Innovate with Confidence: Jeff Holman on Building Businesses in Education

I am excited to have my guest on the show today. Not only has he been revolutionizing how businesses navigate changes in this current environment, but he's also has a mission to help innovators, businesses and investors do something what he calls innovate with confidence. He's here today to talk to you, the educator, all about how to take your idea, that thing that you are passionate about.

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of that classroom and turn it into a reality. I'm pleased to bring on today, Mr. Jeff Holman. Jeff, how are you today? Welcome to the show.

Thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here and I really do love helping people innovate with confidence. It's the mission I've adopted for, I don't know, last 10 or 12 years. So thanks for having me.

Well, let's start right there and talk about that. You know, so many people who are listening to the show are educators over the last many years. I've had an opportunity to work with educators who are saying I have an idea how do you start? How do you get it? I don't know if it's for me. They want to take that step, but they're afraid because you know, classroom is something that's secure. We just covered a lot of stuff in there. I understand. But what do you mean when you say innovate with confidence? What does that actually mean to you?

I mean, for me, it's really, I go back to, this is silly maybe, but GI Joe when I was younger, right? Knowing is half the battle, I think is what the phrase was. And there's so much in the law that you just don't quite know. You hear about A, B, C, D, you hear all these options and you're like, but which one applies to me? And so the first thing is just, I don't think hearing the options is really the obstacle for most people. It's knowing if there are five options, how do I know how to pick for one of them for my situation?

It's really just getting people pointed in the right direction and saying, you know what, from a legal perspective, based on the information I know, here are the six steps I would take to move forward. And that just empowers people, to be honest.

So we're going to talk a little bit today about how do you take your idea and make it a reality? I can easily remember 13 years ago, sitting in my basement, coming up with this concept of teacher cast and starting my first podcast. I took a website, I took a Twitter account and next thing you know, I turn around, I'm working for Microsoft. I'm building things out for multiple companies. And I always started with, how did I get here? I know personally, I didn't expect this to turn into a business. This was a fun thing.

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But here we are in a creator economy, people are starting YouTube channels looking to be millionaires. Teachers are taking this little concept of building tutorials and building a little PDF. So now they're making hundreds of thousands, or trying to on sites that make it easy just to start things up and to start selling their goods. Let's start there. If a teacher has an idea has a concept, at what point should they

Yeah.

be thinking about taking that to that next level? Let's say that they do have an Etsy store or a teachers pay teacher store, they're doing some stuff on YouTube. When does an idea become a business?

that's a great question. So I always, and I don't want to complicate this, I kind of think of this in three phases, There's how to validate your business, right? Validate your market, and then how to give yourself freedom to operate. And the legal stuff all falls into freedom to operate, right? So make sure that you aren't infringing on somebody's trademark, make sure that you have an LLC to protect you. And we can kind of dive into those, but a lot of people start with that LLC. so they'll sell,

Mm-hmm.

You know, they create a digital asset, a PDF, like you mentioned, and they'll start selling it. And then they'll see, people really like this. Like I've tried six or seven iterations and this one I'm I've nailed it. Right. It starts to take off. And so you start making money and then you, and then you realize, wait, I'm making enough money. probably, probably should figure out if I need a company around this. And so that's really the kind of the spark that a lot of people run into is they find a little bit of success or, in other words, as I, as I say it, they validate.

that their product works and that the market wants that product. And then they realize, let's look into starting a company around this, you know, maybe really tracking those expenses, maybe giving myself some liability protection in case I need it. And so they start going down that LLC track usually.

Do you find that people don't take that step quickly enough? You know, they turn around and they're making 1000 bucks a month 1500 bucks a month and you know, that's that's a lot of product. That's a lot of PDF sometimes for educators to be making or they're in the consulting business and they realize that they've been consulting for like three or four or five years and then going, well, should I become an LLC? Should I make this?

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At what point should we be having these conversations with ourselves and most importantly, I think with our families going, do I want to go down this route? Or is this not for me? And what are those questions we should be asking ourselves and thinking about this?

