No protection → No leverage
I have a running list of all the ways business coaches talk about scaling without talking about intellectual property.
To be clear, I 🥰 business coaches, but I cannot overstate the importance that legal protection plays in scaling your business.
To effectively scale an expertise-based business, we need to ensure we have the right protections in place.
The Leverage Continuum
The more leveraged your business model, the greater the need for protection. Here's a breakdown of how this applies across increasing levels of leverage:
1. One-to-One Services
If your business operates on a one-to-one services model, you need these basic agreements:
Client Agreements: Ensure you have a solid agreement that protects your intellectual property by limiting how clients can use (and reuse) your work.
Contractor Agreements: Unless you have written agreements, your contractors own the deliverables they create for you.
Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs): NDAs are crucial when sharing confidential information.
AI Usage Policy: Clearly define how your team can use AI in creating client deliverables to avoid contract breaches.
2. One-to-Several Offers
One-to-several offers allow you to provide value to multiple clients at once, increasing your leverage. Here are the key protections:
Facilitator Agreements: If you use facilitators to deliver your content, ensure they can't use your materials elsewhere and address ownership of any improvements they suggest.
Non-Solicitation Agreements: Protect your client relationships by preventing facilitators from poaching your clients.
License Agreements: License your workshops or training materials to clients who can deliver them internally without you. The license agreement sets forth clear usage parameters.
Copyright Registration: Now that you are giving facilitators, clients, and other licensees access to your content, registration helps enforce your rights if someone misuses your content.
3. One-to-Many Offers
At this high level of leverage, you may not be directly interacting with your buyer at all, and the relationship is more transactional:
Terms of Use: Instead of individual agreements, use terms of use to dictate how your materials can be accessed and utilized. In other words, terms of use are licenses that contain the terms of how your buyer can use your IP.
Trademark Registration: Now that you aren’t selling yourself, your brand becomes more important. Ensure it's protected to maintain its value in the marketplace.
Note that these protections are cumulative. As you diversify your offers, you will need to add more protections.
Protecting our IP at every stage—including one-on-one services--is crucial for building a scalable (and hopefully someday, saleable) expertise-based business.
IP Is Fuel 🚀
Erin