#82 The lawyer for business owners: Steven Landsberg on law, structure and building

TRANSCRIPT: THE bizval PODCAST
Guest: Steven Landsberg, Founder – Landsberg and Co | Co-Founder – Briefcase
Host: Graham Stephen, CEO and Co-Founder, bizval
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenlandsberg/

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[00:00:08] Graham Stephen: Welcome to the bizval Podcast. At bizval, we are passionate about empowering entrepreneurs the world over to understand and unlock the value in their business. We work with advisers and entrepreneurs to demystify the value creation process when building a business. At bizval, we know how tough it is to grow and run a business, which is exactly why we’ve made valuation simple to understand, accurate, and affordable. Our unique blend of tech and touch ensures that you always receive the best service, authentic human engagement, and data insights to ensure that you build a business that provides you with freedom and choice. In the bizval Podcast, we showcase stories of real entrepreneurs and advisers, sharing lessons and inspiration from their journeys to make your journey just that little bit easier.

[00:00:56] Graham Stephen: Welcome to the bizval Podcast. This is a show where we talk to the people shaping the industry, how businesses are built, bought, sold, valued, and the whole ecosystem that supports that. I’m Graham Stephen, the CEO of bizvalglobal.com. And today’s guest is a young lawyer. He’s still young, but he’s doing something a little unusual. He’s built and co-founded ventures while practising, and he positions himself as the lawyer for business owners. Steven Landsberg, welcome to the show.

[00:01:27] Steven Landsberg: Hi, Graham. Thanks for having me.

[00:01:30] Graham Stephen: Fantastic. So before we get started, we’re going to talk a little bit about your journey, your background, where entrepreneurship meets law, a little about your firm and where you’re at at the moment. But before we get going, who is Steven Landsberg and what is Landsberg and Co?

[00:01:53] Steven Landsberg: All right. So, Steven Landsberg. I am a corporate commercial attorney, at least by profession. Landsberg and Co is my law firm. We focus on advising founders on structure-related matters for succession planning, tax efficiencies, and risk mitigation. I’m the founder of the company. I’m trained by great mentors and previous firms that have taught me much of what I know. And yeah, that’s me in a nutshell.

[00:02:27] Graham Stephen: Fantastic. So we’re going to start right at the beginning. We seem to be making a habit, and I think you’re about the third or fourth person from KZN on the show, and you’re the second one from Westville Boys. But tell us a little bit about growing up in KZN. For our international listeners, it’s a coastal province in South Africa. What were some of those early influences that shaped you while you were growing up?

[00:03:03] Steven Landsberg: Yeah. So KZN born and raised. I stay in and around the Ballito area now. It’s on the north coast of KZN. I honestly feel like I live on holiday. This place is unbelievable. It’s a hidden gem and hopefully we keep it hidden for a bit longer, not to get overcrowded like Cape Town with all the expats there. So yeah, Westville educated, family of entrepreneurs, come from a background of entrepreneurs even in the extended family. So business ownership has always been something I’ve wanted to explore. I’m fortunate to have had people like my parents, who are entrepreneurs themselves, and my uncle, who is an entrepreneur. And of course the previous directors and business owners I’ve dealt with accumulating my knowledge in the corporate commercial area. I’m extremely grateful for that.

[00:04:04] Graham Stephen: You know, you touch on a theme we often see on the show. Somebody in the family was an entrepreneur. It could be a dad, an uncle, and I suppose growing up, a lot of the conversation, whether it was informally over a braai or over dinner, inevitably revolved around business. Did that shape your thinking? Did you always want to be an entrepreneur, or did you think about going the corporate route?

[00:04:42] Steven Landsberg: Being an entrepreneur is always something I wanted. I’ve tried a few times and failed a few times along the way. Growing up with a father who is an entrepreneur, business just becomes the topic, because as a business owner it just doesn’t end. It is all the time and there are problems that encroach all the time. Just being surrounded by that, I don’t necessarily feel like I chose it. It just almost felt like the obvious path and the thing I was meant to do.