Well, first off, having an LLC is usually a very simple task to set one up, right? It's not a very complicated process in most states. And so you would be able to do that oftentimes. Now, you can do it on your own. There are pluses and minuses that, but a lot of times people will start out and they'll just get onto their state secretary of commerce or division of commerce website and they'll just file for an LLC at my cost of $100, $200, and they get that going. I think there's

There's kind of two questions here I would look at on the legal side. Do you want liability protection? Now, if you're just selling a PDF, it's got, I don't know, math questions or something, right? whatever that might be, like you don't necessarily need a lot of liability protection because the likelihood of getting sued over that is probably very low as opposed to say, you you're buying real estate and somebody could slip and fall in on a rental unit or you're launching a product and there's, there's perhaps product liability issues related to your product. So

A PDF is a pretty benign way to launch a business. So there's how much liability do you want? And then the other side of that is it branches over into the financial side, right? How do you want to track your expenses? How do you want to account for your income? And oftentimes people will file for an LLC because they can get, when you start making enough money, you can kind of leverage the financial side of it, which is.

Not particularly a legal question, but it's tied together with that legal question.

I remember my first LLC in a different state that I lived in. I did the exactly how you put it went online, filled out some things and next thing you know, I'm a company. And that was a long night with a friend of mine trying to figure out how to make all this work. And when I changed states, I said, okay, enough of this. And at that point in time, I had legal representation helping me out with, you know, the business side. Here, you do it, you close it on this state, you open it up on this state.

Do you have any advice on what this should be naming it? And know a lot of teachers out there are saying, and I'll just use myself as the example, do I name it Jeff LLC? Do I name it teacher cat? Like, is there any recommendations for naming it after the brand naming it after the person? Which do you prefer? And again, I think we should probably say this is not legal advice, yada yada, right? Like, this is just a podcast we're having a conversation on but

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Coming up with your business names and stuff like that. What are some of the things we need to be worrying about?

let me get to that in one moment. Cause you said something else that, I think is worth pausing on. And that is you, you talked about, well, you talked about converting your LLC from one state to another. That's kind of an administrative task. The other thing you mentioned that, that caught my ear is that you stayed up late talking to a friend. If you were starting a business.

with a friend, if there's more than one of you, right? You're not a single member LLC, you're a multi-member LLC. Then I would say you really, really want to get an operating agreement in place. So this, we can talk about the naming in a second, but that's a, it's an excellent point you brought up because once you get another person involved, you have other expectations, maybe two people who don't quite know what to expect, but we all know.

that everybody going into that has expectations, even if they're unspoken. So at that point, the thing that many people will miss when they go into their state division of corporations is they will just put together the templated version of articles of organization that are available and they'll fill in their names and addresses and, you know, registered agent. Maybe one of them is a registered agent. And then they'll leave it at that because they don't realize that there's another step. It's not

necessarily required for your registration in most States. But, as, as a team of founders, I consider it legally required because you want to drop your divorce papers before you ever think about divorce. So that's your operating agreement. You really, really, really want to have an operating agreement in place so that the two of you or the multiple founders that are working on something together can just talk about what the expectations are going forward. So maybe that was a little bit off on a tangent, but,

No, that was good. I know a lot of podcasters who are doing the two person podcast and they're like, let's build this as a business. You need to have those conversations.

Yeah, it goes well until it doesn't go well, right? And then that's when the legal stuff seems to surface is when things haven't gone as one or both parties expect. So operating agreement, remember those words. That's a key takeaway here, I think, for anybody starting an LLC for their startup business. Now, you asked about naming a company. It's a great question. We do a ton of...

trademark work, trademarks of course protect the branding assets that you build, right? The names, logos, taglines, maybe colors, things like that. So we do a lot of work with people because of our expertise in the trademark side of things. As far as your business name goes, I don't want to burst into anybody's bubble, but the name of the business oftentimes doesn't matter at all, right? What matters is what you choose to use as the branding for your business.

Now, if you choose to brand your business with the name, then your name is really important. But a of people don't do that. They'll start their LLC and they'll call it the Jeff Bradbury LLC or whatever. And as long as that name isn't identical to another name in the state registry, you can probably register it. You can call it the Bradco Holding Company or Bradbury Enterprises or whatever you want. A lot of people will do that and it really doesn't matter much.

