People First w/ Jesse Jones | Ep. 203

This week on Biz/Dev, we sit down with Jesse Jones, founder of Fourscore Law, for a conversation every new business owner should hear.

Jesse breaks down the legal essentials in a way that actually makes sense — the practical steps founders can take to protect themselves before the stress hits. But he also lets us in on something deeper: the future he’s building and why taking care of his people is the foundation of it.

It’s a grounded, generous conversation about risk, leadership, and what it really takes to build a business that lasts.

LINKS:

Fourscore Law on LinkedIn

Jesse on LinkedIn

Fourscore Law Website

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David Baxter has been designing, building, and advising startups and businesses for over ten years. His passion, knowledge, and brutal honesty have helped dozens of companies get their start.

In Biz/Dev, David and award-winning Creative Director Gary Voigt talk about current events and how they affect the world of startups, entrepreneurship, software development, and culture.

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Transcript

[00:00:00] David: I think that is something that every business, regardless, it's so much easier to sell a second pair of pants to your first customer than it is to find another person to buy your pants. 

[00:00:09] Jesse: You guys sell pants?

[00:00:11] David: Sell a lot of pants, tons of Big Pixel pants, they're perfect.

They're like hammer pants, but they're bright orange.

[00:00:18] Gary: We're coming out with overalls this spring. 

[00:00:21] David: Gary's wearing them right now. You just can't see it. 'cause he's on the zoom.

[00:00:28] David: Hi everyone. Welcome to the Biz Dev Podcast, the podcast about developing your business. I'm David Baxter, your host, joined Per Usual by Gary Voight. Hello, sir.

[00:00:37] Gary: Hello. Hello. Good to see you again.

[00:00:39] David: It's been so long. Like 10 minutes. 

[00:00:42] Gary: Don't tell everybody that they don't know that

[00:00:44] David: we don't talk outside of this. It's that true.

I wish it 

[00:00:47] Gary: constantly harass me over Slack.

[00:00:49] David: I absolutely do. Yes. Because if you would just do your job better, I wouldn't have to anyway. More importantly, we are joined today by my favorite Ken Doll, Jesse Jones, who is,

[00:01:01] Gary: His job is beach.

[00:01:02] David: he's lawyer, Ken.

It's beautiful. Jesse and I were on a podcast together a month ago. Yeah, about a month ago. And we had such a good time that we we decided to keep the party going. So Jesse welcome.

[00:01:14] Jesse: Thank you guys. I can see what kind of episode this is already gonna be.

[00:01:17] David: it's already off the rails. It's

[00:01:18] Gary: extremely professional,

[00:01:20] David: We are nothing but pros. Alright, we're gonna start out. And I was inspired by Sariah, who is the host of our, the podcast we did together. She'd started out with some lighthearted questions and I really dug that, so we stole that from her.

Thank you, Sariah. So here we go. It is almost Thanksgiving as we record this. I think we're gonna, it'll be after Thanksgiving when it airs, but we're gonna stick with a little bit of a theme. So Turkey, are you a Turkey guy

or something else? A Turkey guy.

[00:01:49] Jesse: I'm a Turkey guy. I actually have been the Turkey preparer for the last 10 years probably.

[00:01:56] David: Nice, nice. Do you do it old school? Do you spatchcock that sucker? What do you do?

[00:02:00] Jesse: no, I've never done that, but I do use I believe my grandmother's method of a plastic baking bag, 

[00:02:08] David: Oh, all right. You just suffocated. All 

[00:02:11] Gary: and bake. 

[00:02:12] Jesse: that's right.

[00:02:13] David: all right. You know 

[00:02:14] Jesse: there.

[00:02:15] David: the one time I've ever been around someone f frying a Turkey was with Gary's brother, Jeff. That is not, that is scary, dude. Like he

did a great job. Don't get me wrong. Oh, those things scare me to death. I just.

[00:02:27] Gary: Yeah, it's fun watching all the people sit their house on fire doing it in their garage during Thanksgiving.

[00:02:33] David: oil and

[00:02:34] Jesse: there there's a, there is a whole, probably multiple montages of

YouTube videos of people, mishaps on deep fried Turkey. The best ones are when they throw this, the frozen solid Turkey into the boiling oil.

