needs to be.That's that's not the one. The
two points are this one, getsomebody in early to roadmap.
You know, it's just like, itdoes not cost a lot, whether, if
it's 500 bucks, 1000 bucks,$5,000 like, get somebody to
(07:35):
roadmap, what you're working onin your business for the next 18
months, and say, Where are mylegal issues going to come up?
What are the critical things?Right? There's because you
mentioned risk. Like, it doesn'talways have to be like
significant consequences to therisk, and it doesn't always have
to be a high likelihood thatrisk is going to happen, but
some combination of, will ithappen and how hefty will those
consequences be? You've got tokind of balance those out. So if
(07:58):
you roadmap, like, there, thereare, you know, just like you do
stages in the business, thereare definite points of, you
know, like a businessobjectives, people working
towards movement, actions thatthe teams are going to take,
that you can say, well, you'relikely in the next 18 months to
have these five items come up.That's big things you would
(08:18):
imagine, fundraising, hiringpeople, firing people, bringing
on a new strategic partner, youknow, new suppliers, launching
new products. You know,reworking your brand, like those
are, those are major mile pointsthat are likely to have some
legal impact to them. So roadmapping those out in the first
instance will give you, I think,a lot of clarity and hopefully,
(08:39):
a lot of comfort in knowing thatyou have at least a heads up as
to what's coming down the road.Then when things do pop up, you
know, getting somebody involvedearly again, even if it's just a
quick phone call to say, hey, wehad this happen. Should I be
worried is this? Is this likelyto blow up? What, you know, what
should I be thinking about? Youdon't necessarily need memos
(09:01):
and, you know, filings andeverything for every little
issue that comes up, but a quickphone call, five minutes, 15
minutes, an hour, depending onthe issue, can really save you.
And that's, I'll admit, that'swhere the legal profession has
really failed its clients. To alarge extent, we have created
some of the biggest obstacles,either financially or
(09:22):
psychologically, even to say,hey, if you've got an issue,
call me. I want to be accessiblefor you. And instead, people are
like, I don't know he's going tobill me 15 minutes for a phone
call. And I like, we've made itso people don't want to call us
to get our advice. And that'sabsolutely the opposite of what
it should be.
Scott Ritzheimer (09:39):
Yeah, I want to drill a little further on
that, because it can feel,especially with the way that a
lot of founders are wired, thatyou're kind of damned if you do,
damned if you don't. Right.Sometimes you're like, Hey, can
you look at this contract forme? And it's like, you know, as
soon as you send it, they'regoing to write it back with
like, 100 things wrong. And.Somehow, like, it's worse than
(10:01):
never having children orsomething. There's this kind of
like, it feels like anoverreaction to a lot of
founders who just like, how hardcan it be? Like, let's move on
past it. So I'm gonna use adifferent group that we have a
similar problem with asfounders, and that is, never ask
a development team, can we dothis? Okay? Right? Because the
answer is always yes. It's thereal question is, how much is it
(10:24):
going to cost to do this? Yes?So is, what is the parallel of
that in the attorney world? Howcan we get founders and
attorneys communicating moreeffectively?
Jeff Holman (10:34):
That's, that's the key, right there. I think you
know every founder that you gotyour sales guy or your technical
guy, right in a lot ofbusinesses. And then the other
people that they bring on reallyreadily and easily is some
finance guy. They like, hey, weraise money. Hey, we need to do
our bookkeeping, we need to payour taxes. And they bring a
finance guy on. I think foundersneed to start thinking of legal
(10:56):
at least like finance, like it'sjust a function that you bring
on because they because not onlyis it a service, but if you've
got the right attorney, youknow, just like your CFO is
doing financial projections andhelping you anticipate where
some of those cash flow issuesmight be, your legal guy should
be doing the same thing. Itshould be, Hey, you guys are, as
I said, road mapping, and youshould be anticipating when
(11:19):
those things are coming up, notjust reacting to them. You know,
the key is, how do you get tothat point with your legal guy
when you're used to knowingthat, you know you don't want to
talk to legal let alone talk tomultiple legal people, if you
have multiple issues going on atonce?
Scott Ritzheimer (11:34):
Yeah, there's this. There's a thing that
happens at this stage forfounders, when they're kind of
building out their leadershipteam. They're looking at who
they're gonna allow to advisethem on their decision making.
And there's kind of the obvioussales and the obvious
operations, and then there'sjust, like this junk drawer of
everything else, right? Like, wethink of administration as
(11:55):
legal, HR, technology,financial, like, all of it kind
of gets GNA, yeah, sgna, all ofit, and and so the question is
like, well, who in the world cancan answer all of these things?