What matters a ton, especially for the long-term value of your business is what you choose to brand your business with. And so that might be, know, for a product-based company, your product branding might be the most important thing to think about to really give consideration to how you brand and market that one product or that group of products. Some people get to the point where they have...

a trade name that they'll use and it might be the same as their business name or it might be different, right? For example, my law firm is called intellectual strategies. That's actually a DBA. That's, that's how I chose to brand my law firm and my team. The actual name of my company is a, cause I ran, I've had my law firm in some form or fashion for like 20 years, I think. And it's, it's actually called Holman technologies. LLC has nothing to do with anything that I brand anywhere on the internet.

You're one of a few people I have ever even told that to cause it doesn't matter. Right. but intellectual strategies is the, is the trade name we've chosen and that's how we brand it. So that might be the long answer to say how you choose your company name probably doesn't matter. You can choose it to be whatever you want. What really matters is the, is the public facing version of the brand that you're using for your product and your service, perhaps a longterm.

For those who are new to this and are listening to this episode, because these are lots of the questions that they have. What are some of the advantages that somebody can take advantage of for having an LLC? You had already mentioned some of the tax things that happen. What? Why does somebody want to have an LLC? Pretend maybe that they're consulting or they're starting to get paid to do speaking engagements or anything like that.

Yeah.

What can they take advantage of? I know for myself, anything with a microphone I can write off like what are some examples of that?

Yeah, that's the big, it's mostly financial in some form or another, right? It's about what you can write off. It's about how you pay yourself. Sometimes people, you'll hear people talk about, I have an S-corp or an LLC. And technically most people who say they have an S-corp oftentimes I find have an LLC.

with a tax election, an S election for their taxes, which they didn't call an S corp for shorthand, but an S corp is usually just a, it's a tax election, not a type of entity. So a lot of it comes down to how you write off your expenses. It comes down to how, which you can do some of that without an LLC, but it's a lot harder to track. And I think your tax advisor would probably tell you that there's more red flags if you don't have an entity behind you.

So writing off expenses, how you pay yourself and, you know, I'm not a tax advisor and this is not tax advice, but you know, lot of people will go do an S election with their LLC so that they can pay themselves what you consider a reasonable salary and then distribute out profits. And the profits don't have all the same like payroll type taxes that you would pay if you paid yourself.

just a straight wage. So wages versus profit distributions on the payment side of things. And then the other financial thing that we kind of wrap into legal is protection against potential liabilities. So if you're launching a business and you're interacting with companies and you think there might be some potential liability there or you're interacting with customers directly, you think.

hey, I might get sued someday for something. And we all know that here in the US, it's a great place to live and a great place to sue people, because you can sue them for whatever you want with no basis whatsoever sometimes. And I say that telling you in cheek in case that dry humor didn't come across. So if you think you have any exposure whatsoever, then an LLC can really protect you against that. If you're taking out loans from a bank, an LLC might be able to protect you. Although a bank would be

They're smart enough to put personal guarantees in place typically. So there's the financial protections through the kind of the legal entity structure. that's where, that's, you don't necessarily realize how many ways people are going to come up with suing you once you become successful. And again, you know, none of this matters on day one, but.

You know, I've got a lot of clients who, you they launched their business, they start selling, they might sell a couple hundred thousand dollars a month, which, we could all just dream to do that, right. As a solo business, as soon as somebody else sees you as a successful entrepreneur, there will be people that come out of nowhere and they're like, your website is not ADA compliant and I'm going to sue you for violation. Cause I, I'm in, you know, wherever and

and I tried to access your website and the, button to purchase your, your PDF wasn't working. And I know it's only a, you know, 9 99 PDF, but, but this is a violation of, you know, Americans with disabilities act because your website wasn't working when I tried to purchase. therefore you're going to end up settling that case with somebody for 10 or $15,000. Like it's, it's kind of crazy.

An LLC doesn't get you out of that, but an LLC, you know, if something goes haywire, we'll call it, something goes really wrong and you need to shut down your business at some point, you can do that. And the liabilities for the most part, unless you've agreed otherwise, like with a bank, the liabilities stay with the business and not with you personally. And that's, you know, at small stakes, that's not, it doesn't seem like a big thing, but once your company goes very successful.

you have a lot more exposure than you probably would think.

