Epic Real Estate Investing - Raj Jha - Building Business Systems | 412

Episode Date: June 21, 2018

Matt Theriault is joined today by Raj Jha, a previous COO and the current leader of Practice Alchemy, a boutique law firm representing some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley. Learn how to get consistent results out of your business, which systems to tackle first and last, the biggest mistake people make with systems, and much more on today's episode of Thought Leader Thursday! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is Terio Media. Find an attorney that you really get along with. Find one that you can partner with, and there's a really great way to mutually add value. If you can become a referral source for them and refer that attorney more opportunities, more business, and it doesn't actually, frankly, take that much, right? A few deals a year could be fantastic for them.

And what you'll get in exchange for that is having a partner who can actually look at deals and help you plan strategically. Hi, I'm Matt Terrio of the Epic Real Estate Investing Show, and this is Thought Leader Thursday. Today I'm joined by the fearless leader of practice alchemy. Practice alchemy works with law firms of all sizes and practice areas to create a comprehensive law firm marketing strategy for them that will consistently deliver return on investment. As an attorney, our guest founded a boutique law firm that today represents some of the

biggest names in Silicon Valley, his early background in computer science, and his depth of experience in the legal realm not only serve as a perfect fit for those Silicon Valley clients, but enable him to introduce dynamic and modern marketing practices to attorneys across the country who have hit a wall with their practice growth efforts. On top of all of that, he has previously held the title C-O, giving him the insight and understanding into attorneys struggle to prioritize their workloads. So please help me welcome to Epic Real Estate Investing, Mr. Raj. Raj, welcome to the show. Thanks very much for having me and for the very detailed introduction.

So people will know everything about that whole thing myself. And now on to the unscripted part of the show, right? Exactly, exactly. Ja, is that how you say your last name? It is. That's great, okay? I've actually known you for a while now and I never said your last name before. Yeah, exactly.

It's actually fewer letters than yours, but harder to pronounce. Yes. All righty. So I'm really excited to have you on today. And the reason that I asked you on is a very popular topic here on my show that revolves around systems and delegation. And from what I know of your, or for what I know of you in our professional circle, you've really been able to dial that part of your business in. So let's just start with. Why are setting up systems and delegations important to a business? And where's the big opportunity then? it's important at the highest level for consistency right ultimately regardless of what kind of

business you have consistent results are important because then you can count on it you can grow the business in an intelligent way and that predictability comes from having a system and even when you start a business and you know maybe you're a solopreneur at the beginning ultimately you have to think about how do I replace myself and that always comes back to a system of some sort because if you just hire somebody or even if it's a contractor, if it's your first employee, and you say, hey, do this and there's no framework, you're not sure they're going to do what you expect them to do. They don't have your knowledge. They don't really know your business. So systems lead to consistency, and consistency is better client delivery and better profitability. Right. Yeah, consistency. It's really,

it's really everything, isn't it? It is. Yeah, exactly. And this applies to every part of the business as well. So it's not, you know, we'll probably dive into that a little more as we go on. But it's not just, you know, one big system. There are lots of little systems in every business as well. Super. So can you give me an example of, in your business, give me an example of a system so we can kind of just see the impact of this and how it impacts you in your business? Sure.

I, you know, I've actually delved into this recently because I had an employee depart and she took with her a lot of institutional knowledge about how we actually do a marketing campaigns. And it was kind of a lot of it was in her head. And it was an opportunity for me to go and say, okay, let's take the one example. Let's take the production of social media and blogs and all the things that we need for our clients and actually systematize that. So looking at it step by step, what has to happen? Who are all the players in there? How do you make sure that when the one person is done that the baton gets passed to the next person appropriately, how do we benchmark success, know we're on track all of that. So it's really taking things apart, and in this instance, blog and social

media production for a client and constructing it into something that can almost run by itself, right? It's a step-by-step protocol. Right. So it's not people dependent. Yeah, that's exactly right. You can plug any person in there and that task can get carried out now. Correct. It's people dependent, but it's not a specific person dependent, right? It's role-dependent. So you had this person with all this knowledge in their head, they left and that could have been a big, caused a big impact to your business. Yep, exactly. But within a week and a half, we managed to systematize everything she was doing, delegated out to other people. And so now that's one less point of failure in our business. Perfect. So you might have already answered this a little bit. Let's get a little bit more detailed, though. If you were to pick a new task today to delegate or a new system to create, I guess this last week and a half, what did that process look like from beginning to end? end? Yeah. So in other words, how did I go through the process of creating the system?

