foreign [Music] a show that helps you step out of your comfort zone into a place of growth and learning for those of you joining us for the first time I'm Aviva Walmer and I'm a vistage chair here in Atlanta Georgia I lead three groups of incredibly driven and ambitious CEOs who want to accelerate towards their goals faster I also facilitate a group of growth oriented key Executives who are dedicated to driving transformative change within their organizations I'm thrilled to have Jonathan Page from in Prime legal and contract Sprint joining me today he's a legal background and entrepreneurial Spirit Jonathan is a constant learner who's passionate about helping CEOs and business owners achieve breakthrough success in both their personal and professional lives his Innovative approach to law includes a subscription model not something we hear every day and contract Sprint a platform that delivers legal documents in minutes rather than weeks today Jonathan's going to share some of his secrets to being in becoming Unstoppable in business and in life so welcome Jonathan I'm really excited to have you with us really excited to be here Viva thank you so much for having me awesome so always ask you just Brent and what both of those companies do sure so both of those companies are really there to support CEOs integrators people who are in a key positions at companies scale up those companies fast skilled them with confidence and really fulfill their mission in life and you know every great company that we work with has a very specific Mission they're on a mission to do something to make a change to help their customers in a specific way and we want to support that we want to make sure that they succeed and so the backbone of both of those companies are really in there in alignment with that is really how we can support them and help them be successful and sort of see around the corners uh better than they they maybe were doing before common myth about your job or the General that you'd like to to debunk so the biggest myth is that legal is a safety net so when people think about legal they turn they often think about it in terms of insurance and it's a necessary evil it's why they often punt it it's something that they kind of say well once we get to a certain Revenue maybe we'll get inside Council or maybe we'll hire general counsel to kind of help us think through the legal infrastructure that we have in place really big men in fact if you look at some of the most successful entrepreneurs the way that they became successful was legal they use legal as a business expansion tool Bill Gates is a great example when Bill Gates was building his operating system way back when at the end of 19 in the end of the 1970s he was nobody he nobody knew him nobody knew about his operating system he just started getting some traction and he made a deal with IBM IBM was the big Goliath out there uh Apple had already gotten a personal computer on the market IBM felt like they were behind and so said let's go ahead and put a personal computer on the market did a deal with Bill Gates to provide the operating system and Bill Gates was very intentional about negotiating exclusivity and had Bill Gates not negotiated that exclusivity we wouldn't know Microsoft for all the products that we use with Microsoft it wouldn't be Microsoft Office it would be IBM office IBM would have had the market share but it's because of legal and how Bill Gates Used legal to expand his business that he was able to at one point have 90 market share so legal is an expansion tool it's a tool that can be used to help CEOs and integrators and and management teams achieve really big goals if it's used in the right way but you know unfortunately a lot of attorneys aren't entrepreneurial so they don't they have a hard time making that connection and a lot of CEOs just haven't experience legal in that way it seems like legal often used in a defensive manner than an offensive proactive strategic Manner and the way you work with your clients seems much more proactive in nature from what I gather absolutely we we want to intimately know what it is they're trying to achieve what goals they have in mind um you know what they're currently doing to try to achieve those goals and then again you know each one of those goals those quarterly rocks the annual goals the beehag there's Corners that they want to look around right what what are the hurdles they're going to run into and how can legal be used to help them overcome those hurdles what's the biggest challenge you're facing in your business right now and how are you tackling it so AI is the biggest challenge that we're facing and I believe it's really the biggest challenge for any business that is providing Legal Services whether they realize it or not you know artificial intelligence is the next Internet it's you know when we think about when the internet first came out which some of us can remember that very few people would adopt it there was a lot of negativity around it people were afraid of it um and then now today if you ask you know any management team like how many times do your employees get on Google I guarantee you they're going to answer at least you know four or five times a day like it's a daily part of your life that's where AI is going to go and it's going to go that direction because it's going to be so um powerful and and improving productivity and anytime you can make things quicker or shorter or less steps you know that at some point will create Mass adoption so uh staying on