Why IP Matters to Your Services Business

So why does IP matter? It matters because, unless you are Tony Robbins, there's only so much you can charge for one day's training, a coaching session or a facilitation. It matters if you are exhausted by the feast or famine cycles of large one-on-one engagements. It matters if you want to stop being an implementer and start being a strategist. It especially matters if you love what you do but you don’t want to do it at this pace forever.

Intellectual property is required to decouple your income from your time.

To decouple your income from your time while providing services, you need methodologies and SOPs (which are IP) to ensure efficient dependable results for your clients, whether those services are provided by you or by your team. When you decouple your income from your time with products--such as trainings that teach others what you know--that’s IP.

The only expert who doesn’t need to think about IP is the “hired hand.” If you simply execute the work assigned to you by the client and collect a check; you’re right, IP isn’t a factor in your business.

However, if you don’t fall into the hired hands bucket, you need to protect your work and your value.

Protecting your IP is not a one-time thing. It takes attention and care throughout the cycle of your business. IP rights are intangible. Once lost it is very difficult, if not impossible, to recover them.

Having the right contracts, doing appropriate due diligence, and memorializing your IP in a manner that establishes your ownership are essential tasks for any service-based business.

That might sound a bit overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be. Like all areas of our business, achieving goals is all about having a plan. The plan to build a scalable and saleable business, which is simply a business that decouples your income from your time, can be broken down into 3 implementable steps:

1. IP Inventory

2. IP Protection

3. IP Deployment

IP Inventory

You may wonder why IP creation isn’t the first step. It simply isn’t necessary. You are creating IP every time you use your intellect. Creation ain’t the challenge. The challenge is to make sure that you are tracking your IP like inventory.

If you are at all like me, you have masses of content, here, there, and everywhere. Having a central location for tracking and storing your IP inventory is the essential first step. You can’t protect what you aren’t tracking.

In support of this essential step, I developed an IP Journal to help you. Use the IP Journal to:

1. Identify what IP you own and use

2. Create a timely record of IP as it is created by you or for you

3. Determine your IP’s usefulness, whether it is enforceable, and whether it conflicts with any third-party IP rights

4. Assess its relative value to your business

5. Determine what additional resources are required to protect your IP.

You can find the IP Journal here.​

IP Protection

Once your understand what you have, you can allocate the appropriate level of resources to protect it. It might mean registration for some of it. But it will certainly mean written agreements for all of it. Intellectual property ownership rules can be confusing. Clients believe they have full ownership a deliverable because they paid for it. Likewise, what rights do you have in your subcontractors’ work? In the absence of a signed contract, you might be very unpleasantly surprised by the default ownership rules under intellectual property laws.

Regardless of your thoughts on contracts, there is one agreement you simply cannot avoid. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, confidentiality agreements aka non-disclosure agreements aka NDAs are everywhere. These days, NDAs are the entry ticket to almost every 2-party interaction. Every pitch meeting. Every RFP. Every hire. Out comes the NDA.

If you don’t have your own NDA or aren’t familiar with them, click here to get a copy of my favorite mutual NDA template, which is fully annotated so you understand each provision

IP Deployment

I’m going to use “deployment” instead of monetization from now on because too many people confuse monetization with creating products. Deployment means “bringing resources into effective action.” I like that much better. We don’t create IP for vanity. We create it so that it works for us; it provides leverage.

The reward for our investment in creating and protecting our IP is to use it as a lever to make our work more enjoyable and profitable. This might be through IP offerings, such as licensing or trainings, or it might be through productized services, or it might be through a customizable signature solution. Through Think Beyond IP, I love to help people look for the intersection among their IP, goals and market to find optimal deployment.

Think Beyond IP and the Hourly to Exit podcast were founded on the premise that all professional services providers can build scalable and saleable businesses. If you are interested in learning more about our offerings, just hit reply!