[00:05:21] Graham Stephen: Yeah, and I suppose the beauty of having that support system around you is you’ve got mentors surrounding you, which is great. But so you had entrepreneurship in your DNA, and then you decided to study law. Why did you study law, and you paired that with a commerce degree rather than a straight LLB. Talk us through the thinking behind that grounding. Was it always just studying law as a fallback, or was there a particular thought that went into it?

[00:05:56] Steven Landsberg: I’ll be very honest with you. There was no real thought process behind the law itself. It just was the thing that almost came up first in my early development and I just stuck with it. It was just never anything else. I feel like I am grateful because it is something that almost was innate to me. I always wanted to do it. There was never another option in my brain. And of course coming from that business background with business owners and mentors in my family who were entrepreneurs, the BCom or the commerce side of things was just a match made in heaven almost. And I’ll be honest though, don’t picture me as that guy who’s going to argue your case in court. I don’t do litigation, divorce, or civil disputes. I always like to tell my clients, if they’re in trouble on a Friday night, please don’t call me. I’m not your man. I prefer to deal on the commerce side. And I also feel like that’s where, for a business owner, the legal profession can become a little bit more scalable.

[00:07:11] Graham Stephen: Going back to those studying days, our listeners don’t know that you finished with cum laude on your law degree. So you do know your stuff. And something else that struck me is you were quite involved at university level, sitting on some of the subcommittees and academic committees. Why was that? Some people get their degree and kind of move on, but you got quite involved. What was the reason and what did that teach you?

[00:07:53] Steven Landsberg: I’ll be honest, Graham. I got involved in that space to boost my CV purely. Those subcommittees were generally around debating and litigation, and as I’ve mentioned that has never been my goal. So that was a career ploy, and that’s about as much as it was. Brutally honest.

[00:08:14] Graham Stephen: An honest lawyer. I mean that must be rare. I’m joking. Anyway, Stephen, let’s move on a little bit. You look at your CV and what jumps out for a young lawyer is that your CV has got more founder and co-founder titles than the words law or attorney anywhere in there. This is not your first rodeo starting Landsberg and Co. You’ve done a number of ventures along the way. Talk to us about what some of those ventures are, what they’ve taught you, whether they succeeded or whether they failed.

[00:09:18] Steven Landsberg: Yeah, so what started it is the shock of actually being in corporate. I always knew I wanted to be a business owner, but when you are in corporate and working nine to five, you’re learning a lot and it’s great, but there’s no ownership involved. About a year into corporate I realised I needed to own something. And in the beginning it was almost a scramble. I needed to own anything. It was, let’s take the first idea we come up with and run with it and see what happens. So that’s where Grad Connect was born. That was a venture I did with a partner and a university friend in Cape Town. We built a university platform, basically a portal that hoped to link the recruiting world to vetted university students. That was our first idea and we thought, let’s run with it. We had to get started, not to get out of corporate necessarily, but to get that ownership, get that equity, try to build something scalable.

[00:10:46] Graham Stephen: It was that sort of first dipping your toes into the world of owning something, right?

[00:10:53] Steven Landsberg: Exactly. I don’t want to use the word panic, but it was almost like a panic. We need to do something and we need to do it right now. We grew Grad Connect and I think we had around 4,000 to 5,000 users on the platform at one stage. But honestly the fire wasn’t there. The passion wasn’t there to drive it forward. It is always something that I think about, you know, what if we carried on? We would be five years in and where could it be? But at the time we started jumping around a little bit too much, and then Briefcase came up a couple of years after Grad Connect. That really took my mind off Grad Connect itself, and unfortunately Grad Connect died after that. I’m proud of it, but it wasn’t the path for me and I’m grateful for what we did and what we learned.

[00:12:02] Graham Stephen: That’s an important lesson for entrepreneurs as well. Sometimes knowing when to let go of something is as important as knowing when to accelerate something. A lot of founders get stuck on an idea even if they’ve fallen out of love with it, or the idea itself has died. And it’s hard. But that was almost like your starter business, your apprenticeship. There was a lot you learned through that in terms of building something, whether it’s dependency on you, whether it was solving a big problem. But it wasn’t something that was captivating you and having all your energy pouring into it in the early days. And that’s what’s required. So you moved into Briefcase. Tell us a little bit about that. What was that about?