Because if you get someone who'svery technically sound, they
don't know anything about thelegal aspect of it, and vice
(12:16):
versa. And so what I really likeabout the way that that the
industry is developing,especially fractional, is that
you can, you can kind of addressthe junk drawer approach with an
equally kind of dispersed set ofhelp. And so here's, here's
because there's the I've seenfolks who've come through have
(12:38):
been fractional legal, you know,fill in the blank. What I
haven't seen is a fractionallegal team, and you've really
stressed that in a lot of yourwebsite and the work that you
do. So tell us a little bitlike, this isn't a fractional
attorney. This is a fractionallegal team. What's the
difference?
Jeff Holman (12:54):
Yeah, I mean, that is the difference. It's a team
approach. The reason it's a teamapproach several things. First
of all, you don't have one legalissue in your business. You have
multiple across sales andemployees and investors and your
corporate entity, and you nameit. Legal is there. It may not
be an active issue, but there'sa potential for it to become
active, and not one attorneyshould be handling all of that.
(13:16):
For you, my background ispatents. I'm excellent at
patents. I'm really good withtrademarks, and I've become very
proficient as a general counsel,helping to guide small
businesses in all their illegalissues. But I'm not the guy
who's going to do youremployment stuff, you know? I'm
not the guy who's going to dosome of your really hyper
technical privacy things. And Irealized that early on, right?
(13:37):
So I'm like, Hey, why am Itrying to do and manage all
these things. When any realcompany, when you get to the
right stage, you're going tohave a small team of attorneys
with the experts that you needin different places. So that's
one. The other is a lot offractional people. They're
passing through. And I don't,you know, I don't say that to
say that's wrong, but they'reoften in between jobs, and
(13:58):
they're like, hey, I'll pick upa few clients. You know, we've
picked up several clients frompeople who were passing through
momentarily and six monthslater, after they'd, you know,
really been onboarded into acompany. They're like, Oh, I
found a full time job. I'm goingto go work there. And that
company is then left, you know,saying, Well, okay, I guess
we'll restart hiring process,you know. So there's no
longevity with single fractionalpeople is harder. Burnout is
(14:22):
higher. And so that's anotherissue that we try to tackle. And
then the last one, really, isgatekeeping. You know, when you
go to, and this is more relatedto, you know, a law firm, law
firms, people are like, Hey,Jeff, how come? How come all
these law firms, with all these,you know, hundreds of attorneys,
don't just do this and and wipeyou out of business. I'm like,
they should. Like, theyliterally should. They're not
built for it. Their businessmodel is different. Is different
(14:43):
and doesn't really support theway to do it. But the other
really big thing, and it's tiedto their business model, is
they're mostly really siloed,gatekeepers in the business,
right? The rainmakers in thosebusinesses, they they're super
protective of their clients.They don't want. Their
associates talking to the to theto the clients. And so I'm like,
(15:03):
Hey, listen, there's nothingmore. Again. I don't want to
block communications between theclient and the legal team.
That's counterproductive. Iwant, I want our clients to feel
like they can go talk to me.They can talk to anybody on the
team, as if we're just down thehall from them. Poke your head
in the door for the Ritzheimeror if you don't know who it is,
any person ask them, you knowyour question, and let's deal
(15:24):
with it as a team. We'll get theright resources to the right
place at the right time. So it'sjust, I don't know. As I was
doing this, I kind of fell intothat fractional General Counsel
solo role, and it didn't take metoo long to realize there's a
better way to do this. And so Istarted building it into the
team approach, and it's beenfantastic.
Scott Ritzheimer (15:42):
Yeah, yeah. I love that. I really do. There's
this idea, especially from folkswho've not had legal issues in
the past, that kind of attorneysare attorneys. It's kind of like
doctors or doctors, you know,it's like, to some extent, they
all have some basic training,but like, if you broke your
foot, you wouldn't go to a heartdoctor. It doesn't really work
that way. And so I love thisidea of being able to provide
(16:03):
that kind of combination of careall under one umbrella that is
fantastic and highly needed formost founders at this stage.
Jeff Holman (16:12):
Can I build on that just because I've talked to
people? You know, you get it.You get somebody who's like a
real sophisticated patient,right? Or has a lot of, a lot of
needs, you know, cancerpatients, and they've got all
these issues you don't have,like you'd mentioned, you don't
have one doctor just treatingthem, right? They will
conference with each other.They'll get into a room and
they'll say, Okay, what's theissue going on? And what do you
think? And what do you think?What do you think? And they all
(16:34):
have their specialties. I mean,that's, I've used that analogy
before, and that's, that's agreat analogy to say, This is
what a team should look like,you know, working for the
client, as opposed to, you know,I, I just canceled my
appointment this morning fortomorrow. I got a cortisone shot
last week because I'm gettingolder, I guess, blew out a disc,
and it's caused some nerveissues for me. I'm, I'm sure
(16:56):
some of your listeners canrelate. And, you know,
everything's good, but, but mythey're like, Hey, we got you
scheduled for a follow up. AndI'm like, Yeah, that's fine.