[00:02:47] Gary: Yeah.

[00:02:47] David: just drop

it on 

[00:02:48] Jesse: like a rocket. That thing, it breaches the atmosphere up there.

[00:02:52] David: There must be. Hospitals must just be full of those idiots anyway. All right, so football or soccer.

[00:03:00] Jesse: Oh my gosh, I do not wanna talk about football right now. I'm a huge Eagles fan and that game last night was just depressing as all get out. So 

[00:03:10] David: I'm gonna pretend I know what you're talking about. So cool.

[00:03:12] Jesse: Yeah. Okay. I'm not gonna talk about it then. Good.

[00:03:15] David: Gary, are you a football or soccer guy? You look like a soccer guy. 'cause you're that dill hole looking dude.

[00:03:20] Gary: Oh yeah, I appreciate that. No I grew up a football guy and then lost interest in professional football and started gaining interest in watching professional soccer or football, as they say in my country. So

[00:03:34] David: your

[00:03:34] Jesse: What's your 

[00:03:35] Gary: yeah.

[00:03:35] David: Florida. 

[00:03:36] Gary: Yeah.

[00:03:37] Jesse: Florida?

[00:03:38] Gary: We spell it FUT with the accent mark, BOL.

[00:03:42] David: Wow. I don't believe

that 

[00:03:44] Gary: think I actually 

[00:03:45] David: man articles to think that you guys are that sophisticated. 

[00:03:48] Gary: I watch more soccer than football now. I'll put it that way. I'll.

[00:03:52] David: Here's something I was, so I'm doing Duolingo for Italian for my wife, and I dream of going there someday and speaking. It's not gonna happen, but that's a dream. And I was surprised to find out that ev, like a lot of different languages, have different words for soccer. I thought we were the only idiots. The, like everybody else I, in my, the way they implied that soccer is the worldwide calls it football in some sort of accent or whatever, football or whatever. But no, they all have their own word for it and I'm like, why are you making fun of the Americans? Then? We just call it soccer, whatever, and

[00:04:25] Jesse: Do they have 

[00:04:26] Gary: they make fun of the Americans 'cause they don't really use their feet and football too often.

It's 

[00:04:32] David: Oh for sure. For sure.

[00:04:34] Jesse: do other languages have, I have a Duolingo point for you too, but do other languages have a word for American football?

[00:04:42] Gary: Yeah. American 

[00:04:43] David: probably 

[00:04:43] Jesse: amer American football.

[00:04:44] Gary: thank God American football.

[00:04:47] Jesse: Yeah.

[00:04:47] David: Italian is Calcho and so it's okay, that's sounds more like soccer than football. But anyway. Alright. I've, we've already, Gary, you're supposed to stop this. Alright.

[00:04:55] Jesse: We are off the rails. But let me tell you my Duolingo story because it's about Italian. I I did du yeah, I did Duolingo I don't know, probably five years ago

and I was gonna do Spanish because I feel like I would use that more, 

[00:05:09] David: That's way more useful. Yes.

[00:05:10] Jesse: Yeah, but my wife wanted me to do Italian. She studied abroad in Italy.

Her family's from Italy, et cetera. I, no joke, I had a 1000 day streak on Duolingo, 

[00:05:21] David: Nice. I'm at three 50 myself.

[00:05:23] Jesse: I don't know anything. Can't say anything.

[00:05:25] Gary: You just make sure you press the button to get the little 

gamification rewards. 

[00:05:29] David: I tell you, it's, I've learned a lot of words. But I am pretty sure the only thing I could do is order a coffee right now. If an actual Italian came up and spoke to me at all, one, it'd be way too fast. And two, and this is a year of doing it right? I'm not new at it.

I've been doing this for a year, and I'm pretty sure. If I spoke back to them, I would sound like Lenny from Mice and Men, and it would be bad. It would be really bad, but I can order a coffee. That's as far as I got.

[00:06:01] Gary: See my wife is also Italian. So the Italian that I learned from her makes me sound like I'm in Goodfellas 'cause she's from New

[00:06:09] David: you, yeah, I

was about to say, you can't say any of those words on the podcast. That's

[00:06:12] Gary: no.