the front end of that and being proactive about figuring out how to incorporate Ai and artificial intelligence into the company how do you integrate it in a way that's gonna going to help you take your company kind of to the next stage is I think it's really critical and we're facing that in in our business and so contract Sprint is sort of a direction it's a step in that direction so although our main uh Revenue business is in Prime that's a full service done for you type uh legal service program contract Sprint is uh is exploring Ai and it's figuring out how you know what are what are these what are items of the of the value that we provide to our clients that we can we can automate that we can make quicker and faster um and what are those value elements that AI won't be able to replace that we can enhance and increase if you really think about it it's more kind of in line with Blue Ocean strategy you know when you read that book they have this framework uh the four action framework is what I believe they call it where they they challenge you to kind of look at your current products and services and really dig down and deep and say what are things that people compete on in the industry that they can reduce that they can that doesn't really have a lot of value what are items in the industry that you you know where you feel like you can increase or enhance um and within legal you know that face-to-face time the time that a business attorney is helping a client think through a legal issue or think through a business strategy or think through like a structure for how to do a joint venture or a strategic Alliance that's what a client finds valuable but when you receive that bill and you look at what you're paying for very little of what you pay for is the time that you spent talking to the attorney most of what you're paying for if you look at the bill that you received from your attorney and I would challenge anyone who's listening to this to go look at their last lawyer bill because this is exactly what they're going to see most of it is going to be the drafting time that the lawyer was behind a computer at their keyboard drafting up documents and at no point was their client thinking about them at no point was their client thinking man I'm really getting a lot of value because they're they're behind their desk and you know really drafting this out zero value right where they're getting value is in that face time so if we can integrate AI in a way that makes you know the behind scene stuff the behind the scenes uh uh activities that an attorney must be engaged in quicker and more efficient and less time consuming where we can enhance those those value elements that that clients actually find Value in which is the face-to-face time then AI could be really powerful and and taking the legal industry in kind of a new Direction so you see AI as a supplement not something that's gonna replace legal at any time no absolutely not I mean if you look at history this is it's the same story so when John Lasseter he was a Disney animator pitch Disney this idea of doing digitized animation computer generated animation Disney bought it I mean a huge company they were like bad news the animators that worked for Disney were scared of it they did not want to see you know digitized computer animation Steve Eli today and and ultimately John Lasseter was fired from Disney or or left but essentially was asked to leave and I had to go out and you know find a way to try to bring his dream alive uh it was Steve Jobs oddly enough that was kind of their last resort and an investment made a 10 million dollar investment after he had gotten fired from uh from Apple and they finally produced Toy Story which is the first feature length computer-generated animated film and what they found is all of those fears that these animators thought they were going to be replaced was absolutely false it what it did is it just enhanced the industry it did require some business model adjustments it didn't require some shifting of you know the technical work that was being done but animators didn't lose their jobs it's going to be the same here business attorneys aren't going to lose their jobs unless unless they are unwilling and to make adjustments unless they're unwilling to embrace and integrate if their you know approach is going to be to resist and push um you know they're going to get left behind um you know and and sadly I think the legal industry they they're sort of very slow to innovate if you look at other Industries like Google Google understands that chat GPT is completely ruining their business model like at some point nobody's going to want to go pay for their information to get ranked because the way people are going to go find information is going to something like chat GPT is Google pushing and resisting no do they say this is a doomsday event for them no they're innovating and figuring out how to change their business model in anticipation that the future is going to look very different Legal Services firms need to do the same thing and if they do that they're going to be successful it's all about pivoting no yep I hear you citing all these stories of different entrepreneurs so I'm curious who's the most influential person in your life and how do they push you outside your comfort zone into a place of growth you know my dad really is one of the most influential entrepreneurs in my life you know he didn't have a big company like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates he served a very local