Episode 275 – Jeff Holman

Richard Matthews: So hello and welcome back to the Hero Show. My name is Richard Matthews, and today I have the pleasure of having on the line Jeff Holman. Jeff, are you there?

Jeff Holman: I am, and it’s my pleasure to be with you.

Richard Matthews: So I’m glad to have you here, Jeff. I know I always like to start these podcasts off cause my wife and I, we travel whole time letting our audience know where we’re at.

Richard Matthews: So we are in Southern Florida, you know, for the winter and join ourselves, where are you calling in from Jeff?

Jeff Holman: Salt Lake City area, in Utah.

Richard Matthews: So has it started getting cold there yet? You guys still enjoying the fall weather or is it snowing?

Jeff Holman: Now, we’re starting to get some snow. Foothills are getting snow. There’s a ski resort that’s open. There’s a couple more openings next week.

Jeff Holman: So, it’s wintertime. I got up and played tennis this morning with my son. And as we’re driving, he said, Google told him it was 25 degrees this morning. So, it’s cold.

Richard Matthews: You guys were playing tennis out. Were you guys playing tennis outdoors and 25 degrees?

Jeff Holman: No.

Richard Matthews: I was going to say that’s a dedication to the sport right there.

Jeff Holman: I mean, we don’t play if it’s less than 40. No, we played indoors.

Richard Matthews: That’s fun. Yeah. My son and I do martial arts and we train outside mostly because, you know, [00:01:00] we’ve trained on video with our instructor and we’ve traveled around the country and last winter, we definitely had to like bundle up because it’s 30 degrees outside and snow on the ground and where we’re in, you know, two or three layers just to do our martial arts workouts.

Richard Matthews: So,

Jeff Holman: Yep.

Richard Matthews: Yeah.

Jeff Holman: I will say running outside in the snow has been some of the best, most serene exercises I’ve ever done. But you gotta layer up for it.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, and I love that part of the country too. I think it’s Alta or Snowbird. One of them has like the largest rock climbing wall in the U.S., like outdoor rock climbing wall. It’s like 127 feet tall. We climbed that one. That was a lot of fun.

Jeff Holman: Oh, I didn’t know that. Of course, Alta won’t let me go there to ski because I don’t ski. I snowboard in there.

Richard Matthews: Oh, see, that’s.

Jeff Holman: Snowboard is. Okay,

Richard Matthews: I’m a skier. Well, actually, technically, I use ski boards, which are, they’re like 110 centimeters. And it’s basically a snowboard on each foot. So it’s more akin to like rollerblading on the snow.

Jeff Holman: Interesting. I’ve probably seen a few people [00:02:00] on the slopes doing something like that and thought, what is that?

Richard Matthews: Yeah. A lot of fun. But we’re not in the part of the country with mountains. Like the hardest, the highest point of Florida is like a bridge over paths and there’s no snow here.

Richard Matthews: So before we get too far into this, I always like to do a quick bio of who you are. So our audience knows who you are and then we’ll dive into your story.

Richard Matthews: So I’ll do that real quick. Jeff Holman is the founder of intellectual strategies. And you are revolutionizing how startups and scaling businesses access legal support through the first fractional legal team model, enables companies to get expert legal guidance as needed without the cost of a full-time in-house team with degrees in electrical engineering law.

Richard Matthews: And an MBA Jeff brings technical and legal expertise to his work admitted to practice in California, Utah, and before the U.S. patents and trademark office. He specializes in intellectual property, business strategy, and technology law, helping ambitious companies navigate growth with tailored on-demand legal support.

Richard Matthews: So what I want to start off with Jeff is what are you known for? Right. This question sets up who you are now, what your business is like. So basically who do you serve? What do you do for them?

Jeff Holman: [00:03:00] Yeah, it’s a great question. Let me tell you, first of all, what somebody called me one time, the word they used. I was explaining what I do, and they said, oh, I know you, you’re ungovernable. So I think in smaller circles, I’m probably known in a way to be ungovernable. I’m kind of outside the mold.

Jeff Holman: That being said, what I do and what people know me for within the industry is I run a small law firm. We help small businesses, basically startups, innovators, scaling companies used to do work for large corporations. Don’t do that anymore. But so it’s all startups. I’m in the startup chaos day in and day out.

Jeff Holman: And I’m known for bringing kind of the technical side and the business side together for these startups because I’ve got the electrical engineering background, the business background. And so I bring those together and we do it in a unique model. That’s called that you mentioned, it’s the fractional legal team.

Jeff Holman: So you’ve heard of, you know, fractional CFO is fractional CMO. We do that in the legal world. A lot of people will refer to outside general counsel.

Jeff Holman: So some [00:04:00] attorney at a firm spends a little bit more time on your business, maybe, and there’ll be your outside general counsel as kind of a single attorney.

Jeff Holman: So we’ve take that, taken that model and expanded it so that we have a small team of attorneys, basically a fully staffed in-house legal team that a small business would need, you know, throughout the time you need contracts, your fundraising, your startup entities, you might need a patent or trademarks. We have all of that under one roof in one team.

Jeff Holman: And so people will hire us as a team on a fractional basis. And so that’s really what we’ve been doing for the last five years. I’ve been trying to tell every law firm out there, this is how you should practice with small businesses. This is what they need and this is how you work with them.

Jeff Holman: And, you know, it’s catching on.

Richard Matthews: I gotta say, I read your bio before we got on and my first thought was I need that right at the small business owner. Like I was on a fractional legal team. That’s perfect because like we were already experienced with you know, fractional CMOs, fractional CFOs, and that kind of stuff.

Richard Matthews: And for every time I talk to a lawyer, they’re like, yeah, it’s a $5,000 retainer. And I’m like, I don’t have enough legal work to afford a [00:05:00] $5,000 retainer. And you know, per month or whatever.

Jeff Holman: Most people don’t want to hire one attorney, let alone have to hire six different attorneys because they’ve got different expertise that they need $5,000 retainers for every one of those. It adds up and it makes it, you know, it’s a failure, frankly,

Richard Matthews: It’s how you get businesses like Legal Zoom popping up where people are like, I can self-service my legal things and not get any like expert legal advice and whatnot. And which I don’t know if this is true, but I feel like that’s just as dangerous.

Jeff Holman: For different reasons, it has its own dangers for sure. Yes.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, absolutely. So I’m fascinated about the types of law that you’re in, right? So you said legal entities and patents and trademarks and several other things. Is there a particular reason why you’ve chosen those fields is because they all work together well for small businesses or like, what’s the reason behind, like, I guess, the few different areas that you guys have lawyers in?

Jeff Holman: Yeah. Well, so I personally have my engineering degree, which is a natural fit to go into patent law. Right? And I did that for 15 years. As I practiced as a patent attorney for my clients, I’m [00:06:00] like, Hey, these guys are doing cool stuff that I’m not, they’re not calling me for it. Cause it’s fundraising or it’s bringing out a board or, you know, whatever it might be.

Jeff Holman: They’re doing a lot of other business stuff, but they think of me as their patent attorney. I do one thing really well. And so, I had the intention of kind of becoming more general counsel is what the, you know, he’s the guy or she’s the person that will come in and they’ll be your point of contract, kind of like a general contractor, building a house.

Jeff Holman: They don’t do all the specialties, but they manage and organize and make sure it all happens the way it’s supposed to. And so you kind of become a jack of all trades at the general counsel level, but you still need this specialized expertise and efficiencies of really expert attorneys.

Jeff Holman: And so, as I got into this, there’s kind of a path I went down going in-house, meaning working for a company directly and just seeing the breadth of services that small businesses need, they need most all of the same services that really large businesses need. They just need them in smaller slices, but they still need them all.

Jeff Holman: And so, you know, you think about any [00:07:00] business your business or some of your friends’ businesses, whatever it might be, you go through issues. Oh, how do I start my company? How do I hire people? And kind of the things we all learn when we hire somebody. And then we’re like, that wasn’t the right fit.

Jeff Holman: We need to transition them out or whatever it is. You bring on investors, you have a new product that you create, you have a brand that you’re trying to build. All of those things come up and there’s kind of tangential legal issues with all of them.

Jeff Holman: So it’s just, you know, I guess going from practicing law to being in the business exposes you and exposed me to seeing that a small company just needs all of these things.

