I think my story is really fortunate. I’m really blessed. I always kind of knew what I wanted to do. I would walk around the house always saying I wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer. I went to college at 16. I had to make that decision kind of early. I remember I prayed. And I was, oh God, what do you want me to be?

My dad told me that he had a dream that I was a lawyer, he does not remember telling me this to this day. Ever since then, I was like, I’m gonna be a lawyer. So I went on to college, so on so forth. I’m a very big believer in what you are purposed to do will chase you down. No matter how far you run from it, you just got to accept the calling.

When I tell you I tried to run from being an attorney, I tried to run from it. It literally chased me down, eventually ended up going to or moving to Arizona going to law school in Arizona, and getting involved with it, I was very intentional with my career.

So how I kind of ended up where I am today is that I have the connection,s have the qualifications to go into a bigger law firm, but I knew the lifestyle that came with that. I was very intentional to not go there. Because I didn’t want to have a failure of work-life balance, you get all this money, but you don’t even have a life to enjoy the money, right?

I turned all of it down, too, my parents are like, are you crazy? I took a very unconventional and more challenging route to build myself up to where I’ve gotten today. But I have the freedom in the life that I have now that allows me to have the balances, which is why it’s so faith-led, right? Because it doesn’t always make sense. There’s not always someone I can look to for an example. But I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I love it.

What brand protections should you have in place before you think about legal monetization?

The foundation

It’s so multifaceted in it, some things people are doing naturally and incorporating it. But it’s really foundational, we can’t talk about the monetization piece until we talk about your foundation.

So you really have to have the right entity in place. Do you have an LLC? Do you have a corporation, being a sole proprietor isn’t protection, you are solely liable for everything that happens in your business? So making sure you have an entity in place multiple entities in place.

your contracts

Next your contracts. Is your contract working for you? Do you have the right clauses in place? Did you pull a template off of Google? Nothing wrong with that in the startup phases.

Honestly, I’m not knocking it. I love Google. Google is a great starting place. So become aware of the things that we don’t know and you can’t do. You don’t know what you don’t know. So Google is a great place foundational. It started with a ball-moving category for thinking with things however, you do need to make sure that your contract is working for you and not against you.

Does it reflect what you are currently doing in your business and can it be a hindrance? I can’t tell you how many times I talk to clients, and they’re like, hey, I’m in this conundrum; here’s my contract. Here’s what happened, what do I do? How do I handle this etc?

It really boils down to, I say, annually at least making sure you are editing your contract, making sure you are updating it, make sure it was reflective. Our businesses are living, they change all the time, everything is happening. Sometimes your business, your work schedule, family, life is changing, and your business needs to change to reflect that. Make sure that’s reflected in your contract, right?

intellectual property

trademarks

Intellectual property isn’t just trademarks. So intellectual, trademarks are sexy, right? Like everybody wants to get the trademark, and wait times are off the charts. Because during the pandemic, trademarks just went crazy. We started hearing about celebrity issues with trademarks. And the 50 Cents and the Kim K’s of the world and Beyonce having suits with trademarks, they became very sexy. And so that’s what people highlight. They are definitely protected. I’m not gonna say you don’t need to trademark. You do. You need multiple.

copyrights

I like to talk about copyrights because everyone is sleeping on copyrights. People don’t often know where a copyright falls into the scope of their business. But copyrights are one of the easiest and most assessable ways to protect your business in regard to the things you are creating.

Later when we talk about monetization, I’ll talk about some cool things; once we have copyrights, how we can benefit from that.

patents

Another type of intellectual property that is kind of seen as a scary piece of intellectual property are patents. There is definitely a place for patents, they are the most costly and the most time-consuming in the intellectual property world.

But patents, my goodness patents do a lot for people. Patents cost a lot of money, but they can make you a lot of money. I, unfortunately, don’t practice patent law; they have to have a specific background for it. But I know the general gist of it, the scope of it enough to advise people and this is a patent, this is what the process is what you would need, this is who you need to go talk to. But patents are a very important piece of it. So just really quickly for the gist of it.