[00:06:13] David: all right. One more, one more. Are you a movie theater guy or do you stream it all at home now?

[00:06:20] Jesse: that's a good question. I'm not a big movie guy, period. But we definitely have watched more movies streaming at home. But I'm not opposed to going, it's just that I've got four kids, so if we're all gonna go, it's $150 

[00:06:33] David: Yeah.

It's a, it is a serious night out. Yeah.

So what was the last movie you saw in the theaters? Do you even remember?

[00:06:39] Jesse: Yes, I do. It was in July and it was How to Train Your Dragon.

[00:06:48] David: the live action one.

[00:06:50] Jesse: Yep.

[00:06:50] Gary: That was actually really good. 

[00:06:52] David: It's not bad. Not bad.

I don't know why they had to make it since the original. It still was three quarters.

CGI like what is the point? Anyway, we just saw Wicked two last weekend on imax.

That's how you do it, my friend. 

[00:07:04] Jesse: That's right.

[00:07:06] David: All righty. Now the fun part is now we're gonna get really serious. First you just gotta tell me what is, what do you do for a living? I know you're a lawyer, but tell the fans 

[00:07:16] Jesse: yeah. That, that I am. Fourscore Business Law is a law firm where we basically work with business owners and entrepreneurs.

[00:07:24] David: I.

[00:07:24] Jesse: most of our work falls into one of three buckets. We do a lot of venture financing work, so we represent mostly companies that are raising outside capital. And, most of those are usually technology companies.

They're software, med device, iot, some other kind of technology

we do. Yeah. What's not ai? We we do a lot of m and a mergers and acquisitions transactions. So we help people buy companies and sell their businesses, and that's very broad. We do a lot of technology work, but also like professional services, blue collar businesses anything really from the business standpoint, we've probably touched on an MA deal.

And then the third bucket is out just outside general counsel work. So we serve as outside. For companies that aren't big enough to really need to hire a full-time attorney and don't have a general counsel's office, we serve as outside general counsel for them. So that's more of the block and tackling everyday legal stuff.

[00:08:19] David: Is that the fancy word for ad hoc lawyering for businesses.

[00:08:23] Jesse: I mean it's there's a fractional C-suite craze, and that's the, that's the lawyer version of the fractional,

[00:08:30] Gary: retainer. 

[00:08:31] Jesse: counsel. Yeah.

[00:08:31] David: So I know I, I don't wanna dive into this, but I'm, this is a genuine question. So we've had several m and a guys who run m and a firms and they help people sell their businesses and buy businesses, all that kind of stuff. What is the difference between what you do for those people and what that company does?

At some point it's just a bunch of contracts. So are they doing what you do? They're not lawyers. So I Are they just coming to you? Are they just white labeling your kind of services Anyways.

[00:08:56] Jesse: it depends on it. They shouldn't be, if they're not lawyers and they're doing the contract drafting and other type of legal work, that's not, they shouldn't be doing that. But it really depends on the size of the deal. When we're we have done deals, sub million dollar deals are pretty small and, anything, probably anything under.

Two or $3 million. Like it's not uncommon that there really isn't an m and a advisor. But you have and finish that thought. In cases where there isn't an m and a advisor, a lot of times we end up helping with the business negotiation in addition to like the legal drafting and getting the thing documented and getting it to closing.

But there's like three. I don't know. I got maybe two demarcation points where you have on the very small deals you have like business brokers, which are like that's more like a main street, somebody's gonna sell a restaurant maybe or 

[00:09:49] David: Yeah, Like you're selling a car wash.

[00:09:51] Jesse: Yeah. But a car wash could be a huge deal too, but if it's like a single, independent, sole location, restaurant, car wash, whatever, something like that. That's like a broker deal. And a lot of times those deals are so small that they'll sometimes they get done without a lawyer, so like it might be a $150,000 deal.

And they have a business broker that has a has like a, some template purchase agreement and just a bunch of template documents. And they basically give those documents to their client and say, you can use these. And, it's a really small deal. If everything goes well, it'll be fine.

