Jim Delkousis is the CEO and founder of PERSUIT, which helps corporations automate legal workflows and inefficiencies while significantly reducing costs. Prior to the launch of PERSUIT, Jim was a BigLaw partner for 17 years. Jim earned his J.D. at the University of Melbourne and a Masters of Law in Commercial Law at the University of London.
Entrepreneurial Role Models:
When business started difficulties overcame:
“at the start of our business I have to say our vision was a little bit different. And it’s not surprising at all it often is when a business finds its product market fit. But certainly, in the early days of our business we were more focused on creating profiles around types of lawyers and helping in-house teams achieve or secure secondments from outside law firms. And frankly it wasn’t very successful. A couple of reasons we were focused at the time in Australia which was a very small market. And secondly it simply wasn’t a problem which was significant enough to scale a business with. So we had to kind of take step back and reassess our goals and listen more carefully and see what we had really learnt from the journey we had taken up until that point in time”…[Listen for More]
Favourite Books:
- The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers Book by Ben Horowitz
- Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of NIKE Book by Phil Knight
- From Impossible To Inevitable: How Hyper-Growth Companies Create Predictable Revenue Book by Aaron Ross and Jason Lemkin
- Ego is the Enemy: The Fight to Master Our Greatest Opponent Book by Ryan Holiday
Also mentioned
- Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow Book by Yuval Noah Harari
- 21 Lessons for the 21st Century Book by Yuval Noah Harari
Favourite Quote:
“what you have got to do is create an environment where you inspire others to achieve life changing moments” Persuit‘s Chairman Frank Stranges
Recommended Online Resources:
- Blog of David Skok, Matrix Partners For Entrepreneurs offers advice on the key issues founders and their teams face in getting started, getting funded, and building a successful company. Also at @DavidSkok
- This is Product Management is a weekly podcast for product managers with over 1,000,000 downloads. They’ve featured guests from Spotify, Viacom, more
- David Cancel A podcast from Drift about personal and professional growth hosted by David Cancel and Dave Gerhardt.
Best Advice to Other Entrepreneurs:
“you cannot control how smart you are… But the one thing you can control is how hard you work. You have got to do the grind and hopefully your passionate about what you’re doing. And the reason I mention passion is that it’s likely that you are going to be eating dirt along the journey and sometimes you are eating a lot of it. So, unless you are actually passionate about what you are doing it’s going to be tough going to stick it out. So grind and passion are certainly the two qualities that I look for”…[Listen for More]
More About Jim Delkousis:
Persuit ( Australia) Operations Pty Ltd
Neil’s Quote at the Beginning:
“Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.” Maya Angelou
Other Quotes From the Chat with Jim Delkousis:
- “the challenge I have with entrepreneurial role models is they often feel out of reach and almost unachievable. So, I kind of have a love hate relationship”
- “make sure you are celebrating the wins along the way”
- “there is always inevitable learning. You cannot basically I think shortcut learning. What I think you can get better at is the process by which you learn, iterate, learn, iterate, and so on… It’s not so much as I said short cutting the learning process it’s just getting better at streamlining that process. So, you make decisions about what you should focus on. For example, hang on a little longer for and what you should stop doing quicker than you might have otherwise done before. To me it’s about better learning process rather than necessarily short cutting the learning process”
- “when I think about my career to what have been the most successful periods? They have always been inextricably linked with a fantastic team. People that just surprise you on a regular basis because they are committed to the journey no matter whatever the task was. And so, I have never had a period of success without a fantastic team. So, if you said Jim pick one factor, what is it? I would say getting the right team on board. Getting the right team can essentially solve any problem”
- “how about if I could create an environment which inspired others to achieve life changing moments and imagine the kind of organisation that you can build”
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