I just dropped three intellectual property types. And people are like, well, what’s the difference? Yeah, patents are for protection and invention, something that you have created. Trademarks are for your brand, name, logos, slogans, service names, product names, colors, even a small sound bite can be a trademark. Copyright is going to be for the things you create, things that you are promoting in your business that you’re doing. You can have a both. You can have both a copyright and a trademark for the same thing. It’s about how you actually use it, which is going to determine if it’s a trademark or a copyright.

What does the copyright process look like?

Copyrights are fairly simple. You can self-apply for it; if you have a bulk of applications, we want to kind of approach it a little bit differently. So what I recommend is that if you are creating materials for your company and your business, we want to copyright that. The first thing I want to say too, is what I am speaking about is the registration of a copyright.

Copyright is the only type of intellectual property that from creation, you are protected. The problem becomes enforcing that protection because if someone steals your work, and you just said, oh, I created it first, I did that, you are going to have the burden of proof to showing where you came from that you had at first.

There is basically going to be he says she says. They’re gonna say well, no, I had it first. And here’s my proof. Here’s that versus registration of your copyright. You do this at copyright.gov. That’s the official copyright site. There is actually copywriting that you can then get copy written, it’s hundreds of words and all types of fun stuff. But a copyright once you create it, you get protection, right?

You can put the “C,” you can put the year things of that nature from when it was created. However, if you are creating a lot of things and you are vulnerable for people coming and stealing your brand, I see it happen all the time people have come in and stolen complete websites, people have come in and taken your book or things like that.

So a good rule of thumb is the more it’s going to be available. It’s going to be exposed to the public the more I would go for a registered copyright, not just the innate copyright that you have from creation. So the copyright process is really just filing it paying the fee, you wait for them to send you an official approval back that they reviewed it, that they saw it, etc. And then they kind of go from there regarding the copyright.

What are other forms of legal monetization of your brand that people should be aware of?

Once we lay this foundation, we want to take every single piece of the foundation and capitalize it; we want just to put it on automation. We are scaling here; we are talking about taking what is already in place in your business. Or if you don’t have all of these protections, the foundation, putting those foundational pieces in place, and scaling them and taking them to a new level without you necessarily having to add additional resources such as hiring people, outsourcing, or getting a video team and recreating a whole lot of things.

We are repurposing what you already have in your business to monetize my way, right? Different types of ways you can do it. But my suggestion is, how do we come alongside of you as a legal partner and help you monetize your business?

creating a nonprofit

So the first element of that we talked about your entity making sure you have some protection, and you’re not a sole proprietor; once we have that entity in place, a missing component and piece that a lot of people are missing is a nonprofit, and you don’t need a nonprofit to replace your business. You want it to work in conjunction with your business because this is just a theory that I observed, and I’m a lawyer, so o we put together nonprofits.

If you look at any wealthy person, that is, and I want to look at the best of the best, the greats of the greats, and look at their examples. But if you look at Bill Gates, if you look at Jeff Bezos, if you look at the Elon Musk of the world, they have nonprofits. The reason they have nonprofits is because they are leveraging the tax code within a nonprofit entity and how they can save money.

A part of scaling is that we got to fill up all the holes, we need to make sure that we are saving money where we can save money and we are not leaking money out. Having a nonprofit when you get to six figures or more is crucial because you need a tax-saving element and a component with your business. And so this works in tandem with your accountant, right?

I’m not a tax attorney; I do net numbers and things like that. I do the entity side and the setup. I often work with accountants to make sure, from a tax perspective, their clients are set up appropriately and able to leverage it. Then I cover them on the legal side just from setting it up, making sure they’re in place. Then passing that entity on to the accounting who’s going to maintain it year after year with actually filing the deductions, strategizing with you sitting down, and making sure you have every single piece in place for it. 

clauses in the contract

Everything we did in the foundation, we’re coming back, and we’re leveling up. So next will be our contracts. We want to make sure that our contracts have clauses that protect us and that we are able to leverage. We want to make sure that it has late payment clauses, and we want to make sure that it has a force majeure, which I had negotiated a lot of contracts during the pandemic.