Jeff Holman: There’s specialties that are there, they exist. And they should be available in some form to every small business. So, I don’t know, revolutionary theory that’s just like the natural nature of business.

Richard Matthews: I have a follow-up question and that’s because I was a business mastermind this last week and talking about what we do. Right? And so we run a podcast post-production company. We do that at scale and we have as [00:08:00] a result of that, because we do it at scale and because of the way we’ve tied in a lot of like the newer AI technologies and how we’re pairing them up with our human team and sort of like, you know, we’ve got some really innovative stuff that we’re doing in order to operate at scale.

Richard Matthews: And one of the individuals at the mastermind was like, you should look at patenting your processes, which I didn’t know was a thing. And he gave me a couple of reasons for that. So one of them is when you actually go first off, I didn’t know you could patent processes.

Richard Matthews: And the second one was when you patent the process if you can get it granted, right? You can get a patent granted for one of your processes that the patent all by itself adds a value to the bottom line of the company, whether or not it impacts your revenue.

Richard Matthews: And so something, I can’t even remember the number. He said somewhere near $300,000 per patent just as the the value of the company. He’s like, but on top of that, it also allows you to then maybe license your processes and actually turn that into revenue as well. And so I’m curious ’cause I was just talking to someone, another business owner who’d been through this process.

Richard Matthews: I’m curious to get, as a patent attorney, your legal sort of thought on that and whether or not that’s true and it’s something that would be [00:09:00] worthwhile for businesses to either know or pursue.

Jeff Holman: Oh, for sure. No, it’s a great question. I tend to think of layers of intellectual property or layers of I. P. In a business, right? And patents are one of those layers. There definitely is, there can be value to having patents in your business when you think about going to sell your business or whatever.

Jeff Holman: You know, what is the end goal of your businesses? It’s a monetize it somehow, right? Maybe monetize its cash flow today, but sell it in five years from now. Who knows? Right? When you go to sell is oftentimes when you realize that, you know, people will put a dollar amount to a patent asset or a trademark. Trademarks are just as valuable, maybe more so in your business evaluation.

Jeff Holman: So yeah, you can go out and you can protect these things that you’re doing. You can put these assets into your portfolio, just like you would real estate or personal property, some tangible asset. You can put these intangible assets or intellectual property into your business the exact same way.

Jeff Holman: And you know, there’s probably a [00:10:00] whole, podcast episode about what is patentable, what does it mean to patent a process? How do you do it? You know, what’s the process, the timeline, the cost, all of that. In general, though, you can patent new inventions. New inventions can be things, they can be systems, they can be products, and in some cases, they can be processes.

Jeff Holman: Normally processes are patentable if you put them in the context of like a software implementation of that process. And I’ll leave it at that for now because there’s kind.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, that’s like, it’s a deep subject, but the baseline answer to the question is if you’re doing innovative things in your business, you should probably talk to a patent attorney and see what of that is patentable because it might have a valuable like an upside for your business.

Jeff Holman: Yeah. That’s absolutely true. And it’s really the way that a lot of legal stuff works, right? So, we see a big difference between first-time founders and second-time founders that Kind of manifests itself in this way, right? They know that for second time founders have been down this road.

Jeff Holman: They [00:11:00] know that when they go hire somebody there’s probably legal issues that pop up and they should catch those. They know that if you’re inventing something or you’re creating a new process or product that you can probably get a utility patent or a design patent on that.

Jeff Holman: And so they’re aware of that, whereas a lot of first-time founders, they haven’t just haven’t been down that path and they don’t know what they don’t know. Right? It’s you know, Like if you’ve got kids if you’ve never had a kid, you don’t know what it’s like to have kids until you’ve had a kid and then you know, it’s a whole different world that you just couldn’t have imagined before you’ve done it.

Jeff Holman: So, kudos to you for being in a mastermind where you’re getting exposure to some of those lessons from other people who’ve been down some of those paths.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, absolutely. It’s one of those important things in business is to find people who are further along than you are and learn from them. And you know, we’re in the process of we’ve got a second startup we’re working on that’s in the same realm that I’ve got all sorts of questions for you on already, which I’m sure we can get into at some point, but I want to talk a little bit about your origin story, right?

Richard Matthews: Every good comic book hero has an origin story, right? The thing that made them into the hero they are today. And we want to hear that story. Were you born a hero or [00:12:00] are you bit by a radioactive spider that made you want to get into starting a fractional legal team or would you start in a job and initially move to become an entrepreneur basically, where did you come from?

Jeff Holman: Man, that’s a great question. I’ll give you some bits and pieces. And as an attorney, I could probably talk the rest of the show and just keep going. But you know, I think there are a couple of transition points for me, you know, and I’ll just mention a few things, a few highlights briefly, like I knew I wanted to go into engineering because I figured that was a great foundation for whatever else I was going to do in life, although I didn’t really want to be an engineer long term.

Jeff Holman: I knew I wanted to go into business. I actually applied to business school right out of engineering school, no work experience. And all the schools I applied to said, Hey, Go get some work experience that’s required you know, for these top-tier schools. And in the meantime, I went to law school.

Jeff Holman: Somebody said, Hey, patent attorneys are in demand. I’m like, I don’t know what that is, but that sounds awesome. And I went to law school and so I really fell into patent law and becoming an attorney by chance almost in a way which led me to work in Silicon Valley for a few years, start my own legal practice, work for some really big companies like [00:13:00] IBM, helping them develop patents.

Jeff Holman: But the turning points for me that took me from kind of that foundation that I had to where I am today, there’s a couple of them. And I’ll just mention maybe two or three of them.

Jeff Holman: One, when I decided I wanted to be more of a business attorney than strictly a niche patent attorney I went in-house with a company.

Jeff Holman: And two weeks into that, I said to myself, I have been practicing law the wrong way for 15 years. Like I’ve been doing it like all these attorneys taught me and they’re good people. They’re just not very good business people. And so it really opened my eyes two weeks into working inside of a company, right?

Jeff Holman: I funded startup developing technology, two weeks into that, I’m like, I have been doing it wrong. And that was eye-opening to me because I thought I was a good attorney. I did a lot of things well, but I don’t know that prior to that was the best type of attorney for my clients, right?

Jeff Holman: So that was eye-opening. Another time that kind of said well, I need to be [00:14:00] aligned with clients better than I have been. While I worked at that company I had a board meeting one time and I was presenting about our patent portfolio and our IP and all this stuff and there was a situation where the management of the company had come to me and they said hey, would you make some changes here and there and I went ahead and I’m like, okay cool, we’ll make those changes.

Jeff Holman: And I’ve been at the company maybe a year and a half at this point. And we had a board meeting, our chairman came in, our outside corporate counsel from a big law firm was there and then, I’m giving this presentation patents and the chairman turned around, changes the topic completely and says, Hey, I heard that you did X, Y, Z.

Jeff Holman: Two things went through my head, I thought to myself, yeah, I did because that’s what the executive and the company asked me to do, so I did it.

Jeff Holman: And two, I’m probably getting fired today. Like, I think that what I did at the request of somebody else in the business is probably not what you wanted, right?

Jeff Holman: And so, I thought if he digs into this topic one or two layers deeper, he’s going to ask some questions that are perfectly valid [00:15:00] questions and I have perfectly valid answers for them. But I probably was not aligned with the board of directors as much as I should, if that makes sense.

Jeff Holman: And so I’m like, okay. A year and a half ago, I started aligning myself with the businesses and the clients that I work for, but I wasn’t fully aligned because there’s this other layer of Board of Directors that has their own agenda, especially when they’re outside investors. You know, we know VC companies become different companies.

Jeff Holman: VC companies become totally different companies because they’re working for investors now, as opposed to working for their clients. So there’s these layers of alignment, and I’m like, Oh, gosh, I think I need to be fired today.

Jeff Holman: That didn’t happen, fortunately. But the last kind of biggest impactful thing for me that really made a difference as to where I’m at today was had nothing to do with my job at all, had nothing to do with my career in the moment.

Jeff Holman: It was in January of 2018 if I remember correctly, there was a day in January, I was out with my family in Hawaii, we were in Maui, and I was taking my [00:16:00] two oldest daughters, I have four kids, my two oldest, two are like 18 and 15 at a time I think, I was taking them scuba diving, we were doing what’s called a beach dive, with a, right, and so you put all your scuba gear on, you just walk into the water until it’s deep enough, and then you swim around and we’re all dressed up in our gear, had our wetsuits on, had our scuba gear on.