I want everybody to hit the rewind button on that answer right there. Because that is absolutely the one if not one of the two things that we all need to worry about whether we're selling digital products, whether we're going into conferences. People always ask what are the two things that they should be thinking about when they're getting into consulting or going out to speak and I say the first is make sure you have that LLC because then you can do things like write off your plane tickets.

The second, get some insurance. I know I've had many, many gigs, if you will, that say, you know, we can't hire you unless you have the specialized insurance. And it's usually not a lot of money. But just having it and having the ability to be able to walk into school buildings and other places knowing that you are covered, both on the business side and on the insurance side. I think those are two things that everybody needs to be looking into. Just real quick, because I this isn't a major topic, any

advice on finding insurance as a small business or as a as an individual consultant.

You know, in my experience, you just gotta find a broker who's familiar with your industry. So if you're out there selling, you know, software perhaps to a school district or you're selling services to a school district, you know, you wanna find somebody who's familiar with that. I've seen instances of clients getting insurance where they thought they were covered and when it came down to it, the insurance.

they'll take their sweet time and they will tell you whether or not you're covered after the fact. So you wanna get somebody who you can really rely on that is familiar with your space. You probably don't wanna go to the same person that you said, hey, I found car insurance somewhere online and they said that they can insure my business. And you make a really good point because when you start getting into contractual situations with clients, especially,

sophisticated clients or larger clients like school districts, they're going to have a ton of requirements. Insurance is one of those. Another one that they're going to say is you have to, you know, there's going to be certain indemnification provisions. And what that really means is, you know, between the two of you, you'll resolve your disputes, right? But if there's a third party who comes in and says that, that that, that they were injured and they go after your client, your client,

if you've indemnified them, your client's gonna turn to you and say, well, you need to take care of this because in our contract, you agreed to be responsible for this third party liability that I incurred because I worked with you. they're gonna require that. this is really where the kind of the, we spend an imbalanced amount of time as attorneys negotiating indemnification clauses.

on contracts when the, when the likelihood of something happened is very remote, but the dollar amounts involved, if something does happen, become very substantial.

I remember one of my first major contracts with the school district was for doing a website. And they would not let me start the project have the contract, unless I had insurance, just in case I fell and broke my arm. And I kept saying to them, but I'm sitting at my house. And they said, that's it doesn't matter. Like, you need to have all of these things in place before you're an official vendor. And I said, it was like 200 bucks or something like it wasn't a lot of money. But it was just like

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

Okay, but I'm only getting paid like 800. Just one of those like, okay, here we go for this.

Yeah.

Yeah, but you will. I mean, you're gonna want a general liability insurance policy. It's gonna be, like you said, a few hundred dollars, depending on the type of business you are. It's slip and fall type coverage. If you're a real business, you're gonna want that anyways. It gives you a layer of protection in addition to the layer we've talked about with the LLC. But you might need more specialized insurance too. There's a lot of different.

types of insurance. I've got some clients who have product liability insurance because the types of products they sell could potentially harm people. you know, there's, and in fact, these days it's probably becoming a big thing in the, education space. And that's data, data privacy, right? Protecting personal information that you might gain access to and complying with the data security and privacy protocols of the districts. there's

Hmm?

It's just, if that fails, which we see it all the time, right? You need to have something in place because it would, it very well could be a mortality incident for your business if you don't have it.

I would love to welcome you back on the show, Jeff to do an hour and a half on data privacy and get a bunch of tech directors on and just have that conversation. I mean, these are things that we talk about in the hallways of conferences. But nobody ever sits down and explains to people. This is the way that it looks like from the school district point of view. This is the way that it looks like from the teacher's point of view, from the from the legal point of view. And then, you know, everybody listening to this knows I'm raising three

Mm-hmm.

11 year olds, they need to understand how all of this works. You know, you turn around and they're on their Chromebooks and they're giving out different passwords stuff. I'm like, that is a huge conversation. And if you guys would love to see Jeff come back on to talk about that, let us know. Head on over to teachercast.net slash contact would love to hear from you guys. And if you have any questions for Jeff, would love to have you guys find out more that link is going to be in the description of this show. Talking to it today to Jeff Holman all about his journey from

Yeah.

being an engineer to the entrepreneur that he is, talk to us a little bit about how you guys started. What were you doing as an engineer? What was that early career like? And how did you find a way to make that transition?