Unfortunately, my business was booming because people were having all these contract issues because they did not have a force majeure that covered a pandemic. A force majeure covers any event that is outside, and it’s not foreseeable for either party, and the party did not intentionally or once again could not foreseeably prevent this from happening.

It restores both parties as if the contract never happened so that they can either still go forth and perform the contract or they will both be led out of the contract without penalty to the other party as it was an unforeseeable, usually referred to as an act of God in the force majeure and then they can list out different details.

Prior to the pandemic, people had an epidemic in their force majeure, but they were not capitalizing on pandemics, which is, is the thing now it happens, right? So pretty much it can be broad, where you have any unforeseeable event, you know, by nature or things like that, and then you list out some of the specifics.

But you also want to have like interest payments in there for service providers, which means we’re taking appointments, we have meetings, some of us have coaching sessions built into our offerings that we’re giving people, well, what happens if this person buys a package of six, but then they rescheduled?

The first one, they don’t show up again, you’re going to forfeit that at some point; I can’t continue to take the cost of that in my business because that will really hinder your operation, it causes a bottleneck, and it doesn’t allow things to go seamlessly. Now you are manually scheduling when they were using the link before because you’re trying to work them in; that is hindering our practices and ultimately hindering us from making more money and positioning ourselves, right?

Being a service provider, these are things that you have to account for. And unfortunately, protect yourself against because life is gonna happen. It’s not intentional. It’s not that people are bad people, but life is gonna life. And when life lifes, we want to make sure we have been proactive in being ready for that, and not reactive.

So I’ll just throw this thing in, it is not for me, it is for anyone; this is why you consult attorneys because our brains and our practice and experience have trained us to know about the things that you don’t know about in your practice, that experience is going to teach you, but we want you to be prepared before you even have to take that, when experience hits you because life is gonna life right. So that’s the contract piece of it.

leveraging intellectual property

Then we talked about intellectual property; we can leverage all of those in a lot of different ways. All of them can be licensed the same, or all of them can be leveraged in the same type of ways.

So patents, once again, trademarks, and our copyrights are going to be the intellectual property I’m referencing; we can use all of those in different capacities to license our business out, we can white label our business, we can franchise our business, we can go and create partnerships and affiliate programs, right.

However, the reason that foundation is so important here is that you have to own it first; if you don’t own these things, and you just get out here, and you start creating partnerships, or you start creating, you know, affiliate programs and you create a white labeling process, but you don’t own it. You’re not giving them anything, right? What’s nothing is stopping them from taking it and going and owning it themselves, going and protecting it themselves. Right?

So the two things that I like to focus on are once that trademark piece, right, getting the protections in place, but then how do we capitalize our brand? How can our brand make us money?

And then specifically, on the copywriting piece, all of us have copyright, every single person, we have lead magnets, we have courses, we have ebooks, we have things that we have created within our business, even as service providers, there are processes, there are things that we’ve created that if we looked at, we could then take those things, go and get them protected, re-bundle them up a little bit, right, and then re repurpose it and resell it create evergreen programs where they are on auto-repeat every single month. They are creating and making us money without us having to do anything.

create a monetization plan

Then lastly, those are the four components I talked about before. But with all of that, what I provide to my clients in a program that I offer is the monetization plan.

Once we get all these foundational pieces in place, great, once we go in and we put the protections in place to monetize those plans, what do we do with it, then how do we make our legal assets work for us, and so I create a monetization plan for my clients and show them a framework of everything, we just protected everything we just discussed all of their future goals, their future processes, and say, this is how you’re going to do this. This is how. These are some ways you could monetize this element that we just protected from you.

Even further in the future, this is what that could become to this is how you could then sell your business or sell a percentage of it to an investor and get this much money from having this many assets. Assets in the legal world are just like assets in the real world. They add value to your business. They add valuation, which is why getting your intellectual property and having your contracts in a place where you can show I’m making this much money or this is what I’m promised to make because they’ve signed this contract. That’s why that’s so important, you guys. I’m so passionate about it, and I love educating people too.

What are the biggest mistakes you see from a legal perspective when it comes to folks building brands?