Jeff Holman: And my daughters are like, Hey, take our picture. So I get there and I go to take their picture with my phone. And I said, you know, and I go to snap the photo of them in there, I call it cute outfits, but I don’t know if scuba gear is cute ever.

Jeff Holman: Go take the picture on the camera before I can take the photo the phone starts buzzing and I get one of these alerts, right?

Jeff Holman: If you remember in 2018, and you might not, cause if you weren’t there, it probably wasn’t a big deal. If you remember in 2018, in January, there was a missile threat scare.

Richard Matthews: I do remember that.

Jeff Holman: That’s what came up, it said something like warning ballistic missile threat incoming. This is not a drill, and I’m like, what does that mean?

Jeff Holman: Like, I think I know what a ballistic missile is, but that can’t [00:17:00] be what that like, how is that? What’s that?

Richard Matthews: How you respond to that?

Jeff Holman: Like with like utter I don’t know just I was shocked right? And I had my daughter’s phone in my hand. I’m like guys like, hey and I look around and there’s like the other people in the group there about it, they’ve all got their phones in their hand. It’s really close to the highway.

Jeff Holman: This is Olawala Beach, if you’ve been there mile marker 14 awesome place go there take care of it. But it’s really close to the highway that drives by people in their trucks are driving by with their phones stuck in their faces. Everybody is looking at their phone. I’m like, okay, so everybody’s seeing this and it’s the moment where you’re like, we’re like, okay, do we go dive?

Jeff Holman: Do we go in the water? Is it safer in the water? Is it not safer in the water? If I go in the water, though, I got a wife and two kids back at the condo. If it’s not real and I’m going to be dead when I get back, if I tell her, Oh yeah, I decided to go diving, that’d be safer for me.

Jeff Holman: You know, you’re like, do I call my parents? Like, do you, say, Hey Mom and Dad, I don’t know what’s going on, but I love you, you know what I mean?

Jeff Holman: So it’s just [00:18:00] this kind of moment of reality that you, your mortality, you see your mortality, right? And it turned out to be a scare of somebody pushed the wrong button.

Jeff Holman: They say, right? But for me, it was like holy cow, I got to do something better with my life than what I’m doing. Was I doing anything wrong? No. Was I doing a lot of normal average stuff? Yeah, and it really kind of kicked me into gear to say, how do I take what I know?

Jeff Holman: And when I do. And do it better, you know, have a bigger impact, have something that’s more fulfilling for me, for my family, for my clients, whatever it might be. And you know, that’s maybe just like for me, it hit me in a personal way, but it was really one of the moments where you say, Oh, I’m going to re-evaluate what I’m doing and I’m going to do it a little bit better.

Jeff Holman: So, that was really probably one of the more pivotal moments for me to say, I’m going to go out of step out of the norm and I’m going to create something that I think is the best thing I know how to create in the role that I’m in with my work, my law firm, I left the company that I was at I kind of, I call it restarting my law [00:19:00] firm.

Jeff Holman: Cause I had this all-new vision. Like there is a better way to bring true value to clients. I stopped working with large corporate groups just because I didn’t feel like I could really have a say or an impact with them as much. And I work, you know, in the middle of the chaos of these startups, because I feel like I can go in there.

Jeff Holman: I’ve got this blend of expertise across a couple of disciplines, 20 years of experience, and I can make a difference, right? I can actually say. You want to avoid a million-dollar lawsuit today? Like we can have an easy conversation and avoid a million-dollar lawsuit. That happens, right? Clients are like, Oh, we’re doing this.

Jeff Holman: I’m like, no, you’re not. Don’t do that. You know, so you can make a big difference in kind of little levers making a huge difference for these companies, and it’s really fulfilling.

Jeff Holman: So, that’s probably different than getting bit maybe my spider moment.

Richard Matthews: I love the story because your first couple of realizations were you know, like a small evolution for like understanding where your value is in the company and like [00:20:00] where, you know, like the difference between like, Hey, I learned law, but I didn’t learn business.

Richard Matthews: And you started to learn business a little bit and started to learn how law impacts business and how like those of us who are small business owners, how like the law we think about it and how you can best communicate with us.

Richard Matthews: And then you have that moment of realization with that ballistic missile threat that you’re like, okay, that’s the moment where you decided I’m going to become an entrepreneur, where you’re like, there’s a value I can give to the world that nobody else can give. Right?

Richard Matthews: So, you know, that’s where you go from evolution to revolution. And you change everything about what you’re doing to bring your value to the world, which is what business owners do, right? They see a problem and they build a solution for it.

Jeff Holman: I love that. And I’m just going to write it down because I’ve never heard it phrased that way. What you said and what I’m taking away from that is an entrepreneur, you became an entrepreneur because you’re building value that nobody else can give. That’s maybe the best definition of an entrepreneur that I’ve ever heard.

Jeff Holman: So thank you for sharing that.

Richard Matthews: Well, I appreciate that. Yeah. I mean, that’s what we do on this show, right? Talk to entrepreneurs about how they got to that point of deciding they were going to do something and provide [00:21:00] a value to the world. And it becomes, at least for me, right? And I’ll tell you more about our startup that we’re working on later, just because I think it’d be an interesting conversation.

Richard Matthews: But it’s the kind thing where you realize you’re like, No, I have to do this. It’s not a like, Oh, I could do this or like I could do that or I could do the other thing you realize, no, my particular set of skills and my particular set of experiences and the vision I see for this means that like it’s the one thing that I have to do.

Richard Matthews: It’s the legacy I have to build. And if you’ve talked to small business owners and startups and people like in that space, you see that same sort of I don’t you call it.

Richard Matthews: A lot of people, I guess a lot of people call it a vision, but it’s like a dedication to that vision where you’re like, no, this is the thing I have to do.

Richard Matthews: And that’s an entrepreneurial thing.

Jeff Holman: Yeah, that’s where entrepreneurs get their grit and their persistence because I agree, they’ve seen that vision for themselves and they know that’s their role. That’s unique to them, I totally agree with that.

Richard Matthews: Awesome. So I’m going to talk then about your superpowers, right? Every iconic hero has a superpower, whether that’s your fancy flying suit made by a genius intellect or the ability to call down [00:22:00] thunder from the sky or super strength in the real world, here’s what I call a zone of genius, which is either a skill or a set of skills that you were born with or you developed over the course of time that really energize all of your other skills.

Richard Matthews: And the superpower is what sets you apart. It allows you to help your people slay their villains and come out on top in their journeys. And the way I like to frame it for my guests is if you look at everything you’ve done over the course of your life, there’s probably a common thread that ties all of your accomplishments and your skills together.

Richard Matthews: And that common thread is probably where your superpower is. And we want to know what that is.

Jeff Holman: Yeah, these are great questions. Are you gonna ask me later what kind of animal I’d be if I was gonna be an animal?

Richard Matthews: I’m not.

Jeff Holman: Most mundane answer for it, but hear me out. With the stuff that I’ve done, my engineering, my law, my business, I’ve really spent a lot of time kind of gaining perspective in these different ways to look at things, you know, engineers look at something systematically totally different than what like a salesperson would do, right?

Jeff Holman: Business people look at it as opportunity and at [00:23:00] risk and lawyers look at stuff as like, how do I navigate the channels to help advocate for a client?

Jeff Holman: Like, they’re really different in a lot of ways. And when I first went to law school, somebody said, Oh, you’re going to kill it. You’re going to law school. You’re an engineer. You’re going to engineers do way better at law than everybody else. Well, I went there and I proved him wrong.

Jeff Holman: Engineers, like there’s a right answer. You do a problem. There’s a right answer. There’s partial credit. Like you derive all this stuff and you work through it and you get the answer. Well, there is no answer. In fact, there’s not even an answer. They’re not even questioned. There’s not even like all the questions there to the problem.

Jeff Holman: They’re like, they want you to make up. They want you to take the facts and then make up additional scenarios with those facts and say whether those made-up scenarios would be right or wrong, making up scenarios doesn’t exist in the world of engineering. Right? And then you got business where there’s a bunch of other stuff going on.

Jeff Holman: Anyway, it’s been a blast, honestly, kind of going through these different parts or stages in my own education. And [00:24:00] so, my superpower coming from that is, I’ll say it to two ways.