If things don't go well, it'll probably be a mess, but it's a really small deal, and then you have things that are really large, like you're talking about, like Wall Street Investment Bank Type M and a transactions,

Half a billion dollars and up kind of things. But they're gonna be like full fledged investment banks.

And those are not the deals that we're typically working on. We're not doing billion dollar deals every day or ever. We never have. Maybe, I don't know, it might be horrible, but those are, they're gonna have an army of attorneys and multiple m and a advisors who are investment bankers working on the business, the business terms basically.

And then you have the stuff that like falls in between. They're roughly and maybe a little bit smaller than an eight figure deal, but 5, 6, 7, $8 million and up to maybe, maybe a 50, 80, a hundred million dollars deal maybe where there's there is gonna be an m and a advisor, but they're like a boutique investment bank.

It's a much more condensed team. So you might have one or two m and a advisors on the business side. You might have. A handful of lawyers working on the transaction. So we end up working with those people a lot unless it's a deal that's so small that they don't even have an MA advisor, where like it's just, they have a customer that wants to buy them out, or they have a partner they've worked with that they're gonna acquire, or they have some other type of relationship with, the buyer or the seller that they already know who the buyer or seller is.

They already know what the target is if we're on the buy side, or they already know who's gonna buy the company from them if they're on the sell side. And then they might just come to us and they don't really have an MA advisor. 

[00:12:05] David: So that brings up an interesting question. Back in the day, Uber was really famous for just diving in and they weren't asking permission, they were asking forgiveness, Right,

They would blow through cities and set business up and, they didn't care about the legality of it

and their hope was, I'm so big by the time the lawyers catch up that what are you gonna do? am sure that startups are, have dreams and they're thinking they're gonna follow that playbook as a lawyer. What is that? It seemed to work out pretty well for Uber, but is that something you typically say, I'm not looking and go do what you gotta do? Or is it, dude, I do not recommend that, and here's why.

Because for every Uber, there's 37 that are just

buried under legal bills.

[00:12:53] Jesse: there's not, it's not 37. I'm sure there's a lot more than that, but the ultimately our, we, we are not, like the lawyer in the deal is not, or the lawyer in the business is not like the ultimate decision maker. So our job is really to help the decision makers understand what the risk points are.

At the end of the day, you can't run the business based on trying to avoid legal risk. That's something you need to know about because it might, it might sway you to make one decision versus another, but if you're trying to avoid all risk, then don't do anything.

[00:13:30] David: Sure you're

not gonna be an entrepreneur. 

[00:13:33] Jesse: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Very often what we're all we're doing is understanding the documentation that's involved in whatever the situation is, explaining how it works. If it's a really, if our client's a really small company, they don't have any leverage, they're, we're not gonna waste time trying to negotiate it.

It's just, this is how it works. Do you want to do it or not? And it's not, the ultimate decision is not up to us. It's, it, we can we give advice, but but yeah, if the strategy is just go out there as fast as you can and try to stay ahead of any kind of regulatory, action, then you better have a really good plan and a way to scale very quickly, because otherwise you prob that's not gonna work most of the time.

I would not normally, that would not probably be the recommended approach, but, you make a good point. It worked for Uber. It's probably worked for a number of other companies, but there's, many businesses where that's not really a viable strategy.

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[00:15:06] David: So I wanna back up. I know from our previous podcast you've been running Fourscore for about eight years.

Take me back to those early days 'cause I always like to hear origin stories. But I'm curious if it's different.

And most people, if I'm coming out with a product, I'm selling a pair of jeans or whatever, I gotta go tell people about it. But I'm wondering, is legal lawyers the same thing, or is it like doctors, I imagine you hang up a shingle and people are so desperate for a good doctor that people just start calling you.

Is it like that for lawyers?

[00:15:37] Jesse: probably a little bit. Like I, I started Fourscore in 2017, but I had been practicing for probably 8, 7, 8 years before that, and had been in Raleigh for five years before that. There was a little bit of, there was already a network. I think it would be really hard to start a law firm.

If you want to have any kind of local presence or client base to wherever you are, it would be hard to start a law firm. Like it would be hard to move and just start a law firm, but because I was already here and already had some relationships with people, there was a little bit of oh, you are doing this on your own now.