community and made a local impact um he his big dream was really to have a small business and you know he always he always had this philosophy of helping others be successful and if you help others be successful then you will also find success that's kind of how he lived his life and you know he he had a very Rocky beginning he had this like burning desire to go to college he went to he had dyslexia he had learning issues he went to my my grandfather we call Papa to ask him for the application fee and papa basically told him you're too stupid to go to college wow you're just too stupid to go to college and you know that was that was my dad's Idol Papa that's who he looked up to and to be told by an idol that he uh that he didn't have what it took to be good in business or to be good at school uh really hurt him but he ultimately did go to college he worked three jobs he had to sleep on the uh one of his jobs was taking photos around college campus and he didn't have money for uh housing there so he slept on the floor of the dark room where he developed the photography he still remembers that the mechanic or the cleaning crew who knew that he was sleeping there but just didn't say anything he was just kind of uh nice about it but he was able to get himself through college and he really wanted to open a business but he just didn't have the confidence to do it because of all that baggage and it took it took him until age 43 when he finally decided to pursue that dream of opening and scaling up a small business and he scaled up not one but two eight-figure businesses and exited them both successfully and so when I entered his life you know when I was born he was already on that he had had just started that kind of entrepreneurial I was one of I was the last of four kids and so I got the benefit of him really not wanting me to hold off on my business dreams he pushed me you know I decided to go to law school really because I you know was looking at like an NBA versus uh some other business education I just thought law school would be a neat way to get a business education um ultimately when I graduated I decided hey you know I really like corporate laws so let me practice that I think I could even get a better business education kind of understanding complex corporate transactions and was able to get a really good position at a mid-time sperm in Atlanta but like every weekend I would come home uh for dinner on Sunday and he and my wife would like gang up on me and be like when are you leading like when are you opening your business like he did not want me to wait he felt like I needed no time to train I was always pushing back hey I've got you know these are Big complex transactions I really gotta understand what's going on um but they really were um he knew he knew what my dream was and he just really wanted me to pursue it um and so I'm very grateful that I got you know got to grow up in this very entrepreneurial family um and you know he he really wanted me to have a better a better life than he did and um and so that's what I'm trying to bring to my kids is you know whatever I'm not able to achieve maybe I can Inspire them to achieve even more than than what I've been able to do well that's an amazing story your dad sounds incredible and for him to push you outside of your comfort zone to you know start following your dreams earlier I mean that's really amazing um you get a lot of entrepreneurs you follow and yet you know you have this great life a big family balance I'm curious you know you seem to have it all can you have it all can you be this great entrepreneur and have a family and enjoy your life and do all of the things yes you can so if you read the personal growth books of life Think and Grow Rich Napoleon Hill as a man think if James uh James Allen if you read like the current you know personal growth you know thought leaders they all base the same Concepts on on these earlier thought leaders and you know they seem to have this kind of uh principle that they they teach that you can manifest whatever you want in life right so if you want to you know uh build a rocket that can land itself like Elon Musk did if you want to build an electric vehicle like anyone can do that it's already the cause and effect that you need to to to build whatever you want to build or create whatever you want to create already exists in the universe and it's just a matter of thinking about it every day and manifesting that and I think in in I think that's correct but I think it also misses something and what it misses is that not everyone's going to be a champion not everyone's gonna win right but we can all be contenders and what I mean by that is that big game you have that big goal that big dream that you're trying to reach that's a destination and you're not living that destination day to day right you're trying to advance towards that destination whether you get there or not it's what you're doing day to day that is living life right and if you have a mission if you have a purpose if getting to that destination is reflective of some bigger contribution you want to make to the world in some way that you want to increase the lives of your customers increase the lives of the people who are around you then being able to wake up every day and work on that mission is is is just as good as actually achieving the mission and so I think having that personal success is being relentless about what it is you want to achieve in life but understanding that the joy and the fulfillment's not going to come and