Thank

man, haphazard is probably the best word for it sometimes, but no, actually really loved, you through school, I loved the science, loved the engineers, engineering, and knew I wanted to get into that, but I kind of, if for some strange reason, also knew I wanted to go beyond that. So I had this idea of going into business, becoming an entrepreneur. So I worked a couple of years after electrical engineering. I was doing that.

We call it power and lighting. It's the, it's the least sexy version of engineering. It's taking, you know, big hospitals and making sure power gets to all the plugs. I did work on some fancy homes and, know, we mentioned before the show that we're, I live here in Utah. We, helped design some 25, 30,000 square foot private residences at some of the ski resorts with fancy lighting design everywhere for their artwork. So there's, some of that, but I did that for a few years. and, and honestly, I was going to go to get an MBA and

And I did eventually go back and get my MBA also because I just have that bug that, know, there's a, I tell people there's a chaos with working with small startups and innovators and entrepreneurs that just, it just draws me in, right? It's a great place to be and there's a great energy about it, even though it is chaotic most of the time.

How has this environment changed? You had mentioned you've been doing this for 20 years with the, you know, technology is constantly moving around. Things are happening. Pandemic administrations are changing in D.C. Does what has all of that done to this system of becoming a business owner, becoming an entrepreneur, understanding how things working, becoming successful? What have you seen as a big change over the last 20 years?

Hmm.

I mean, so I spent 15 years doing pretty heavy patent stuff. The last eight or 10 years, I've been more general business, but it surprised me in the patent world. mean, patents have been around for a few hundred years, right? The last, well, prior to 2013, the last major change in the patent system was like in the 1950s. And yet there's been such a swing from one extreme to the other, just in the patent world about what is patentable.

you know, starting with, I became a patent agent, call it prior to graduating law school. And that was right after the one click patent with Amazon, if you remember that, which is kind of the, the, the foundation of, of software patents and software, just the explosion of software and the, the SAS business model that's, that's evolved out of, you know, the disks that we used to buy and install on our own computers. So there's just been so much,

Mm-hmm.

shifting and changing regulatory in a regulatory manner with patents that it's really opened my eyes up that this is this is we're working in a live system here right things are moving and and we see it in politics we see it in the statutes and the regulations and then you know we see it with evolution of technology ai is you know ai is not going to replace me anytime soon but it is going to change the way all of us work you know 100 you know so

That's an exciting, boy, I want to use a phrase, new frontier. that the Star Trek phrase? Don't confuse me for a Trekkie because I couldn't claim or pretend to be one, but it really is a new frontier for everything. And legal, I was talking to somebody today, legal and finance are some of the most traditional fields. They don't move.

the same way and the same speed as these other fields. And yet AI is going to disrupt us as much or more than anyone else, I believe.

In what ways do you see AI already disrupting your business?

I mean, the way that we integrated into it, we use it a lot for brainstorming. Now there are probably a thousand ways we could be using it, but we use it for just working through ideas and generating some marketing content and, and kind of mulling through options for clients. It's, it's a terrible system if you want facts and truth, which we really need as attorneys, but it's a, it's a, it's a fantastic system for

just sourcing large amounts of data and aggregating things together. So we use that a lot. Another maybe fun way that we're getting involved in it is I've got a client that came on board recently and ironically you would think, maybe we don't want to work for them because they're perhaps going to displace us. They want to patents using mainly AI, you know, and that takes our patent clients and says, well, they're probably going after some of the same clients that we're already working for.

But as we talk, these types of businesses recognize that they don't have a 100 % solution. They have like a 40 % solution, right? So they've come back to us and said, hey, while we're kind of perfecting our system, we'd love to have some expert oversight as to what's going on. And so we're gonna do all this front-end work. We're gonna sell this product and this service to clients, but in the background, can you help us make sure it's good?