I've been looking to get this kind of help. Maybe you can help me with it. But yeah, there's still a lot of there's a lot of effort that we put into marketing and making sure people know who we are. Right now, we're actually really trying to work on strategically engaging our existing clients

because I can't, I the most frustrating thing to me we've probably done.

I don't know, probably 50 deals like licensed deals with companies that spin out of IP that's owned by NC State.

[00:16:53] David: Sure.

[00:16:54] Jesse: and very often those comp like the, in almost every case, not every case, but almost every case, the inventor of the IP is a professor at the university. And this is the way it works at Duke and Carolina and Stanford and MIT and all, all these places.

And the professors in most cases is not gonna be the business lead. Like they need to hire a CEO and they need to do all this stuff to like, try to actually commercialize the intellectual property. And so we pro, but for example, at NC State, you can't get, you can't even get a license. Like the professor that invented the thing can't even get a license to the patent until they have an entity set up.

The university will not license it to an individual person. So 50 times we have met with the professor, set up some kind of an entity for them, help 'em through the license phase and then they're out there either trying to do it themselves or they're trying to find a CEO or a team to build this company around.

Anyway, long story to get to the point it that one of the most frustrating things for me has been to see some of those companies that we helped at the very earliest stage and then they disappeared for a while. Then I'll run into, somebody that's involved and just be like, Hey, how you doing?

They're like, oh, we just raised our series A, we raised $10 million. And I'm like, what do you mean? What do you mean? Why didn't you like, and and it just dawned on me like, that's not their fault, that's our fault. We didn't stay in touch with 'em. We didn't have a good strategy for engaging them in what we could help with.

And we probably could have made it easier for 'em, if we had been. A little bit more proactive. So we're I'm hoping that, I can never tell that story, like a new story of that situation again. And so there, but it's, it is marketing and it's just, it's marketing to people that we already have a relationship with to make sure that they know how we can help them and that we know what they're looking for, so that if it's not something we can actually help with, whatever, it's a CPA or they actually need help on a patent side.

Like we don't do patent work, we have clients that need that kind of stuff, and we'll bring in a great patent attorney from outside of Fourscore. But trying to reach out and build a an existing client engagement process is is something that we're diving into right now.

[00:19:02] David: I know. There's that old business ad adage that it is so much easier to make money on existing clients than it's to find a new client. There's numbers behind that I'm gonna forget, but that is a hundred percent true. And usually, even in tech, we follow the same sort of thing. We have our lane that we do, but we try very hard to just become their tech.

[00:19:22] Jesse: Yeah.

[00:19:22] David: whatever you need tech, because now you know, now this is my sandbox. And if you let in that guy who does something, that we don't do, oh, a WordPress site for instance, we don't really do those. Though, that guy's gonna be like, get a whiff of the bigger project that we're on and they're gonna, they're gonna start trying to, get that project

and we find if we can just be whatever they need.

If that means we gotta bring on an outside guy for that, then. I find that is much, much better. But Yeah.

I think that is something that every business, regardless, it's so much easier to sell a second pair of pants to your first customer than it is to find another person to buy your pants. 

[00:20:00] Jesse: You guys sell pants?

[00:20:02] David: Sell a lot of pants, tons of Big Pixel pants, they're perfect.

They're like hammer pants, but they're bright orange.

[00:20:09] Gary: We're coming out with overalls this spring. 

[00:20:12] David: Gary's wearing them right now. You just can't see it. 'cause he's on the zoom. But alright, so here's an out there question. If you were the lawyer Czar of America, what would you change about your profession?

[00:20:26] Jesse: Oh, that's a great question. I actually know exactly what I would do.

[00:20:31] David: All

[00:20:32] Jesse: I do because we are very we are very focused on our profession and wanting to raise the bar for our industry. And the, I started in a couple of, I was in a couple of much bigger law firms early in my career.

What they do really well is train. They teach young lawyers how to actually, practice the type of law that they do. But what they do very poorly, although I think it is intentional, is it's just a, it's a complete burnout machine. It's a we'll keep you for three or four years and then you'll burn out and we'll get somebody else.