[00:13:00] Steven Landsberg: So Briefcase is also a project that has been ongoing, and it is software as a service. And if you’ve dealt with software as a service, you know the product is never done. So we’re in MVP version 2.5 at this point. It started out as a legal tech platform, a legal operating system. The bottlenecks in legal, at least from my experience, were always chasing signatures, version control, filling out precedents that you’ve done a hundred times but now you’ve got to do from scratch again. So what we did was we uploaded the IP I had accumulated along the way. This was an extremely excruciating process and I don’t recommend anyone do it. But we uploaded our IP onto a platform and built a Word-like system that you could then automate going forward, send for tasks, manage workflow. It turns out after building for 18 months that law firms love Word, and that was a bit of a kick in the teeth. We had spent 18 to 20 months building this platform and now it was becoming a hard sell.

[00:14:42] Steven Landsberg: Anyway, that is an ongoing challenge. We are working similarly to platforms like Juro. It’s a UK-based company, and we’re doing something in that space. We’ve also recently come across a great opportunity on the education side. So we’ve now got Briefcase Education, and the education side is something I’m really excited about. It’s got that scalable factor. It is essentially AI tracking for assessments. What we’ve seen behind some of the big internet-based universities in South Africa, and even high schools from grade 8 to 11, is they’re using AI to help them. But as soon as they go to matric and have to do in-person exams, the standard drops because they don’t fully understand the content or AI has been doing the work for them. So we’ve built Briefcase Education, which is basically AI guardrails on assessments. We can track how a student uses AI, we can block it to the best of our abilities, blocking copy-paste, recording typing habits, uploading our own version of AI so that there are guardrails to the lecturer or teacher’s desire.

[00:16:24] Graham Stephen: A couple of themes coming out here. One is that if you’ve got an entrepreneurial mindset, you’ve got to get going. You become impatient as an entrepreneur. Two is that ideas continually evolve. If you’re standing still, you’re not going anywhere. And the other point is around validating that idea. You talk about MVPs. The last thing you want to be doing is building for two years only to find nobody needs it. The importance of engaging prospective users and figuring out what actually needs to be built. We had a similar issue with bizval. We built a platform to do valuations and then realised nobody wanted the platform. They actually just wanted an independent party to do the work for them. So that platform became one of the tools we use internally rather than a service we sold. And as a lawyer, lawyers don’t always think like that. They often work within the boundaries and framework of the law. You’ve got a problem-solving mindset, and I’m going to get into that around what that means for Landsberg and Co. But these are really important entrepreneurial lessons.

[00:18:04] Graham Stephen: So let’s talk about that intersection between entrepreneurship and law. What does it look like for you on a day-to-day basis? Why does it matter for you and why does it matter for the clients you serve?

[00:18:25] Steven Landsberg: So, the difference between entrepreneurship and law. Law school doesn’t set you up to be an entrepreneur, right? It teaches you how to think like a lawyer, but not how to be one. I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to work with business owners and consult with them from a much younger age than most. And honestly, I’m just fascinated by entrepreneurship. I come home so grateful for having meetings with entrepreneurs every day. My biggest question to them is always, everyone paints this picture that it’s glamorous and great. You’ve got this company, you’ve got 50 employees, you’re doing X, Y, Z revenue. But how was it in the beginning? What did you do to get there? What did you rely on? Was it your spirituality, your partner, your wife? What was it that made you do it? That’s been my obsession honestly. So Landsberg and Co, I feel like I run a podcast because I work remotely a lot and I’m often on a call and I get so carried away finding out about this person’s business that our time runs out and we have to reschedule and actually get to the business need at hand.

[00:20:39] Graham Stephen: I think what’s super important there is that context matters. Nothing, whether it’s law or business, works without taking the time to understand the context, get to know the person, the thoughts, the ideas behind whatever problem you’re solving. And a lot of lawyers are very risk-averse. They want to operate within the neat boundaries and frameworks of what the law says. Whereas entrepreneurship sometimes requires you to look at the existing rule set and say, well, why is it wrong and how can I do it better? Those two are almost at odds with each other. So what about old-school legal practices? Where do you think they fall short and what do you do differently in terms of supporting business owners?