Jeff Holman: One, maybe the bland way to say it is I’m really a translator. Like I’m pretty darn good at taking stuff and saying oh your business guy is saying this. Let me tell you what that really means legally or your engineering, you know, your inventor is talking about these things, let me tell you what we have to do on the legal or the business side to really you know, leverage that invention the way that you’re talking about it.

Jeff Holman: So I translate day in and day out among the different disciplines and for the different executives on a team, right? You’re talking to the CEO. He’s got a perspective. The CFO is looking at something else. The CTO, the product guy that like, they’re all looking at these things differently. And I feel like I’m pretty darn good at sitting down with them and saying, okay, I know what you’re saying.

Jeff Holman: Let me tell you why I think that’s important and I’m going to put in some words that might be helpful for the other guy to see why it’s so important and that also works at the level of, you know, [00:25:00] management versus employee, you know, middle management or employees being able to translate why the executive team is so stuck on this concept that people are like, why do I have to spend my time doing that?

Jeff Holman: Well, let’s talk about it. Because there’s a reason, you know, and there’s a reason why people down here don’t understand it. And they, you know, those frustrations aren’t always communicated up.

Jeff Holman: So there’s kind of across disciplines, you know, throughout the hierarchy of an enterprise. There’s all these opportunities to translate is the way I see it and translation to me really means bringing the right perspectives maybe sometimes new perspectives to people that they didn’t already have and you know, it’s kind of easy to do when you’re able to draw on a totally different discipline or a different framework than what, you know, these other people are coming from.

Jeff Holman: So one thing I try to do in pretty much every conversation I can is, say, how do I bring a new perspective to this person or this audience that I’m talking with? It might be revolutionary and it might simply be just, huh, I hadn’t thought of it that way [00:26:00] before. However, bringing new perspectives is something that I thoroughly enjoy.

Jeff Holman: And that’s actually why I just, you know, made a note here on my pad when you brought a new perspective to me saying, Oh, this is an entrepreneur, you know, somebody who brings value that nobody else can do like that. I’m like, Oh, that’s awesome. Like, I love that.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. And I love the translator as a superpower because you see that a lot as the entrepreneur, the one who’s running the business, and I’m sure you see this in your own company that you realize that like one of your jobs, even if you’re not good at it, but one of your jobs is to be a translator, right?

Richard Matthews: To be able to, you know, in our world, we talk a lot of times to the people who are doing like the code and the person who is like doing the payroll. Right?

Richard Matthews: And like, or the one who’s got the vision versus the one who’s got to write the actual like thing. A lot of times you have to translate playing like, okay, here’s all the things that they’re saying.

Richard Matthews: And here’s what that means in like programmatic language, which is like for you, for as an engineer, that’s really useful to be able to say like, cause engineers don’t talk the same way that visionaries do. Right?

Jeff Holman: Not at all.

Richard Matthews: My brother talks about this regularly. He [00:27:00] works in a machine shop and he’ll get things from engineers.

Richard Matthews: And so you have the engineers who are working on like the theoretical design and then the machine shop that has to actually make it. And so it’s like a lot of times you have to go back to the engineer and be like, Hey, this like inside corner square can’t be 90 degrees because the machine you want us to build it on has a spinning tool and spinning tools are incapable of making 90-degree corners.

Richard Matthews: So you have to re-engineer this, right? And it’s a trend. It’s a translation thing back and forth. And you see that just everywhere in business that one of the biggest bottlenecks essentially is the translation from one person to an extra one role to the next for one hierarchy to the next. And so to have that as like the superpower makes you sort of like invaluable to the organization.

Jeff Holman: Yeah, I think there is a value there. And I think to your point that not only does it make communication hard and create communication kind of obstacles, but I think that’s where a lot of disputes come from, like legal disputes between parties. It’s because they’re unwilling to communicate. You know, you get one or two parties who are irrational in their [00:28:00] approach to communicating with the other party, and you’re going to end up with a lawsuit.

Jeff Holman: It doesn’t benefit anybody. People say it benefits attorneys, and some attorneys might enjoy that. Like, that’s not my thing. We do some litigation because our clients get into these issues. Maybe sometimes because of themselves, and sometimes because of the people that they’ve tried to interact with.

Jeff Holman: But, you know, if you can’t communicate or you’re unwilling to communicate, then you’re unwilling to have that translation happen, then, you know, legal disputes are typically a result of that. And I get it. I’m a human too. You take me out of my translator role. It’s really easy to be like, Hey, client, you should do this and this is what this means.

Jeff Holman: And then I go, you know, home or I go play sports or I go have my own, you know, struggles in a business. Something happens with a vendor or something and I’m like. Oh, let’s go like, I forget to communicate with them and, you know, that’s where problems come up.

Richard Matthews: One of my favorite sayings and this is usually in the context of like relational advice, but it fits pretty much everywhere, particularly with this translator conversation is [00:29:00] that 90% of contention comes from unmet or uncommunicated expectations.

Jeff Holman: Oh, yeah.

Richard Matthews: And that’s like the baseline of it.

Richard Matthews: If we can just, we know what the if you so I talk about this regularly in our company if someone is not performing their job correctly. We don’t start with discipline of the employee, right? We start with did we clearly and effectively communicate what we want to have done, right? Did we document that communication?

Richard Matthews: Did we ensure that the person both had access to that documentation and understood that documentation, right? And so there’s like several steps before, like, Our fault on the clearly communicated expectations before we get to the employee has a problem right now.

Richard Matthews: Now, if you’ve hit all of those things and they’re still not meeting the expectations, now we know that there’s a problem with the employee, but it’s right back to that translation idea of like, Hey, we need to make sure that they understood what the expectations were.

Richard Matthews: And then we did a good job in clearly communicating them.

Jeff Holman: Yeah, [00:30:00] that reminds me of a friend of mine. One of the attorneys I work with. Because when you have different perspectives you tend to reflect more and you’re like, okay. Well, maybe you know, I see why this went wrong. Maybe there’s something I should have done and like you say before I’m going to go and you know, would it be easier to just go and be like this is your fault you fixed it, but you’re like well, maybe it wasn’t maybe it was my fault maybe there’s something I could have done to make it better, maybe there’s something I could have done so that this client had better expectations from us or from the situation and so you do, there’s a lot of internalizing.

Jeff Holman: And I was talking to one of our attorneys about that. And he said I don’t remember the exact phrase. He said, I posted on LinkedIn at some point, cause it was kind of fitting. He’s like, well, Jeff, I know you have an over-exuberance for accountability for self-accountability. And I’m like, I think that was meant to be a compliment, but I think there’s a little bit of criticism in there probably criticism does.

Jeff Holman: So anyway. Yeah, it does act as how I think it impacts how I behave, not just the impact I have on other people.

Richard Matthews: Absolutely. So let’s [00:31:00] talk about the other side of the coin. So if one side of the coin is a superpower, the other side of that coin is always the fatal flaw, right? Every Superman has his kryptonite or Wonder Woman can’t remove her bracelets of victory without going mad. You probably have a flaw that’s held you back in your business, something you struggled with.

Richard Matthews: For me, it was things like perfectionism, right? Lack of shipping things, right? I could always make a little bit better before we put it out to the clients or lack of self-care, right? That meant that I don’t let my clients walk all over me. Let my time walk all over me. And, you know, sometimes I even struggle with like being a visionary but lacking the discipline to implement.

Richard Matthews: Like there’s a lot of problems I’ve struggled with, but, you know, I think more important than what the flaw is, is how have you worked to overcome it so that you could continue to grow and get your value out to the world and hopefully sharing this will help our listeners learn a little bit from your experience.

Jeff Holman: Yeah. Do you want me to go get my wife? I think she has a list.

Richard Matthews: She has a list.

Jeff Holman: She’s great. I actually work with my wife. She runs the operations of our firm. She’s way smarter than me and she does a fantastic job. So no complaints there. And she would probably be hesitant to share some of the things that she might say for fear that they would actually hurt me and be too true.

Jeff Holman: But no, I think I [00:32:00] probably have a lot of areas that I could improve it, I’m sure. I think one area that I do get caught up in sometimes and it impacts the way that I provide services sometimes positively and sometimes negatively is I get tied up emotionally with my clients.