And, that's how, that's how it works. And so I would, I guess it's twofold. We, one of the things we've done at Fourscore since the beginning is we actually pay our people a vacation bonus if they take off five days in a row. So I am trying to get people to leave work at work and actually take a mental break so that they're not getting burned out.

'cause I don't want to keep hiring different people. I want the people that we have. To continue to grow and succeed here, not somewhere else. And so that's one thing I would do is I would have some kind of like expectation. I wouldn't I wouldn't want there to be like a wall, but like some kind of expectation for attorneys to not, and not just attorneys, either attorneys, paralegals, admin staff office manager, all that stuff to have some kind of an expectation for.

Actual rest from their work, whether that's being paid for it or whatever, it doesn't really matter. But so often it is, yes, you have X number of days of PTO, but if we have billable work to do, you better get it figured out how to get it done. So okay, I go on vacation to the beach and I just work 10 hours a day from there.

That's not helpful like that just adds to potential burnout, so that's one thing I would do. The other thing I would do is I would figure out some way to mimic the big firm's ability to train younger lawyers and allow, and give that power to smaller firms. And that might be like, that might be an AI use case.

Like how do we actually, how do we actually get more? Because it's easy in a big firm because you have, there's 200 venture deals that are backed up, and as soon as you finish one, you're already into the next, you just keep doing it over and over again. And that repetition allows you to really understand how to do it.

At a smaller firm, it's hard to do that because you might be working on a venture deal, but at the same time, we're also doing an m and a transaction, which is the same, but it's not really the same thing. And then you also have five sort of general corporate needs from different clients that are all scattered.

One's an HR thing, one's a one's an employment issue or an employment agreement, one's a partnership dispute that needs, so it's great 'cause you get to see a lot of different stuff and there's a lot of pieces that are applicable to, to different projects, but you don't as easily get the.

Continuous repetition of the same type of work until you have mastered that. And if there was a way to use some kind of tool, be it a AI or something else, to allow smaller firms to be able to train younger lawyers, in that way, I think that would be awesome.

[00:23:56] David: So you brought up paralegals and so this was a question I thought of. While back is in the world of ai, do paralegals disappear?

My my understanding of a peer paralegal, correct me where I'm wrong 'cause I'm sure I'm, in my mind there's lawyers and then all the research in looking up of cases as if that's the paralegal, which seems very, something AI would be very good at.

[00:24:21] Jesse: Yeah. Yeah. I think that things are certainly going to change. But I don't think that here's the thing we've been talking about. We use a couple different AI tools at Fourscore and we're always evaluating new technology and seeing what the best thing to use is.

One of the things we've been talking about is a AI when used correctly and probably in an increasing manner as we go forward and things continue to improve.

It's gonna cut down greatly on the amount of time it takes for an attorney to do something, right? So what, whatever write, get this contract from zero to, signature ready. If that used to take 10 hours, it might only take two hours if you're using the right tools, and so what that means is you're probably going to be able to, at least on paper, handle more stuff. Like one person can handle more stuff because there's not as much time that's needed to, put into any one thing.

[00:25:25] David: Sure.

[00:25:25] Jesse: but the reality is we, like each person only has as much capacity to juggle so many things.

So even if do I really think I could handle five times more projects? No I don't think so. I don't think I could. Maybe there's people out there that have more capacity than me, but I don't know that's really true. Could I handle more than I am now? Yeah, probably. And if I had a better system and maybe create a system that helps me keep track of things in a more.

Dynamic manner. Maybe I could do two or three times more, but I don't think we're gonna get full like efficiency benefits from the actual time efficiency, like the time savings that AI uses. So back to your question on paralegals, I think it's gonna change what paralegals do, but do I think one paralegal is gonna be able to handle what five paralegals were doing?

I don't think so. And so maybe it's only three paralegals where there were five maybe. Or maybe there's just something else that paralegals will pick up. There's some other, some other need that they can fill in some way. But I would be surprised if like paralegals don't exist. I don't think that's really, that's not, I don't think that's the future.

[00:26:43] David: That's fair. Alright. I call this my blue sky question. I think it's, I've been really interested by the answers I get. I like asking owners, if you could project five years from now, no major disruptions, no major hiccups, your vision comes true. What does Foursquare look like?