Right. And so it becomes another source of revenue for us. But more importantly, you know, we get to, we get to be there and kind of work hand in hand with the, with the tech guys who are trying to create and roll out the AI that, know, eventually we might, we might find ways to just incorporate really seamlessly into our business. So it, it, sorry, I just gonna say it just, it's such a moving chaotic space right now.

had the opportunity.

You've had the opportunity over the last 20 plus years to not only grow your business, build your business, but also help so many other companies grow their brands and grow their businesses. I got to ask you one of my favorite questions here. What's been your biggest teachable moment? What's the one thing or the couple things that you've just learned and take with you that you're always just reverting back to?

wow. I might need to take a minute on that. I do think I might have a couple. Let me start with this one though. And I'm to go back to the, the, the slogan or the tagline that I've adopted, which is innovate with confidence. You know, when I first started out, I was working with some companies who were servicing, you know, clients like IBM and Intel and they were just writing, you know, mass

patents, so not large patents, but lots and lots of patents. IBM for so many years has been and maybe still is, I think they might've lost their first place status as the number one patent filer and patent grantee in the nation. There was like a 40 year streak, because that was what was important to them. But on my end, there helping, as interesting as it was, helping a company like IBM put...

put a few dozen more patents in their portfolio. Like there's just not a whole lot of fulfillment there. And so that's one of the reasons I transitioned, right? Between from the way I worked with large corporations into exclusively working with startups and small companies. It's just, there's an energy. There's the ability to make a difference. You know, we're working with dreamers. We're working with creators, people who are actually creating something out of nothing. Do you know what mean?

I know you know what I mean, but right. You're like, you go one day and you're like, you know, there's, there's probably a better way to do this. Like that's phrase that we hear, right? I bet, I bet there's a better way to do this. And you go and you sit down at your computer and you use AI or whatever. And all of a sudden you're selling something new that didn't exist. And, and you might, you might downplay it be like, well, it's just like, it's just a little bit better way to do this. Yeah. But people came there to buy it because it's good. It's, it's better enough.

Yep. Yep.

that is making a difference. And so that's who we work with all the time. And so when I say, you know, our, this started with me before I had a team, you know, my, my objective was to help people innovate with confidence. Like I want to see people go in and I want to see them crush it. And I want to see them feel like good and, and, and have some, I wish I had a synonym for it, but I want to see them have confidence as they're going through this process and they're, and they're launching something new that

never existed before and that the world is loving. that's, I don't know, that's a lot of what drives me. So I'll leave it at that for teachable. That's, think, one of the biggest takeaways and I think it's one of the biggest ways I'm able to contribute, but also one of the biggest ways I'm able to experience the rewards of what I do. So it just fits for how I operate.

Take us through one of those. you, you know, without giving away names and companies and things, share a quick story, a success story. Somebody that came to you, sat across the desk and said, I have an idea. And now they're over the moon successful. And maybe a couple tips of what was that thing. We all talk about, you know, Michael Jordan had that it factor. What is that it factor that you're looking for when you're sitting across a table from somebody who says I have an idea?

let me tell you two stories. One, I got an email today from somebody and we've helped them get one patent. And I wouldn't say this is like the yet. This is not yet the, the, the story of Michael Jordan, but maybe it will be these two kids came and they said, Hey, we want to, we want to get a patent on this, ski product. And, and they have leveraged that to, you know, we've got them a patent. They came up with a cool product.

It's something that they use because they're skiers, they're on their school ski team or whatever it is. And these two have kind of leveraged that to get into college as part of their application process with the college. And they've said, hey, we're inventors officially. Like we have a patent. And so to me, that's a really impactful moment personally for those two inventors. And they just emailed today, hey, we're working on something new. Like, let's set up another call. So that's one.

Another one on a little bit larger scale. You know, I mentioned a group of founders earlier as we were talking, you know, they came to me, somebody referred me to them and they were in the middle of, at the time they were selling, it's a company called Pillow Cube. You might've heard of it. If you're a side sleeper and you're on Facebook at all, you've seen Pillow Cube because they make awesome commercials and they make an awesome product. have a couple.

I know PillowCube, yep.