Jeff Holman: Like I want my clients to win, right? And I’m not saying like, there’s a lot of people out there who take a win-lose proposition, right? It’s like, Hey, we’re going to win at all costs. We’re going to bro hustle this thing to death. And we’re going to walk away with all the money.

Jeff Holman: Like, that’s not me. Right? It’s like, I really want my clients to get out of the situations that they’re in what they want out of it. And I get tied up sometimes at the point where I maybe become a little bit overly optimistic about what we can do or about what they’re do, what they deserve in the situation either from us as a team in which case we’ll, I’ll be like, Hey, just like, we’re just going to do this.

Jeff Holman: I know it’s going to cost us a little more money, a little bit more time and money and effort on our side. We’re just going to do it because I think it’s the right thing to do. Right? Or what they might [00:33:00] get out of a situation if they’re in a dispute or a relationship with, you know, vendors or affiliates or clients, customers, whatever it might be.

Jeff Holman: And I’m like, I get really protective, you know, my wife has a story that she’s shared a few times when she’s first started working with me. Actually, she, you know, we were working on a patent application for one of our clients, a small client had a new bike par and Sam, a great guy, right? He was trying to bring something new to the world, which is awesome.

Jeff Holman: People create, have these dreams and they produce them and they patent them and they bring them to the world. It’s so fun to see. We were struggling more than we needed to with the patent examiner saying, Hey, you can’t get this. There’s all this stuff out there. And for these reasons, I’m not going to give you the patent.

Jeff Holman: And it didn’t really stand out to me, but she’s mentioned it a few times over the years. And so I’ve kind of picked up on it that, Oh, maybe it is something there. And in this case, you know, it actually helped, but it’s maybe an illustration of getting emotionally invested.

Jeff Holman: And I was on the phone and you give all these technical [00:34:00] arguments like this invention is different. It’s better than the other prior art or the references that are already out there, the other products that exist. And I got to the end of my rope and I just said, Hey, listen, and I’m on the phone with a patent examiner from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Jeff Holman: I said, Hey, listen, I’ve given you all my answers. I’ve given you all my arguments. I believe really strongly that I’m right. We might have to appeal this case, but before we do any of that, can I just appeal to your sense of humanity?

Jeff Holman: Let me tell you about Sam. Let me tell you who he is, what he’s been doing. And it was really laying out you know, it wasn’t meant to be this tactic even, but it was just laying out like, I know, Sam, I’ve been to his shop. I’ve talked to him dozens of times. I know what this product means to him.

Jeff Holman: And I just said, is there anything you can do, anything you can think of that you and me together working on behalf of, you know, for the benefit of Sam, what can we do to get past this and to get him something that will end [00:35:00] up in a patent?

Jeff Holman: Because it would just mean so much to him and all the effort, all the money he’s paid to me and my team to do this. Like, how do we do that? I was like, it was an emotional plea to the patent examiner.

Jeff Holman: I don’t do that often but I get that way with my clients and I’m like, sometimes it helps, sometimes it hurts. Right? And fortunately for Sam, we were able to work through that patent examiner granted the patent. Other times though, you know, our team was like, why are you doing this?

Jeff Holman: We’re losing money on this client. I’m like, well. I want this guy to win. You know, I want this client to get what I think they deserve out of this. And back to your point before, if I set up the relationship a little bit wrong if I set the expectation wrong, You know, so be it. I’m going to deliver on what I think they’re expecting from.

Jeff Holman: So, from a business perspective, you know, is that a flaw maybe in a way? I don’t think we lose really from it. It does cost and sometimes it hurts a little bit, sometimes it’s painful.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, I get that. We’ve done that a number of times where I’m like, no, this is like, we’re just going to do this, even though you know, we didn’t set this expectation. Right?

Richard Matthews: We’re not going to get paid for it [00:36:00] the way we should. It’s going to cost us money. Right.? So, like, if your business literally only cared about the bottom line, It’d be a flaw.

Richard Matthews: But also your business cares about the people, right? And the value you’re bringing to, them and the way that you’re working to change the world. And sometimes you eat the costs.

Jeff Holman: Yeah, no, I mean, I’m not to talk poorly about anybody, but that’s what the industry that I’m in is known for. Right? It’s like, we’re emotionless, heartless, battle-hardened lawyers who, you know, we just want to bill every minute of our day and if we get some of the client great if we don’t it doesn’t matter because we’re just feeding our own monster, right?

Jeff Holman: That perspective is not wrong for a lot of reasons. But again, it’s not how I like to practice, it’s not what’s fulfilling to me. And so.

Richard Matthews: So You built something new.

Jeff Holman: What’s that?

Richard Matthews: I said, so you built something new,

Jeff Holman: So I built something new. I’m like, let’s do it differently. Exactly.

Richard Matthews: Do differently. So I want to talk a little bit then about your common enemy, right? Every superhero has an arch-nemesis. I think that they constantly have to fight against in their world and the [00:37:00] world of business takes on a lot of forms, but generally speaking, we’d like to put it in the context of your clients, the right, the people that hire you or your firm.

Richard Matthews: And it’s a mindset or a flaw that you constantly have to fight to overcome so you can actually get your people the results that they came to you for. Right?

Richard Matthews: So in the world of someone hiring a fractional legal team, what’s a mindset or a flaw that they come to the table with that you constantly have to fight against as to provide the service that you provide?

Jeff Holman: I laugh a little bit, so I hope none of my clients think I’m talking about them, but I’m probably talking about all of them slightly, right? Same way I would criticize myself. I think that there is you know, I work with small businesses. I work probably like you do. I work with innovators creating new things.

Jeff Holman: People have dreams and they want to bring them to market. They want to see their baby come alive. And it’s a fascinating process and it’s a totally emotionally driven process for a lot of people.

Jeff Holman: And so I think the common enemy when I’m trying to work with the clients that I do, I think one of the common enemies that I struggle with that makes my job harder helping [00:38:00] them.

Jeff Holman: It honestly, it’s two things. It’s probably a little bit of ignorance and a lot of optimism, but honestly, without those two things, they probably wouldn’t have jumped, you know, two feet into this business anyways. Right?

Jeff Holman: They don’t quite know what everybody’s saying, well, if I knew then what I know now, I probably wouldn’t have tried it. Right?

Jeff Holman: But so you get these people who say, well, I don’t think there are any issues with this I’m just going to dive in and when I dive in, they’re not going to be sharks in the water. They’re not gonna be rocks, you know, under the surface. I’m gonna dive in. It’s gonna be awesome. And it’s never totally awesome. Sometimes it’s awesome at times and not at others.

Jeff Holman: But for the same reasons that they jumped into their business. And, you know, it just creates a little bit of chaos that they need legal help, but for those same reasons, they don’t know that they need legal help that they’re not, you don’t know what you don’t know.

Jeff Holman: And so there’s a lot of education that happens with early-stage founders and teams, because there is some ignorance and there is a lot of optimism and that [00:39:00] can lead to unnecessary legal problems.

Jeff Holman: You know, we go in oftentimes and we help, we come in when the legal problems have started to already pile up, you know, they’ve said, Hey, I’ve got this issue. I’ve got a partner, I told him I’d give him stock options, but I don’t know how to do that.

Jeff Holman: And it’s been a year and a half and I’ve never given them to him. And we just keep growing our business. And they just put that in the closet, legal skeleton, and put it away. And they’re like, Hey, I got this employee or this customer. And they said they were going to sue me. And like, I don’t have time for this. I’m too busy building my business. You know, put it in the closet.

Jeff Holman: And so they kind of, a lot of our clients, when they first call us the first time founder clients, especially, they call us when they’ve got a closet folder clients, especially they call I’m losing sleep.

Jeff Holman: Like I need somebody to have legal skeletons and they’re like, you know, that’s a result of it’s what makes the, it’s what makes.

Richard Matthews: Yeah.

Jeff Holman: It’s fun. And it was also what makes it possible for us to have the impact that we have. When we do come in and help do that cleanup. Yeah, I think you’re just giving me [00:40:00] a new perspective.

Richard Matthews: It’s giving a new perspective on the thing’

Jeff Holman: Get take two going no soup for you. So.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, the it’s an interesting sort of thing for the Attorneys and I know you mentioned that second-time founders and whatnot tend to have a different view of it and I noticed just in my own world, right? We’ve got our main company, right?