[00:27:03] Jesse: I think we are, we're probably three times the size in terms of people. I think that, we, so we probably have 12 to 15, 18 attorneys. I think that we have branched out in terms of what we're actually doing. Right now. I'm working on getting an estate planning practice up and running.

It's something that I think our business owner clients could really. Benefit from, so I can see us moving, we've got an estate planning practice that's just thriving and that maybe expands beyond North Carolina. Maybe we actually go after like pure estate planning clients in other places.

So maybe we've got two or three different, locations. Right now we have the office in Raleigh and we've got a small office out in San Jose. And maybe, I don't know, maybe there's something in Denver or there's something in South Florida. Or there's something, something going on there.

I think we probably have a a core team in Raleigh that is, maybe half to two thirds of the whole team. And then I think we have a distributed team for specific reasons. Regardless of where they are, it wouldn't really matter probably, but I can definitely see, also, we actually been we did a a client survey back in ju I don't know, back in the summer sometime. And we're just asking our clients like, Hey if Fourscore could provide additional services to you, what, which ones would you be interested in? And we had dropdowns that were like estate planning and tax law and litigation and cybersecurity and data privacy.

And so we've made steps towards those things. We brought on a data privacy and cybersecurity attorney in May, this estate planning thing. Hopefully we'll get up and running right before or right after the end of the year. But then we also started thinking like what are, and going back to our like client engagement path, what are some other things that we could actually help with?

So we have we, we decided, we, who knows what we'll do in the future, but we decided for now to shelve the tax advisory piece. But what we did was we have made some really good relationships with some good tax advisors and so we sent out an email to all those people that said, Hey, I would be interested if force score could help me with tax, tax prep and planning.

And then we made introductions to that, those those like trusted resources, essentially. They're not part of Fourscore, but we think could help our clients. And then we thought what are some other things that people need? Early stage companies they don't they need to have some kind of marketing strategy, but they don't really have a ton of budget for that.

And so we took all of, like, all the clients that we have done a startup package for in 2025. We sent out an email to them offering like a a like a marketing like seminar basically that's run by Christie on my team, who is our fractional marketing director. But she has, she's, for 20 years she owned her an agency and worked with all kinds of entrepreneurs, startup companies, technology, whatever.

So she's got a pretty broad base. We got like almost no response from that. So we're like, that's interesting 'cause I, that just seems like something that people would be interested in. So we like tweaked it, sent it out to all of our clients and said, it's not gonna be a seminar. This is a one-on-one, like one hour conversation.

No charge to you with Christie. If she can help you with marketing strategy. She'd love to just see if, see what you guys need. And we got we have a wait list. Like we got way too many responses to people saying, yes, we would like to. Have a conversation with her. And so I, I can see us doing more stuff like that, like whether it's actually becomes part of Fourscore or not.

I think that we we will further evolve into, like when entrepreneurs, business owners don't know what to do, they just ask the person at fourscore that they're working with because they know that we can either set them up with somebody, make a suggestion, or we can actually help 'em with something that might not even be a legal issue.

[00:31:03] David: I think that's something that, oh what? Wait. I have a good point. I was, I think that's something that gets shortchanged a lot. If I can't do X, then that's useless to me, there's a, there's just a belief of that and I think being a connector to saying, Hey, this guy just knows smart people. He's gonna connect me. Makes your company so much more valuable than just a law firm. And I think a lot of people just say I don't know. And I bet if you ask most business owners your network, you know almost every kind of person. I know a couple of lawyers, I know a couple of marketing people.

I know some PR people, right? And so if someone come to me, man, I'm so tired of my marketing person, and I say, you know what? You should talk to this person right here. What's funny is you do that enough. I know people who built entire careers off of that, and all they do is connect people and suddenly their basket is super full, whatever their basket is, because everyone now in inevitably feels indebted to you and they just, you didn't ask 'em for that, right? You didn't ask them, Hey, you owe me one 'cause I got you this. That's not it. But they, oh man, he,

he did to me 

a provide value. Yeah, 

Yeah, You're giving value. And if you turn that back around, man, your company can explode. And I think most business guys and gals don't think, don't realize that. And I think that's a, an important point. All right. I'm done. Gary, what do you wanna say?