Yeah, exactly. I mean, did this employee, were they involved in helping you create the system? Or did you have to kind of go look at her job and read? I kind of had to go go look at her job, which was honestly, you know, bad on my part, right? I should have done this earlier on in the process, but we all learn as we go about the pieces you don't know, right? You get good at delegating. And, you know, there's a fine line between delegation and abdication. And when you have a train. trusted employee, you sometimes say, oh, go set up the system. And they do it and they've got their system, but it's not general enough, right? It's not something that could be applied to other

people. Yeah. So you ask for a specific example of something. So if you're going to go set the system up, or like kind of what was your approach to that process? You had to go recreate this. Yeah. So number one, always begin with the end in mind, right? So you ask, what are we trying to achieve with this system? And then what does success look like? And you have to define that very crisply. Some of these systems are internal facing. Some of them are external facing. Either way, you have to know what success looks like either for your customer or client or for internally another consumer of the process, right, because it's a production line ultimately. So you ask yourself, what does success look like? And then you kind of work backwards from there. That each stage, okay, I know I want to end up here with this

kind of end product. Then what's the previous stage? Okay, well, what are the, inputs to that stage, what information is necessary, what tools are necessary, and then what are the success criteria for output? And then you just kind of work backwards up the chain until you figure out, okay, from tip to tail, these are all the stages. Got it. Right. I'm starting to notice a pattern in my line of questioning. Is that I have this next question lined up, but it tends to be answered in the previous question. So it's like my normal. I'm a mind reader. So let me ask you, I mean, And like I said, you might have already answered this. But what are the biggest mistakes either you have made or you see others make when it comes to systems and delegation?

I mean, abdication is kind of one. And I'm certainly guilty of that. So I get that. Anything else that you can think of? Yeah. And I think this applies particularly to a business owner, to an entrepreneur. We very often, we think in big pictures, right? Big generalities.

Okay, I know I want to accomplish this. I know these are the big pieces. and then you kind of throw it to somebody else. And it's sort of abdication, right? You've given responsibility, but you haven't really given clarity on the outcomes. And so a few mistakes that I see is not sitting down with the person tasked on making the system, if it's not you,

and say this is what success looks like. And here's the process I want you to follow. And here is the sign-off you need to get. So whenever someone creates a system, have the business owner, ultimately in smaller businesses, sit down with it and review it and think to themselves, okay, if this person vanished, could I take this and give it to somebody else? That's a very important criteria for that.

You know, I've made every mistake in the book, you know, creating systems that are too complicated or not complicated enough. It's at just the right level of system that matters. Because if everything is tasked driven down to the five-minute, you know, a checkbox, then it's too detailed and won't be used. If it's too general, then you don't know if it encompasses too many sub-tasks and there could be a failure there. So getting the sizing right and that's going to be different for every business is also a really important thing that I see people not paying a lot of attention to. All right.

Let's get practical. All right. If someone were to take on the idea of systemizing their business, so you got a solopreneur out there, a one-man band, what system or systems should be tackled first? that's a that's a good question there are several frameworks for that but ultimately you have to look at what your highest contribution is in the business and then what are the things that are ultimately commodities so if these are some of the first things that you are delegating out whether you've got a you know an hourly assistant of some sort or even just a subcontractor doing things for you you have to ask yourself what are the things that are taking a huge amount of time, are relatively repeatable, and are not core to my business or core to the value that I add, right? So, I mean, if you think about what's one of the first things that almost all businesses outsourced is bookkeeping, right?

Bookkeeping. Right. Why is that? Well, it makes no sense for me to be doing journal entries and entering receipts and things like that. We all get that, but then we fail to apply that lesson to something else that might be, you know, equally systematizable, right? So that's the general principle.

Look for those things where you're not adding huge amounts of value or that are low-level, repeatable commodities that free you up so you can work more on the high-level parts of the business. Got it. So what should be last then? Should that be like your genius and what you do best or your biggest value?

Yeah. Yeah. Last would be either your genius or your highest contribution to the company. second to last is probably anything in the line of money between a customer and you, right? Because very often some of the last things that should be off your plate are sales and marketing, right? Because of a lot of the other delivery and operations can be handled by other people. You can actually find really people whose genius is the delivery of the thing.

The thing you don't want to let go of is, you know, the wallet of the business, right? Financial controls. And you don't want to let go of sales and marketing. and listen until you feel that you really have a solid team in place for that and systems that you know and you can see at a dashboard level what's going on. Raj, what was the last book you've read in the last 12 months and how, or let's say, no, what was the best book that you read in the last 12 months and how did it impact you? The best book, okay.

Now, the funniest thing is because I do them all on audio, I don't even remember a lot of the books. Let's see. Recent memory then. Yeah, recent memory. I think one of the book I've re-read it or re-listen to it is essentialism. I think that that is a, you know, really an eye-opening thing. It's about what really matters. And asking yourself is what I'm doing really essential at all times.

And I find that, you know, both personally and professionally, that that's a really important lesson. Yeah. I read that as well. and but I think I forgot most of what I read in there. Exactly. Well, it's worth a reread. So was it, is there another book called minimalism or was it minimalism a subject within essentialism?

Well, it's, it might be another book. I don't, I don't know. It might be another book. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Okay. Good. So what's the, uh, the toughest time that you've had in business and how did you overcome it? Yeah.