getting to the destination it's going to come in working towards the destination and so there's a lot of prioritization you have to do in life especially in my life I've got six kids um I've got an amazing wife who's just as busy as me um so we we have to do a lot of prioritizing our 24 hours did not expand to 48 hours we still only get the same amount of time that everybody else gets but you know I make sure that I'm working towards the goals that I have and that I'm you know doing my very best every single day and that I'm not sacrificing my family and I'm not sacrificing you know time with my kids also that I'm making sure that that I'm prioritizing that just the same as I'm prioritizing my goals and I try to double dip you know business is something that is uh passion of mine um understanding how to scale a company is a passion of mine so I'm finishing a children's book this year that's on starting a business it's based on my dad's so it's a true story it's how my dad built a business at age eight and it's a story he told over and over to us growing up so I wrote the manuscript last year we're working with an illustrator now and it should be published by the end of this year and part of that business book is having a business plan and it talk you know business plan that somebody who's eight nine ten could use to actually create a business at that age um and so that's part of that double dipping it's something I get to work with him on it's consistent with my personal goals what I'm trying to do in business and it's something I can talk to my kids all about so I think you know one of the tricks in achieving breakthrough success not only personally but in business is tying it together it doesn't have to be in either or it can be you know it can be I'm pursuing this business let me figure out how I can get my kids involved so that they they can have you know they can be parts of that journey in a way that helps them that helps feed their growth um and doesn't require me to make an either or and I think that's a really important you know tool that people can use to to try to to try to bring alignment within their life and their priorities yeah I hear a couple of like key things you know message wisiness the joys in the journey itself right the steps you take along the way to get there and enjoying those moments and knowing that you're making more of an impact every time you take one more step and the other thing I really heard you know is this it doesn't have to be either or right you find ways to do both and I think that's critical for honestly most of the people who watch my show to hear because we commonly feel the battle and the struggle between family and home and then work and what we're trying to go towards and I think that's a good message there's ways to do both at the same time um and not sacrifice um so that's great curious as we sit here and talk about you know growing up and all that and by the way I do I look forward to hearing that kids story so when it comes out I'll have to pick up a copy um share it with my kid um but if you could go back you know and give your 18 year old self a piece of advice what would you tell your 18 year old self hmm you know that's a tough question because that life doesn't exist anymore and so I think we have to be careful not to get too caught up in the past unless it teaches something that can help us make better decisions in the future but even with that said you know so I don't want to frame this as a regret but I think if I was 18 again and I was you know giving myself advice it would be start now start your business now really really find out what you're passionate about but even if you don't know what you're passionate about even if that's not clear start taking action towards something put a goal out there and take action because what I find is so many people in life they get stuck in place waiting around for somebody to tell them exactly what they should want they hire coaches they go to courses they go to conferences and they're like somebody's going to tell me what it is I want um and they struggle they're like I don't really know what my want my business to be um that I'm reading traction and it tells me I need to have this like powerful Mission and I'm struggling figuring that out the reality of it is the only way you're really going to discover those things is by taking action towards a goal and it's through taking action that you're going to discover what gives you passion you're going to discover what what you're really on a mission to do it's where you're going to discover what you want your business to be and you know too many people more than most just wait around stuck in place not making any advancement towards their goals because they they need 100 Clarity or they need their all their ducks in a row um and that and that's not how it works um you got to take action you got to fail you got to be willing to get off the beaten path you have to be willing to make mistakes you have to be willing to embarrass yourself you have to be willing to be the stupidest person in the room you know you've got to be willing to to try and be a contender right um and and give it your best shot and in that process you're gonna you're gonna start discovering those things you're gonna get a lot more clarity around you know what your life purpose really is So speaking of failure and experience what is your biggest failure or was it and what did you learn from it so kind of a recent failure I was recruited away from the businesses that I had created