Richard Matthews: The push button podcast. And we’re working on this secondary company. And I know just because of the way we’re approaching the secondary company, that like the first thing that we started off with, it was like, Hey, we’ve got this nice big vision. Here’s our pitch deck. Here’s all the things we want to build.

Richard Matthews: And then like everything on the pitch deck has like, here’s the perceived challenges we think we’re going to run into. But.

Jeff Holman: You’ve been through it once and now you’re like, I think we got to create a more detailed plan to deal with what we know is coming. Right?

Richard Matthews: Yeah, so like here’s what the challenges were is like, I know the younger version of me doing the same thing would have just had the opportunities, right? And not the challenges.

Richard Matthews: And I know that’s a that’s a result of experience, but for what you’re saying is it’s also, it’s a fairly common first [00:41:00] time founder thing to not, because you don’t know what you don’t know, right?

Richard Matthews: You just don’t know the other side of those things. 

Jeff Holman: It’d be the same. It’s no different than if I take like, you know I’m on this journey with my law firm, right? I’m an entrepreneur as much as anybody else although a lot of people wouldn’t think of that with attorneys. But when I go out and I’m like, well, who’s my target market?

Jeff Holman: And what type of marketing channel should I be in? Should I be doing Facebook ads? Should I be doing podcast interviews? Should I be doing you know, webinars or creating white papers or picking any number of changes?

Jeff Holman: I mean on TV, you know, whatever. Or billboards. If I were a personal injury attorney, I’d be on billboards.

Jeff Holman: Like all these channels and I’ve got to do the same thing that you guys do that any other Entrepreneur does and I say well, I’ve got to I’ve got to kind of outline my opportunities Look at what the costs and risks are associated with those and then I’ve got to do a bunch of testing to see which one works, right?

Jeff Holman: And I’m going to learn some new things when I start testing because my background is of all the things I’ve done back. Marketing is not one of those, right? So I’m gonna learn stuff along the way and be like, Oh, that one worked, and that one [00:42:00] wasted a bunch of money, right? It’s no different.

Jeff Holman: So.

Richard Matthews: That’s crazy to me about almost all small business, you know, the legal chiropractic doctors, like a lot of them, they go to school to learn to be the technician, but they don’t learn the business side, right?

Richard Matthews: They don’t learn the marketing. They don’t learn the personnel. They don’t learn the HR. They don’t learn all the things that go into like, Oh, like there’s more to being a lawyer than practicing law.

Jeff Holman: Exactly. Now, imagine you have an engineering degree and from an engineering perspective, you’re like, well, I want to take a holistic, systematic approach to everything I do.

Jeff Holman: And so you’re like, well, if I’m going to do this, well, that’s going to have an impact here. And so I need to actually figure out this before I do.

Jeff Holman: Oh, that’s going to have two more impacts. And now you have this whole decision tree of things that are, like you said before, you’re like, well, I want to get it perfect before I launch anything and that is of all the perspectives or the personalities inside of me. If you want to call it that, like I have to suppress my engineering personality the most because while it brings great perspective.

Jeff Holman: [00:43:00] Sometimes a hindrance it at driving a business forward, or it would be a hindrance to getting clients the sufficient information they need in a timely manner, right?

Jeff Holman: A lot of our business clients just move too fast. We can’t create a systematic or a system-level perspective on everything we do for them.

Jeff Holman: So it’s an interesting balance, I’ll say.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. So with the common enemy being that first time, don’t know what you don’t know. Again, flip that coin over, you have the driving force, right?

Richard Matthews: So if the common enemy is what you fight against, your driving force is what you fight for, right? Just like Spider-Man fights to save New York or Batman fights to save Gotham or Google fights to index and categorize all the world’s information.

Richard Matthews: What I want to know is what you fight for in your business, your mission, so to speak?

Jeff Holman: So, I have a phrase. I adopted it, I don’t know, 10 or 12 years ago. And that phrase, I’ve actually trademarked it. I think it’s important It’s the phrase is innovate with confidence. What I fight for is because we work with innovators and I think you can define innovation in a lot of different ways.

Jeff Holman: Anybody [00:44:00] starting a business is probably innovating right there or, or should be innovating or not, because you’re, the odds are.

Richard Matthews: Where the value part is.

Jeff Holman: Yeah. If you don’t innovate, you don’t stand out. And if you don’t stand out, you can’t establish leadership. And you can’t say like, you don’t have a strategy, like having, being innovative is equivalent in a lot of ways to having a strategy in your business you know, creating that competitive, sustainable advantage.

Jeff Holman: And so, my goal has been for the last dozen years to help my clients innovate with confidence. And that of course, is just a really high-level tagline type statement, but it means a lot. And it means how do I educate my clients? How do I help them see further into the future than they can see right now?

Jeff Holman: How do I help them have the confidence in making decisions? Because a lot of what we do, especially when you talk about new businesses and launching products and putting $10,000 down to get a patent on something that doesn’t even exist yet. Like there’s a lot of speculative action that happens in small businesses.

Jeff Holman: And how do you maybe not have 100% [00:45:00] confidence in everything you’re doing, but how do you have more confidence? how do you remove the risks? How do you understand how fear is? You know, I’ve talked about this in some areas. There’s these four fears, right? How do the four fears kind of keep you from action?

Jeff Holman: How does taking action? Actually taking action is the only solution to actually overcoming fear, right? Because then what was known is now known. It might not be what you wanted it to be but it’s now known. And so there’s no reason to have fears.

Jeff Holman: So there’s innovating with confidence. It ties everything that I do together for sure.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, absolutely. And I love that as a tagline. Actually, I don’t particularly like the word tagline or slogan or anything. I like the word key message better, right? Cause it’s like the key message that your business is bringing to the world. Ours for push button podcasts is democratized, we democratize storytelling.

Richard Matthews: It looks like my camera is still being weird. Did it freeze

Jeff Holman: It’s frozen on my India.

Richard Matthews: My camera? There we go. Bring it back to life. So, yeah, we talk about democratizing storytelling, right? And that’s like, there’s so much more to it. Like you hear the word democratize storytelling and what does that mean? Right?

Richard Matthews: And I could probably spend an entire [00:46:00] podcast episode just talking about what that means and like how important it is to what we do and what we do for businesses, what we do for nonprofits, and what we do in the political space and like everything like it all comes back to that one thing is we democratize storytelling and you have the same kind of thing. It’s like, Hey, we bring innovation with confidence. Right?

Richard Matthews: And there’s a lot of depth there and you realize, okay, all businesses are working on innovating, right? Because otherwise, they wouldn’t be in business. Right?

Richard Matthews: And so if you’re trying to innovate, right? How do you innovate has with it carries with it a certain amount of risk and you know, entrepreneurs are already got a little bit of the crazy people who are like, No, I’m gonna take the risk.

Richard Matthews: And what you’re coming in and saying is like, Hey, we can actually show you how to take those risks confidently, right?

Richard Matthews: And know that you’re going to either protect yourself, protect your intellectual properties, protect the innovations that you’re doing, and then do them in a way that knows that you’ll be able to operate profitably without, you know, like losing those kinds of like there’s a lot of depth there.

Richard Matthews: When you really think about what is it? What does it mean to both to innovate with confidence?

Jeff Holman: Yeah, no, it is. And it’s been great. And I like democratizing [00:47:00] storytelling. That’s awesome, because the one thing I’m learning, I mentioned my own ignorance with marketing storytelling is where it’s at. You know, that’s, it’s a skill. It’s a skill that most engineers don’t have, right?

Jeff Holman: A lot of attorneys have it. And a lot of business people will have that too. But yeah, storytelling is probably the superpower that every business needs at some level to really, cause I can have my own, but if I don’t know how to get my message about innovate with innovating with confidence out to the masses, you know, through storytelling, then that message you know, lives and dies with me, and that’s not good for me or the people I think that will help. So storytelling is that vehicle, I believe.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. I have some pretty deep like thoughts on that, but it might be an interesting conversation for you. Are you familiar with the story of creation in the Bible?

Jeff Holman: Yeah.

Richard Matthews: So the story of creation is essentially that you know, God created the world and he spoke the universe into existence, right?

Richard Matthews: Let there be the heavens and light and all this kind of stuff. And he spoke it all into existence with the exception of human beings, right? We weren’t spoken into existence. We were formed by his hands out of the dust. And then he breathed life [00:48:00] into us.