[00:32:35] Gary: speaking of adding value and connecting people through starting your own business and then working with startups through a legal lens, what would you say are your top three pieces of advice for a new entrepreneur?

[00:32:48] Jesse: So a new entrepreneur, meaning somebody who's actually like starting a new business?

[00:32:54] Gary: Yes. Someone who's starting a new business and was like, wait, legal lawyers, I need lawyers.

What? What do I need them for? What would you say are your top three things?

[00:33:02] Jesse: I think that these are not really like earth shaking thoughts, but they are probably the most foundational, basic, important things you can do when you're starting a business. Number one, from a liability perspective and an IP ownership perspective, you really want to like have an actual entity that you're running the business through.

So it's great to have an idea, but once you're really going to pursue it, you want to set up something either an LLC or a corporation in most cases. That is because if you do that, then you're starting to build a foundation to separate any liabilities that the company might have or that you personally might have, from each other, vice versa.

And you, that's what you want. You don't want, you don't want some early employee who gets upset with something that you did to cause a problem for you on the personal side because you didn't separate your business from yourself. So setting up an entity is one way to do that. Having a separate bank account for the company is another way to do that.

That's super important. And sometimes people just don't, they just overlook that. But that's like step one is to do those two things basically. Number two, I would say be very careful and be very diligent to properly and completely document any partnership arrangements. So if you have a co-founder or you have somebody that you're going to make a co-founder you don't want to do that on a verbal agreement because that's where things get really messed up later.

It's tempting to not want to spend the time, energy, and attention on that kind of stuff, but it really, it is really important to make sure that those types of arrangements are documented. And then the third thing I will say relates mostly to the ownership of intellectual property.

That's another thing where there are just. There are ways to really mess up. If, especially if it's like a technology company. If you are starting a technology company and people other than yourself or even you really, but if individual people are building technology that is supposed to be owned by your company, you really wanna make sure that it is clear that is the end state once they have completed whatever project they're working on.

So that applies to. A third party app development shop, there should be some kind of services contract that clearly lays out the IP ownership rules. That applies if you're hiring somebody and you're bringing them on either as a 1099 contractor or an employee. And it really even applies to yourself.

Like you, you want to keep the business separate from yourself. So those are all things that, can be. It's easy to overlook and understandably, like I, I know that when you're starting a business, like there are certain things that you're really focused on and there are some that just have to wait.

But you don't wanna, you don't want to make those important things wait any longer than they absolutely have to because you don't want to, you don't wanna build something that doesn't have a foundation that's valuable, and those are the three that stick out to me.

[00:36:16] Gary: Jesse. If anybody wants to learn more about you or about Fourscore, where's the best place to reach out and find you?

[00:36:22] Jesse: uh, so you check out our website. It's fourscore law.com. For people that are listening, there's a ton of content on the website. You can look through our resources, you can download stuff. There's video content. There's our YouTube channel that, my mother-in-law watches. But there's also a sort of a special landing page for folks that hear us on a podcast.

So if you go to fourscore law.com/on air we have some special content and downloads for podcast listeners.

[00:36:51] Gary: Awesome. We'll make sure we put those links in the show notes as well. Yeah, discount codes.

[00:36:58] David: thank you so much Jesse for joining us. This has been so much fun.

[00:37:01] Jesse: Yeah, it's been great. Thanks for having me guys.

[00:37:04] David: Absolutely. And on that note, we are out. We will be back in a few weeks 'cause it's holiday time, but we'll be back before you know it. Thanks everybody.

[00:37:13] OUTRO: That wraps up this episode of the Biz Dev Podcast, and this time you get me, Jen Baxter, co-owner of Big Pixel and David's Wife. Yep. I finally took the mic or rusted it away from David. Biz Dev is a production of Big Pixel, a US-based provider of UX design strategy, and custom software. This podcast is edited by Audio Wiz Matt McCracken and Christie Pronto marketing guru for Big Pixel.

Want to connect, shoot us an email at hello@thebigpixel.net. Or find us on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, X and LinkedIn.