I travel everywhere with one, their travel cube. says I get paid nothing for this, but buy their travel cube, pack it up and travel with it. I've taken it around the world with me and I'm so glad I have it. But they came to me when they were much smaller and you know, and it is, I don't want to downplay it because it's made a difference for so many people, but if you look at it, it's a rectangular pillow, right? And they said, hey, we're selling this thing. And there's a lot of...

You

talent behind how they create their product, how they market it, how they fulfill all that stuff. So it's a, it's a much more sophisticated business than maybe the product would seem. But I just remember they came to me five years ago and they said, Hey, we're, we're selling this product and we started it, you know, last year or six months ago or whenever it was. And I'm like, okay, we'll help you. I've helped a lot of clients that are doing this. I'm like, no, no, no. Like we need you right now because we're selling.

X dollars a month of this. And I'm like, you're selling it's a like, how much are you selling of this? And, and, which, which to me triggered a bunch of things, not just, cool. They're making money, but, but I mentioned before, you know, when you start to see success, people start to notice you and then you start to get exposed to all these potential liabilities. lot of them are,

to square pillow.

opportunistic, would say, and not really valid exposures, but people will come after you and they'll start to say, well, if you're successful, I want a piece of it. Cause you know, this is America, I deserve part of your success. So, or whatever, right? So they were doing kind of an astonishing amount of sales. And the funny thing is, as we've gotten involved, I've been with more than the last five years, they've, you know, like a lot of CPG companies, a lot of consumer product, good companies that are selling.

on Amazon and on their Shopify stores, like they, you know, the, the, market is, is very turbulent, but they, but the amount of scaling they've done from where they started to where they've gotten to it's, it's blown my mind again, right? It's like, this is pretty crazy to see companies with these products and expanding their product lines, growing, and really building an entire business out of one founder's idea.

to start selling what seems to be a relatively simple product. And yet, you know, they're employing a lot, they're spending a ton on ads, they're making a lot of money, they're just finding success. And it's pretty cool to be a part of that.

Their product looks amazing. I mean, even as you're talking, I'm thinking about all the YouTube ads and all the places that they've popped up and it it is a cube. But man, they're doing a good job with it.

Yeah, ironically, it's not technically a cube, but we can get into that. That's a whole different thing. Anyway.

is an amazing story. Say congratulations on that one that that is an amazing story on that. Jeff, first of all, thank you for coming on the show today. I again, I would love to do another hour and a half on all of these different topics because there's just so much stuff out there. And in you know, if I could do this with tech directors and stuff would love to continue that data privacy conversation. Tell everybody where they can get a hold of

Well, first off, if you want to do that, let me know. I'm available, pretty accessible. And for anybody else who wants to reach out, I am pretty active on LinkedIn. If you're on LinkedIn, you can find me under Jeff Holman. If you find somebody who says, I build fractional legal teams, because that's a whole business model that we do that's pretty unique, that's me. And then the other place is,

We do for prospective clients, we'll do a free 30 minute phone call. So if someone has got an idea, there's, you know, like we talked about starting that LLC, they maybe have this branding question, they're trying to get trademarked or whatever. Like, like go to our website. It's just intellectualstrategies.com and you can sign up for a free 30 minute call. That'll be with me. I'll sit down and we'll kind of hear what chaos you're working in, hear what trouble you're creating and you know, what we can do to help, help solve or guide you along the way. So.

We just love talking with cool people about cool stuff they're working on.

We're going to make sure that the links this is in our show notes over on the Jeff Bradbury show you can find out more information over at teachercast.net slash podcast. Jeff, first of all, thank you so much for coming on today and continued success for you and all your clients. I hope 2025 is prosperous for you guys.

Thanks.

Thanks so much, it's been pleasure.

And thank you guys out there for checking out this show. you'd like to find out more information, head on over to teachercast.net slash podcast for this and all of our shows. You can learn more about Ask the Tech Coach, the Digital Learning Today podcast, and of course other episodes of the Jeff Bradbury show. Hope you guys hit that like and subscribe button. Well, that wraps up this episode on behalf of Jeff Holman and Jeff Bradbury and everybody here on Teacher Cast. My name is Jeff Bradbury, reminding you guys to keep up the great work in your classrooms and continue sharing your passions with your students.