Richard Matthews: And my contention is that breath of life, that spark of divinity is our ability to tell stories, our ability to speak a future into an existence.

Richard Matthews: And it’s, which makes storytelling, not something that humans do, but something that is quintessentially human, right? It’s the that spark of divinity that we have.

Richard Matthews: And so the mission for our company is to, well, it’s to basically make people aware of that and then teach them how to do it well, because if you can do it well and you can do it intentionally, then you can create the future that you want to create for yourself, right?

Richard Matthews: And create the future for your clients and for your staff and for the world that, you know, the value that you’re trying to put into the world is all going to come back to your ability to tell your story about what you do and hence the term democratizing storytelling.

Jeff Holman: I haven’t heard that application of the creation story before. But it makes a lot of sense. And I’ve heard, think we’ve all heard somebody say, you know, the thing that makes humans different from all the other animals is our ability to rationalize. Right?

Jeff Holman: But I’ve heard it differently. And I believe I’ve heard it differently. I could be wrong and I don’t know who to attribute it to now at [00:49:00] this point from all the podcasts I’ve listened to. But I think I’ve heard somebody say in the past, you know, the real differentiator between us and the rest of the animals is our ability to tell stories.

Jeff Holman: That’s what makes us different. Maybe that has something to do with rationality or not, I don’t know, but yeah our ability to sort of.

Richard Matthews: Is a symptom. Storytelling is the cause, right? And I like, I went to if you’ve ever been to San Diego Zoo you know, it’s one of the biggest zoos in the world.

Richard Matthews: And I remember one time I was there, and we’re riding on the tour bus with the lady, and she’s talking and doing all this stuff, and they’re all, generally whoever’s on the tour bus doing the guided tour, they’re all really good.

Richard Matthews: But this one lady, she like, she really understood what she was doing. And we get to the end of the tour and she said something that stuck with me for probably 20 years now.

Richard Matthews: And she said, she’s at the end of the tour and she’s like, so there, I want to talk about the difference between every creature that we just looked at and you guys, right?

Richard Matthews: And the people here on this bus. And the difference is essentially that you tell their stories. Right? You tell the animal stories. That’s why we can do the conservation. That’s why we can help these creatures. That’s why we have like all the Botanical Gardens, everything here, the zoo.

Richard Matthews: We’re the only [00:50:00] creatures on the planet that do what we do. We tell our stories and we tell the stories of all the other creatures. No, there’s no tiger out there telling the stories of other creatures, right?

Richard Matthews: Like, it’s just not the way the world works, but humans do. We tell their stories and he, and she’s like, that’s the baseline of conservation, which is what Sandy goes, it was about his conservation. And that really stuck with me for a long time that there’s something about storytelling that makes us different than everyone else in the animal, everything else in the animal kingdom.

Jeff Holman: That’s fascinating cause what she did. What I’ve received from those tours is a lot of information. You know, you go to a new city, you go to a place and you get all this information about the city. What she did is she took it to the next level, like you’re saying, and she just turned information into empowerment.

Jeff Holman: She’s like, here’s how you get to take all this information. I mean, obviously, she created that new perspective for you. Like, Oh, I just learned all about these tigers, but now I kind of understand I have a responsibility to, I’m empowered to take the next action with all that information I have.

Jeff Holman: That’s, that’s fascinating.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, it was just an admission from her that like the [00:51:00] reason conservation works, the reason why we can have an impact on our ecology and our biology and all this stuff that’s happening here at the zoo is because we tell these animals stories and then you go out and you tell them to other people. Right?

Richard Matthews: And that’s how the conservation efforts grow. Why not? And anyway, I just thought it was a really, you know, for someone who’s obsessed with storytelling and runs a company about it. It was a really interesting way to look at that.

Jeff Holman: You know, I had somebody tell me that I spent some time in Peru when I was younger and somebody, when I was leaving, somebody said to me, Hey, you’re going back to the United States. We’re staying here. You know, they were Peruvian. We’re staying here. You’re going back to the United States. You are now our ambassador.

Jeff Holman: You get to bring, you get to tell everybody else that you know in the United States about Peru and the Peruvians and the experiences you’ve had.

Jeff Holman: So, in a way, I’ve never made the connection, but that’s like, that person did the same thing to me that the tour bus guy did with you. You know, empowered you and challenged you in a way to take that action.

Jeff Holman: That’s interesting.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, I love it. And anyways, we can talk forever [00:52:00] about democratizing storytelling because it’s my passion in life, but I do, I want to talk a little bit about something that’s very practical to your business, right?

Richard Matthews: And that we call that on the show, your hero’s tool belt. Right? And just like every superhero has their tool belt with awesome gadgets like batarangs or web slingers or laser eyes or, you know, big magic hammers, they can spin around and fly with, I don’t talk about the top one or two tools you couldn’t live without to do what you do.

Richard Matthews: It could be anything from your notepad, your calendar, to your marketing tools, to something that you do for your actual service delivery, something you think is essential to getting your job done on a daily basis as an entrepreneur running a fractional legal team.

Jeff Holman: You’ve just ignited the engineer in me and I’ve got about a dozen things that I think are all part of my tool belt. I won’t go into all.

Jeff Holman: Yeah, let me tell you that too, really quick. And I’m not going to go into much detail here, but the number one tool belt in my business that I bring to the table is a framework for strategy.

Jeff Holman: I won’t go into detail in it, but a strategy has five parts and you got to have all five parts to be a strategy because every client that I work with, whether they’re a small business, big business individual, like in order [00:53:00] to be, you know, an innovator and innovate with confidence like you need to be thinking about strategy in a particular way and nobody breaks down strategy that I found all the books I’ve read.

Jeff Holman: Nobody breaks it down into really comprehensive, understandable way. It always means something different depending on who you talk to. So having a very universal framework for strategy is something that I believe.

Richard Matthews: Have like simple like five words to go over like what the five stages are? I’d love to hear them.

Jeff Holman: There and maybe we’ll just maybe this we’ll just talk about this one tool though.

Jeff Holman: Strategy is a plan and not surprisingly the plan to deploy valuable resources for a competitive advantage. For a business leadership position which I think is the one that most people miss.

Jeff Holman: We have to be deploying these resources for a competitive advantage to obtain a business leadership position in your industry or whatever market, however, you define it within a competitive environment.

Jeff Holman: And I think that you can take that definition of strategy to [00:54:00] any business out there and you can apply it. You don’t need to be talking about, you know, I heard together. Like I don’t know how to make those fit I could do it but I can’t replicate it because they don’t really fit whereas these it’s I think they just fit, they flow.

Jeff Holman: You got to have all five there If you have those five you got a strategy if you’re missing one of those you don’t really have a strategy.

Jeff Holman: You’ve got a plan or you’ve got a goal or you’ve got a vision or something, but it’s not a strategy if you’re not thinking about all those things.

Jeff Holman: And I do think the key out of all those that most people miss is you’ve got to be saying, well, what is the business leadership position that I’m working towards?

Jeff Holman: Most of the time that falls into one of two camps. It’s either a market or brand leadership. You know, like an apple. I’m creating leadership toward being the number one brand. I have pricing, like, I can charge what I want. I have better margins because I’m the leader on the other camp is a price leader where price leader really means that you’re not that you’re charging the most.

Jeff Holman: It means that you’re optimizing your pricing and cost structures the best so that you can essentially underprice everybody else and still make a meaningful [00:55:00] margin and you can offer the best price to the market and so you know It’s a Walmart type of player they’re their price leaders, they can take and they can outprice anybody because their cost structure is so much better managed or you know, maybe sometimes forcefully so than anybody else, right?

Richard Matthews: Every stage of their entire distribution channel to be able to do that.

Jeff Holman: Every stage. So you’re really if you’ve got a plan to achieve a goal in smart goals and some amount of time, that’s totally fine. If you want to take that into the realm of strategy, though, you need to say, how does that plan and that smart goal on that timeline help us become the leader in our space, you know, a particular type of leadership position?

Jeff Holman: Add that in and you have a strategy. Without that, I think we’re missing it. I think a lot of people are, you know, floating around. There’s a lot of strategy consulting that it doesn’t, like, it’s cool. It’s fun to talk about, but it doesn’t drive to any real objective a lot of times because you don’t know what to do with it, right?