[00:21:40] Steven Landsberg: I would say my biggest differentiator, Graham, is that we’re very public and educational about what we know. I place a lot of emphasis on social media, especially platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. Short-form content. Pick up the phone and say, this is what I know about this topic. I don’t know everything, but this is what I know and this is what I’ve been taught. You do that over two years and all of a sudden you’ve got a platform with around 700 videos on it that is all based on your expertise. You become more proficient at communicating what you know. And honestly, I feel like there’s a lot of opportunity for Landsberg and Co to have its own education wing. If you make a video, you can educate thousands of people in a day just from the reach and scale of video content. That’s our differentiator. We want to teach, we want to help people.

[00:23:08] Graham Stephen: I think that’s so important. In the old-school model, a lot of the power and ability for professionals to charge high by-the-hour rates was based on knowledge scarcity. I know more than you, so I can charge this. Whereas in today’s world, with AI and all of that, knowledge is no longer scarce. Anybody can find the knowledge. What they lack is the ability to apply it in context and understand what it means for them. That’s where education comes in. I love that notion that education is almost at the centre of what you do. You’ve got the confidence to say, you can go and find this information, because clients are going to do that anyway. If you send a client a brief, they’re going to pop it into AI and come back with questions. Best you bring something else to the table in terms of application and context, otherwise you become irrelevant.

[00:24:27] Steven Landsberg: Yeah, I think it’s authenticity, Graham. My previous boss, who I like to refer to as my mentor at my old corporate commercial firm, always used to say to us, rightly so, people do business with people who care, not because you know something they don’t. So trying to communicate that at scale is where our education wing really becomes valuable, and it’s an opportunity a lot of legal professionals are not making use of enough.

[00:25:11] Graham Stephen: I like that saying. People do business with people that care. We have a similar saying in our business: people do business with people that they like and trust. Very similar notion. So let’s drill down on the old-school law side. You’ve done the degree, the articles, the admission. What are some of the things that law school honestly doesn’t teach you and you’ve had to learn the hard way?

[00:25:56] Steven Landsberg: Yeah, so the law is extremely broad. Every sort of corporate or business transaction or personal civil transaction that you do requires a lawyer to stamp off at some point. I personally feel like law school didn’t teach me that there were so many different avenues of law. I knew there were endless modules and texts and books, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into, this is what you can do with that knowledge. To go back to what I said earlier, it teaches you how to think like a lawyer, how to phrase and word things like a lawyer. But how to act like a lawyer is really all about where you’re placed after law school.

[00:26:47] Graham Stephen: Absolutely. And that can make a big difference. Where you do your articles matters. Are you in a family-type firm where you learn a broader approach, or are you in a big corporate where you just get stuck doing litigation all day or research? It seems like you’ve had a bit of both. I just want to flip this around before we move on. What’s one thing you wish clients knew or understood before they engaged you?

[00:27:23] Steven Landsberg: I always like to say, I don’t know what I don’t know. So it’s always good for clients to ask questions. Corporate commercial law, especially when you’re going down risk mitigation and company reorganisations, is a specialised niche within the broader law itself. It took me a while to realise it even existed before I was trained in it. So open-mindedness. AI can tell you what things exist, but if you don’t ask it the right question, it’s going to miss out that whole sector that could apply to you. I’ve been fortunate that I’ve never had to instruct a client to be more open-minded, and I hope I never have to. I always say, I don’t expect you to know what I know, and I don’t expect you to know what you don’t know. But I hope that together we can come and find a solution that works for both of us.

[00:28:46] Graham Stephen: I love that. And I think historically, people go to a lawyer and say, you’re the expert, you should know everything. And even this notion of billing by the hour, sometimes clients feel quite intimidated. They feel on the clock so they don’t ask the questions. What you’re doing with Landsberg and Co is flipping that on its head. You’re saying, we know things about the law, but ask us questions, engage with us. You’re solutions-oriented rather than compliance-motivated. That makes a big difference. You take away the intimidation. It’s, hey, we’re just two people having a conversation. I know these things, I’m specialised in these things, but I don’t know anything about your business. Let’s learn together and figure out what makes sense.