and run I kind of created a business that was on autopilot so we didn't have to shut down the business it was sort of running itself um but I was recruited away to be CEO of a pretty big company management team um they had you know 20 to 30 million dollars in investment and when I stepped into the role I was like the fourth CEO that should have been like the red flag right that I was the fourth CEO and I was stepping on a fast-moving train and they had already didn't realize at the time that had already made some really really poor decisions um they had already committed themselves to a business plan that wasn't really feasible had already purchased the infrastructure like a huge equipment buildings um millions of dollars worth of infrastructure that didn't uh wasn't viable for achieving their goals and so but I got in there and you know I was able to work with a very you know with a lot of talent and was able to you know really learn how to run a team at a very high level where you know there's no way anything was going to get done on my time it was going to have to be on everybody else's time and what I learned in that is that you have to be really really clear about the vision and you've got to talk about it all the time because it's really easy for people to get off track and I think being clear about the vision and talking about it all the time is not just for your people but it's also for you so that you can have sort of a a guideline for how you're making decisions and how you're steering people and you know the direction you're you're you're you're you're advising people to go um and so ultimately that company failed it was a it was a very difficult process I had to terminate more than 40 people myself I had to coordinate the termination of a lot more employees I had to turn I had to coordinate the uh you know if anyone's ever closed a big company there's lots of assets and you have to be concerned about employees taking those assets and stealing things and so there was a lot of coordination that had that had to go into preserving the assets I had to go and talk to each one of the investors some of which had put in millions of dollars of their own money and and and and meet with them and tell them that they lost their money um and explain to them what the process was going to be I coordinated the company going through what's called an assignment for the benefit of creditors um had to deal with some some litigation that came after that so it was uh it was definitely uh you know I essentially got an education in Failure that some people learn over 20 years I got to learn it in 18 months like everything that possibly could go wrong I got to learn what that was and experience it firsthand in an 18 month period um so maybe that was a guy telling me let's let's uh let's let you experience this for 18 months so you can take all of that and then make sure that you know moving forward you've got some really really sound business practices um but it was definitely it definitely was an experience of a lifetime it sounds like you learned a lot of lessons really fast yes yes so I know that you are pretty tech savvy and you try a lot of things so I'm curious what's your favorite productivity hack or underrated tool that's indispensable for you and what you do so you know the tool we're developing our own productivity hat hacks that are being internally developed software that we're developing actually programming stuff ourselves but outside of that just talk about other people's tools monday.com is probably been the most instrumental tool that we've procured in order to help us run our teams better what we love about monday.com is it's collaborative and so the team can can update each other through that you can assign you know uh people who are accountable we've got one person accountable we've got multiple people responsible we have done on every single task you can assign deadlines it's a really great project management tool in our opinion not only do we handle all of our legal work through monday.com and make it accessible to our clients so our clients can go to a portal and when they log in they see their Monday board so they see every project that's in the pipeline who's working on it what paralegal is working on it what the latest update is so not only do we use it for that but we also use it for our own internal goals our annual goals our quarterly rocks kind of the EOS system I think is a good fit for monday.com as well and it's a great place where the team can go and make sure that they're keeping you know on target for our for our goals each quarter sounds like a great tool for people who aren't currently using a project management tool of some sort something for you to look at and try um I gotta ask this because I know how much you read you've already cited several books just in talking today but what would you say are three books that you would recommend to my audience so I think one of the best books on cause and effect is as a man thinketh by James Allen now it was written I think in like 1902 is when it was published so you have to read it with the understanding that people talked and wrote differently in 1902 than they do today um so it does take some some effort to really uh really process the material but it's a very short book um so but it it really I think does the best job of explaining that you know anything that you try to achieve in life it's through cause and effect it's through it's not based on it's not based on your intelligence it's not based on these things