Jeff Holman: And so, that’s a framework that I bring in we’ll do we do strategy calls with, [00:56:00] you know, clients and potential clients around that specifically and it’s pretty different, other attorneys don’t do that.

Richard Matthews: It’s really useful. I like, I almost feel like we should schedule a second podcast interview just to like go through that strategy framework for people because that like I’ve never heard it put like that.

Richard Matthews: you know, we do a lot of business strategy and a lot of train areas and mastermind groups and whatnot.

Richard Matthews: And I love how simple that framework is. And like, I can see in our own, like the other startup we’re working on, I can see the elements of those things. I’m like, okay, so, but maybe we should talk about them specifically in those ways. Cause yeah, that’s, you’re right. That’s how you build a strategy.

Jeff Holman: We’ll chat on another podcast or offline and we’ll talk about it. I’m happy to. Like, this is the stuff I love to do, right? This is why I’m here.

Richard Matthews: So, I got one more question for you here and that is about your guiding principles. Right? One of the things that makes heroes heroic is that they live by a code. For instance, Batman never kills his enemies. He only ever brings them to Arkham Asylum or, you know, if you get deep into the Spider-Man comic universe, you find out that he always pulls his punches because he’s afraid that you know, he’ll hurt someone if he punches them as hard as [00:57:00] he actually could.

Richard Matthews: So as we wrap up the interview, I want to talk about the top one or two principles that you use regularly in your life. Maybe something you wish you had known when you started out on your own hero’s journey.

Jeff Holman: I’m gonna go the easy route. I’m gonna tell you what our core values are at the law firm. And they’re not that exciting. It’s not like have fun or whatever. But the way I’ve designed my firm is probably parallel to the way I live my life in a lot of ways.

Jeff Holman: And so I think it applies. But we have five, core values, we call them. Other people might think, well, those aren’t very cool core values, but it doesn’t matter. You know, strategy is the beginning of ours, right?

Jeff Holman: Strategy is the first one because if you’re not strategic, you’re missing that L that, that spark in your business.

Jeff Holman: I think trust and a lot of these will come because you’ll be like, Oh yeah, attorney, this is, this makes sense. Trust is another one. There’s a lot of things you can do to build or break trust in a business, any integrity, that kind of stuff.

Jeff Holman: Yeah, for sure. Advocacy. Our business is all about advocating for our clients. Like, well, like we’re here to advocate.

Jeff Holman: If we’re doing stuff to build, to increase our billings, as opposed to helping you out, like that’s, we’re failing to advocate. And I want that to be top of [00:58:00] mind for my team. Right? And anybody we work with, I want to know, like, our goal is to advocate call us out if we’re not doing it, right?

Jeff Holman: Leadership. There’s a lot of times leadership to me means stepping in and making recommendations with, you know, kind of with confidence in a way like, like being able to be the leader in the situation say, Hey, leadership is not just like a position. It’s like who’s going to step up and actually recommend a practical action to move this thing forward?

Jeff Holman: And a lot of time you get into big, big meetings and everybody’s talking. Well, these are the problems and these are the opportunities and nobody will say, Hey, listen, here’s what next step in this next step is to do X, Y, Z.

Jeff Holman: And part of what we need to do as attorneys because we’re counselors and I think we’re really are in leadership positions, whether people would say the same or not, we need to be able to say, well, given everything you’ve told me, taking it all in, mixing it together with my expertise, my knowledge, my experience, you know, here’s what needs to happen and people need that you don’t go to the doctor and have the doctor just tell you, oh, well, yeah, I see you’ve got a runny nose and your temperature is high.

Jeff Holman: And so, [00:59:00] you know, yeah. If you leave that meeting and sometimes doctors do this and the doctor says, well, we’ll just watch that You’re like, what do you mean? Just watch that I came here. I like, like, help me out. What do I need to do? I don’t want to go home and

Richard Matthews: Your actions to take,

Richard Matthews: Yeah,

Jeff Holman: like what, like show some leadership here, dude. You know, so that’s leadership to me. And then the last one is expertise. I mean, we need to be deep experts in what we do. That’s nobody’s going to come to us if we’re not the expert in patents or trademarks or contracts or fundraising, whatever it might be like, it’s essential to our business to be experts.

Jeff Holman: Those are all. So those are the five core values that we have. I think that’s a really driving force for what I do. Personally, the one I would add to that is fairness. I’m all about being a fair person, I believe. but it’s not one that we’ve adopted.

Richard Matthews: I love that you don’t have to reference anything. You just have the core values. You know them by heart, right? And that is very telling for anyone who has worked in business for any length of time that the business owners who know their core values. You know, they run a different kind of organization.

Richard Matthews: And that’s it’s powerful.

Jeff Holman: It’s helpful. So.

Richard Matthews: That [01:00:00] is basically a wrap on our interview, but I do finish every interview with a simple challenge I call the hero’s challenge. And we do this to help get access to stories that we might not otherwise find on our own.

Richard Matthews: So the question is simple. Do you have someone in your life or in your network that you think has a cool entrepreneurial story with the work that you do?

Richard Matthews: I imagine you have a lot, but who are they? First names are fine. And why do you think they should come to share their story with us here on the hero show? First person that comes to mind for you.

Jeff Holman: I work with a lot of times, Jay runs some really cool kinds of, he runs two or three different companies. Some of those companies are in marketing. Some are in CPG commerce products. He’s a great guy. J Damian on the storytelling side, you would have a blast talking with Damian, one of the most creative geniuses really that I know.

Jeff Holman: Alex is an awesome entrepreneur. He’s not the frontline guy in terms of like, the Face of like a product business or something like that but he’s the guy that runs the business that makes the other businesses run if that makes sense. I have a lot of guys I could tell but those are a few.

Richard Matthews: So, we’ll reach out after and see if maybe we can get a couple of introductions, get someone to come on the show. We don’t always get yeses, but when we do, sometimes we get some [01:01:00] unique, interesting stories because not everyone is out doing the podcast rounds like you and I might be doing.

Richard Matthews: So, you know, to finish off the show in comic books, there’s always the crowd of people at the end who are cheering and clapping for the acts of heroism.

Richard Matthews: So as we close I want to know where people can find you if they want your help in the future. Where can they light up the bat signal, so to speak, and say, hey, you know what, I think a fractional legal team might be exactly what we need.

Richard Matthews: And more importantly than where, is who are the best people to reach out to and ask for your help?

Jeff Holman: Listen anybody who wants to cheer me on can reach out anytime, Anywhere, but the best place to reach me and the people who should reach me are Startups and small businesses. I mean, that’s just that’s the world I live in. I understand your chaos. I actually like it. I like solving it a little bit where I can startups and scaling businesses should reach out.

Jeff Holman: They can find me on LinkedIn. I’m pretty active there. I post a fair amount, but I’m available through DMs all the time. And if you get on LinkedIn, you find somebody named Jeff Holman, it’ll say something about building fractional legal teams. That’s me. I’m the only [01:02:00] guy that you’re going to find with that.

Jeff Holman: And then the other thing we do, as I mentioned before, for prospective clients, we’ll do a strategy call, a free 30-minute strategy call with people. And that’s where we just kind of hear about your business, what are the business milestones you’re working towards, and what are the legal steps that we can add into your business milestones to help you kind of understand what your road map would look like for the next 12 to 18 months, and we kind of do that within the framework of the strategy definition and factors that I mentioned before.

Jeff Holman: So, I like doing that. I always like meeting cool and interesting people working on cool and interesting things. So, you know, you can get onto our website, IntellectualStrategies.com. You can book a call from there pretty easily.

Richard Matthews: Awesome. Thank you so much, Jeff, for coming on and sharing your perspective and your story with us here on the show today. If you’re listening and anything that Jeff has said or that we’ve talked about has gotten any sort of desire for you to talk to a legal team as someone who’s been there and done this a couple of times having legal representation, especially someone who knows what you’re doing and it’s been there and can advocate as a business owner, right?

Richard Matthews: As a business owner themselves, I would definitely take the time to [01:03:00] reach out to Jeff. And again, I said, I appreciate you coming on and sharing your story with us today. You have any final words of wisdom for the audience for hit this a stop record button?

Jeff Holman: I’m going to say it’s been my pleasure, Richard. Thanks so much for having me.

Richard Matthews: Awesome. Thank you.