Um, You know, there have been several. I mean, it's a long road. But I think ultimately it is realizing that my original economic model of this business didn't work. And I was not charging enough for the services that I was providing. And again, down to systems, I had systematized things to a point where I could deliver very well. But ultimately, I wasn't charging enough and there wasn't enough value in the product, in that marketing product that we were, originally started with, to have customers stick with us for the long term. So, you know, I invested probably, you know, two years of my life in trying to push that rock up the hill and not, you know,

not deciding sooner that really I need to reset some assumptions in the business. Got it. As real estate investors, our network, the people that we know within are really important to us. And one of those key players is, say a realtor, right? And that's kind of what everybody always goes after. And, you know, having been a realtor the first few years before I was an investor, you know, investors hit me up every single day. And it was just annoying. And they were just like, I just thought they were all full of crap and like, I was like, stay away from me. I don't want to deal with investors, right? Exactly. Until there was like one person who actually came and actually understood what made me

tick and we built an incredible relationship together. And I've kind of taught that when you're out networking with realtors, understand that they work in a little box, right? And they're really focused on their commission. And the faster they can get that commission, the better. So if you can kind of deliver those things and not make things too complicated for realtors, that's how you approach realtors. So an attorney is also a very important part of the real estate investors network. Are there any idiosyncrasies or things that someone should know if they wanted to network with attorneys? There definitely are. I'm a, you know, I'm a, you know, retired attorney and we are a very idiosyncratic bunch. I think one of the things, again, you know, you said the realtors live in

their little box. The attorneys do the same thing. They spend so much of their career and their life just learning how to do the craft that, you know, there are a few who go out and they do a lot of networking events and things. Most of them, most of an attorney's life, you know, it's not what you see on TV. You're not in court all the time. You're sitting, it's a relatively lonely existence, sitting in your office, churning through deals. And so I think there's an opportunity for investors to really get to know and, you know, find an attorney that you really get along with. Find one that you can partner with. And there's a really great way to mutually add value. If you can become a referral source for them and refer that attorney more opportunities,

more business, and it doesn't actually, frankly, take that much, right? A few deals a year could be fantastic for them. And what you'll get in exchange for that is having a partner who can actually look at deals and help you plan strategically. Because a lot of folks use attorneys reactively, like when there's a problem or, oh, just paper the deal. And can they do that? Yes. But if you find a really good attorney, what they can be fantastic about is warning you about problems that you might not have even thought about in advance. So when you're structuring a deal, et cetera, and obviously, you know, you're clearly teaching folks a lot about that, but they might not always anticipate something that has to do with, you know, restrictions on land use or what have you

that that might exist up for specific property. So, you know, use it, find one really good attorney, feed them well with referrals. And in exchange, you'll get a lot of strategic guidance if you've chosen well. That's kind of like the number one rule of networking in general anyway. Just give, give, give before you ever really asked. Yes. Yeah. That's exactly right. I mean, the one thing I will say with attorneys, you know, they're, they, uh,

they often don't have enough kind of deal flow to be referral out partners for a lot of entrepreneurs. Um, but the value that you can get from them is in the strategic advice. And if you feed them, you know, uh, referrals, it's, it's definitely something that, that works out. You don't, and you don't need a whole lot of them, right? One good attorney, that's fine. Or maybe two in your network.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, one of the key relationships for us would be a family law attorney, like bankruptcy, divorce, divorce, bankruptcy. Estate planning, probably. Estate planning, yeah, exactly, right? The same thing for them, do they find the same thing of value, is just referrals? Is that what they would hold us in the highest regard?

Yeah, it is. And the one thing that might be valuable to folks listening is really don't, you know, don't go with the true generalist. If there is someone who thinks that they can do everything and they're holding themselves as generals, they may be a very competent attorney, but nowadays it is impossible to be an expert at everything. So, you know, I always advise folks, get, you know, your estate planning and probate attorney is one kind. Your family law attorney is a different kind. Your real estate attorney is a different one. So you might have multiple relationships like that, but you're going to get much better work product and much more depth of knowledge that's useful to you if you do it

that way. Got it. Cool. Make sense. Thank you very much. Raj, it's been a pleasure. Thanks for sharing your wisdom with us today. Just in case your ideal client were listening today, how would they know it and what would be the best way for them to reach out to you? Perfect. An ideal client for us would be anyone who's got a law firm. We typically work with two partners or more.

So anything from a two, five partner firm all the way on up to 20 or 30 partners. That's kind of our sweet spot for doing the kind of marketing that we do. visit us at practice alchemy.com and there's a few things you can do there. Number one, there's a whole bunch of guides and resources that you can download or you could request a marketing assessment, which is something that we'll go through with you and actually flag, here are the things that you should be paying attention to. And all that's available at practicealchemy.com. Super. Thanks, Raj. We'll talk soon. Very soon. A couple days here. A couple days at our next meeting. So I'm really looking forward to that. And thanks for having

you, Matt. You bet. You bet. All righty. I'm Matt Terry. God bless to your success, and I'll see you next week for another episode of Thought Leader Thursday. Take care. This podcast is a part of the C-suite Radio Network. For more top business podcasts, visit c-sweetradio.com.