that we think it's based on right we often say I'm not going to go after that goal because I'm not smart enough for you know uh that person was just lucky none of that's true it's there's specific specifications for achieving a goal and you know every cause has an effect and every every every cause leads to an effect and every effect has a cause so that's a really good book uh I think for that on terms of strategy Blue Ocean strategy I think is one of the best business strategy books that have been written it really helps you kind of think through um how to create new customers um this is not mentioned in the book and many people have different opinions about Uber but if you can go back to Uber when they first came out it was a complete blue ocean I mean it's really kind of a crazy model like a stranger is going to pick me up in a car who I don't know and who's not working for some taxi company and I'm going to trust them to take me from point A to point B um and if you really think about the Uber model it's the same utility as the taxi service I mean at its core it's taking a stranger's picking me up taking me from A to B but what they did is they created these different value elements they figured out different ways that and and as a result they they attracted non-customers is what they call it in Blue Ocean strategy and that's really key I mean if you look at the ride sharing industry it's like quadruple the size of the taxi service industry so what that tells you is that the people who procure Ubers were not the same people who were procuring taxis like it's created an entirely New Market and you can really do that in in any business it doesn't have to be like Reinventing Your entire business model it can be you know innovating on a specific aspect of your products and services and I think being blue ocean minded is a really critical uh skill that every CEO every Visionary every management team should have so Blue Ocean strategy in my opinion is a really critical book uh for that um and then a third book I'm just running through lots of books in my head I'm trying not to just mention one that's recent um because I read a ton a ton of books but um you know one that's been instrumental to me is as a man is is uh Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill I can I always know if somebody has read that book because I'll ask them a lot of people claim that they read the book I'll ask them do you recite the self-confidence formula and then if I get a Splunk stare I know they didn't really read the book well because the whole premise of Think and Grow Rich is that you you read the whole thing but at the end of the day it's uh Napoleon Hill instructs his readers you need to recite the specific self-confidence formula at least once a day and I recite it every single day I go through it's like a prayer and essentially it's just reorienting your mind towards the the fact that you can achieve big things that you can you know achieve your life purpose um and a big part of that self-confidence formula is understanding that having a negative attitude towards others can never bring you success it's in fact that's an exact line from that formula um and so it it encourages you to eliminate you know in the uh jealousy selfishness greed cynicism because these things uh hinder you from really advancing forward if you can if you can have a love for all Humanity of service then you're more likely to achieve your goals so I think that's a really pivotal book um you know Napoleon Hill essentially studied thousands of entrepreneurs over 25 years including Edison Henry Ford and you know Rockefeller and Carnegie and all these guys that were around when he wrote that book and it's a culmination of what he feels like they did in order to achieve you know big results so I think it's a great book to to really get familiar with and from speaking with you I don't think there's a lot that's outside your comfort zone probably to be honest but what is something that is outside of your comfort zone that you've never done before foreign something outside of my comfort zone that I have never done before uh there's a lot of things I haven't done I just don't think I would have any issue doing them um you know if I had an opportunity to do I mean maybe doing some like high intensity sport like if they drop me out of a helicopter with like skis on you know where I hear these guys do that that might get me out of my comfort zone I probably think I'm probably gonna die a premature death so I definitely wouldn't want to I wouldn't want to tackle those things but um but you know maybe maybe only that so gotta take it to the extreme to get outside your comfort zone I love it yeah yeah how can people get in touch if they want to learn more about in prime or about contract Sprint so they're welcome to email me Jonathan uh that's uh j o n a t h a n not with an extra H and and that's at inprimelegal.com and uh I would love to have a conversation with anyone that wants to talk about big games Big Dreams what they're doing um I usually learn as much if not more from those conversations than than they do for me but um I always love to to talk to more people who are trying to achieve big things and have big goals and want to make a difference in the world it's really been an honor to have you as a guest on my show until next time on beyond the comfort zone I encourage all my viewers to try something new outside your comfort zone because that's where growth occurs and Life Begins have a great day everyone foreign [Music]