[00:30:08] Graham Stephen: Now, you didn’t just get there on your own. You grew up in an entrepreneurial family. Can you share a little bit about who some of the mentors and people who shaped you are, and what they’ve taught you along the way?

[00:30:29] Steven Landsberg: So I would say starting closest to home, growing up in an entrepreneurial household. My parents were both entrepreneurs at times, and my dad still is, for a couple of decades now at least. With that comes hard times and challenges, and those challenges have clearly been overcome because they are still standing today. In terms of the business model, you don’t want to make it too aggressive, you don’t want to come out firing too hard, you don’t want to rush the sale or try to close too aggressively. Understanding the mechanics, consistency over time, and small positive movements in the right direction accumulating over time is really something I learned close to home.

[00:31:37] Steven Landsberg: And then professionally speaking, how to engage with clients, how to read the room, how to have influence without having an ego. And things like billing by the hour versus fixed-fee, outcome-based packages. That is something a lot more common in newer modern legal practices now, but the billable hour has always been the dominant model. The ego metric of, what’s your billable hour, it’s like bragging rights. The higher you charge, the better you are. Whereas I want a client to come in knowing what it costs at the outset. You’re not going in not knowing what you’ll spend. It’s outcome-based.

[00:33:06] Graham Stephen: I want to move on to the next question. This is talking around that compliance mindset versus a growth mindset. The legal mindset and the business owner mindset are almost wired differently. One is almost wired to spot risk and say no, and the other is wired to chase opportunity. You’re obviously more to the latter. But do you think in practice that’s a problem and how do you bridge that gap?

[00:33:43] Steven Landsberg: So, building sustainably. Compliance, of course, for professionals whether it’s accountants, doctors, attorneys, finance analysts, everyone. I like to say we’re all in the business of admin. The admin is sky-high. There’s KYC, there’s FICA, there’s certified copies of everything. So checklists and compliance are at the forefront, which of course becomes a bottleneck to scale. It’s about trying to nurse the pipeline and build a pipeline that’s not going to drown you in the short term. It can be quick and easy to collect mandates and invoice people and they pay. But nothing’s been done yet. Often with compliance headaches, administration, working with government and third parties, things can take time. So building up a big pipeline is great, but actually being able to accurately and consistently deliver on all of those mandates where something may only become relevant two months after the client has paid, because that’s just how long the system or the relevant department takes to get their rubber stamp.

[00:35:30] Graham Stephen: Yeah, absolutely. You also have to make sure you’re engaging the client to let them know you are there and you’ve been working on it. Sometimes the courts move slowly. They’ve paid upfront, you’ve done the compliance, but the value maybe only gets delivered two or three months down the line, sometimes even longer. I want to move on to one last question and then we go into our rapid fire round. You’ve been quite vocal about AI and technology and where that fits in the legal space. Unverified AI work can be a real liability. You’ve also used AI in building some of your products. Talk to us about where you see AI coming into the legal space, what it does well, what it doesn’t, and how you hold that tension between it being a great efficiency and thought-enabling tool versus the dangers of using it completely unchecked.

[00:36:41] Steven Landsberg: Yeah, so I will say verbatim, I love AI. I think it is amazing. The opportunities it brings. I like to think Google was just a search engine. Now you’ve got basically a friend you can ask anything to. In terms of law it does need to be vetted. When clients run my documents through AI, it comes back with some concepts that sound great and seem legitimate but just are not supposed to be there. So it tends to glorify things that maybe it shouldn’t. It tends to overcomplicate where a more simple and direct approach is necessary.

[00:38:05] Graham Stephen: Think about a university lecturer. You can go to university and the lecturer can say, there’s the textbook, go and read it, everything you need is in there. But a great lecturer brings that to life through stories, through experience, and through context. What you’re doing is no different. Clients are going to use AI as a great efficiency tool, but what you bring to the table is the verification. And the ability to separate out, let’s call it, the wheat from the chaff. Because to an uninformed person it might seem plausible and good enough, but you as an expert are able to say, actually no, that’s not quite right. It’s the subtleties which your expertise fills in.