Cortisone shot in my back is notwhat I need, right? I've got a
different issue. Cancel that.I'm going to go schedule with
somebody else who who can tellme about the nerve issue, not
about the disc issue. So, right?You know, just got to move to
(17:18):
the right, move to the rightperson for the right issue.
Scott Ritzheimer (17:20):
Right, and being able to get that through
the expertise of another isextremely helpful, especially
when they have your bestinterests in mind. So Jeff,
there's this question I ask allmy guests, and I'm gonna ask it
of you here as well. I'minterested to see what you have
to say. So what would you say isthe biggest secret that you wish
wasn't a secret at all? What'sthat one thing that you wish
(17:41):
every founder watching orlistening today knew?
Jeff Holman (17:44):
Can I share two? Yeah, I've got two, because so
the first one might be obviousfrom my website. If you go to my
website, if you ever get anemail from me, it says, innovate
with confidence. I think thathelping people to overcome the
fears involved with doingsomething new, and that's what a
lot of our clients are doing.They're they're disrupting
because they're doing somethingnothing. They're doing something
(18:05):
nobody has done before. And sodoing that new stuff is there's
a lot of fear involved. And Irun into a lot of inventors,
specifically, who who arefearful, and you see this great
invention, and then they just,they just freeze up. So the one
thing that I would say to a lotof those people, to summarize a
lot of other things I've said,is, you know, action dispels
(18:26):
fear, right? So you've got totake action to get over the
fear. If any of your if any ofyour people, are at a stage
where they're saying, I don'tknow, I just, I just can't do
this, like, think it through,make up an action plan and take
the action that'll dispel thefear, because fear is just fear
of what's going to happen thefuture. And once you've taken
the action, there's no morefuture to be afraid of. Yep, the
other thing that I think isreally it's something that a lot
(18:51):
of people should be doing moreof, and that is strategy. This
whole discussion of strategy, Iwas kind of a big issue for me.
I got into it thinking about IPstrategy in the beginning, and
how that fits into businessstrategy and all this stuff
going through my MBA program,like a whole journey I've been
on for 10 years. The thing thatI think, I wish a lot of
(19:11):
founders knew was that thisconcept of strategy, strategy is
actually something you canachieve, right? There's, there's
like, really complex, disjointedteachings out there about
strategy, but there are someapproaches where you can, you
can really articulate yourstrategy in a way that's super
helpful. And you know, we don'thave time to go into that today.
(19:32):
I've got a thing I call the fivefactors of business strategy
that I came up with because itdidn't exist out there, similar
to the fracture legal teams, Icame up with it because it
didn't exist, and I talked to alot of my clients about it,
because about it, because itmakes strategy, you know,
reachable. It makes it somethingthat you can actually talk about
for your business and implement.And so I guess those are the
(19:52):
types of things that I wouldleave, you know, take action to
dispel fear and really thinkabout how to be strategic in
your business. And. And realizethat it's something you can do
if you have the right framework.
Scott Ritzheimer (20:04):
Yeah, yeah, Jeff, there's some folks
listening, and it's, you know,it's, it's time. They could use
the help. And they love the ideaof a fractional team, but they
don't exactly know what thatmeans just yet, and they'd like
to know more about it. Where canthey connect with you? Where can
they find more out about thework that you and your team do.
Jeff Holman (20:22):
Yeah, best place is to reach out to me on my
website,intellectualstrategies.com I do
a free 30 minute kickoff call,strategy call with people. We'll
start to talk about yourroadmap. We'll figure out, you
know, what are the messes thatyou've got hiding, maybe under
the bed that you've been puttingoff starting to lose sleep over
some of the things coming up,and we'll just walk through that
(20:43):
in 30 minutes. Have a call andsee if it's a right fit, if it's
the right time for for them tobring somebody on board in some
capacity. So that's a freestrategy call at
intellectualstrategies.com.
Scott Ritzheimer (20:55):
Fantastic, fantastic. Well, Jeff, thanks
for being on the show. Really aprivilege and honor. Having you
here with us today. Love thework that you do, and couldn't
encourage folks more to check itout, get some help, and Jeff's a
great place to start. And forthose of you watching and
listening, you know that yourtime and attention mean the
world to us. I hope you got asmuch out of this conversation as
I know I did, and I cannot waitto see you next time. Take care.
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