[00:39:13] Steven Landsberg: Exactly. And yeah, I can’t stress this enough. It’s just dealing with people. Especially when you’re dealing with founders and entrepreneurs, they’re doing something great and cool. Let’s try to have fun with the process and learn. Of course it’s professional, it’s business, we need to tick all the compliance boxes, but let’s try to enjoy it and learn something along the way. And back on AI, depending on what model you use, the AI I use can sometimes be very agreeable, which is something you don’t want when handling your legal stuff. You can’t agree on the law. The law is what the law is. So it can be very flattering. It makes you feel like the expert. And it says it in a hundred different ways. Every time you challenge it, it’s like, oh no, but you’re really right and this is what you must consider. That can be dangerous. Don’t necessarily trust without verification.

[00:40:45] Graham Stephen: Absolutely. Stephen, this has been a phenomenal chat. Before I ask the rapid fire questions, is there anything you’d like to leave with anyone listening today? Any closing thoughts?

[00:41:03] Steven Landsberg: Mantra is: do cool things with cool people. That’s what I like to do. That’s it.

[00:41:12] Graham Stephen: It’s amazing. Anybody who wants to work with a cool, young, out-the-box, forward-thinking lawyer needs to get hold of you. How can our listeners get hold of you, Steven?

[00:41:25] Steven Landsberg: I’m at Steve Landsberg or at Steven Landsberg on all major social media profiles. I’ve got links there to my email and my website. So you can reach me. I promise even a Google search should bring me up. Reach me there, see my credibility, see what I do. And yeah, if I can help you or even just have a conversation and learn about what you do, that would be great.

[00:42:03] Graham Stephen: Fantastic. So let’s move on to our last section. We do it with all our guests. Just five questions, first thing that comes to mind. One book that you think every founder should read.

[00:42:22] Steven Landsberg: Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself by Dr Joe Dispenza.

[00:42:27] Graham Stephen: Okay, we’ll have to put that in the notes. What’s it about, briefly?

[00:42:33] Steven Landsberg: So it’s basically a quantum physics approach on reality. It breaks it down to the science. What are we? Are we matter or are we divine creatures? Once that veil is pierced, you can imagine the rabbit hole goes deeper. That’s how I would describe that book.

[00:43:04] Graham Stephen: It sounds incredible. I’m going to have to get a copy of that. Back to the law. One contract clause that most business owners get wrong.

[00:43:09] Steven Landsberg: Limitation of liability.

[00:43:17] Graham Stephen: And in what context? Why is that an issue?

[00:43:22] Steven Landsberg: Most of the time it’s not there, which can be an issue. And when it is there, sometimes it absolves all liability. So that’s something that must always be checked.

[00:43:34] Graham Stephen: Fantastic. What is a venture that you wish you had started? Is there anything looking back over the last few years that you regret not having started?

[00:43:54] Steven Landsberg: Not regret not having started, but something I would like to get involved in is plant hire. Construction plant hire.

[00:44:02] Graham Stephen: I can connect you with someone. Let’s talk about it. What’s the best thing about being a boy from KZN?

[00:44:15] Steven Landsberg: We live on holiday whilst doing what we love.

[00:44:23] Graham Stephen: Do you surf by any chance?

[00:44:23] Steven Landsberg: I’m not a surfer. No.

[00:44:27] Graham Stephen: You’re from KZN and you don’t surf. We’re going to have to talk about that.

[00:44:31] Graham Stephen: And then finish the sentence. The business owner that sleeps well at night is the one who…

[00:44:42] Steven Landsberg: Has a great team.

[00:44:44] Graham Stephen: Yeah. You can’t build a business on your own. There’s another saying, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go with purpose, go with a team. And we see that day in and day out. If you let your ego become the business, that business is on very shaky foundations. And it happens a lot more often than we’d like to admit.

[00:45:07] Graham Stephen: Steven, it’s been an absolute pleasure having you on the show. There are so many nuggets and gems in here, but more than anything else, just your authenticity and the way that you talk about your business, your learnings, and your background. I’m sure we’d love to get you on the show again and go into a bunch of other topics. Thanks for being here. And to our listeners, that’s the end of the podcast for today. If you found it valuable, please like and share and tell all your friends about it. If you didn’t, keep it to yourself. Until next time, thank you for listening. Find us at bizvalglobal.com.

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