Eps 36 - Your IP is Your Biggest Asset: Protect It!

Erin Austin: Hello ladies. Welcome to the Hourly to Exit podcast. I'm very excited to answer the question why IP matters to your professional services business. So in a recent LinkedIn Live, I shared what I call a big number, 70% of the US gross domestic product. I think you can guess intellectual property. Despite this, I had a recent pitch to talk to a group of consultants about IP creation and protection, and was rejected with this response quote.

Erin Austin: The common perception of services businesses is that they deliver services, not that they create IP that needs to be protected. Well, yeah. That's what I'm here for. As an expert, you are creating intellectual property every day. Intellectual property is created every time you use your intellect or pay someone to use theirs, whether it is the custom advertising campaign that you create for your client or the d e I training material that you use with your clients, or the logo that the guy on fiber designs for you.

Erin Austin: It's all I. Sure your expertise is in your head and no one can take from you. Uh, Share your expertise is in your head, and no one can take what's in your head away from you, but they can take what you produce away from you as a business owner. You know, as opposed to a freelancer, which we'll talk about later.

Erin Austin: As a business owner, your job is to make sure that you own and control to the extent feasible, the intellectual property that you create with your e. Of course there will be intellectual property that you create specifically for your clients that they will own. And of course there will be people that you hire to create deliverables for you that will be based on their intellectual property, which you won't own.

Erin Austin: But when you're using your own, uh, uh, expertise to create new assets, we wanna make sure that you're owning and controlling them to the extent. So let's talk about a few really obvious places where you need to protect your ip. First content marketing. Whether publishing on LinkedIn or doing a webinar or a podcast or an article for an industry publication or some other original thinking for public consumption, your marketing content is worth protecting These materials demonstrate your thought leadership, your unique skillset, and other important characteristics that contribute to your ability to attract.

Erin Austin: Land clients. Of course, if you're hoping to be taken seriously, you must have a website because among other things, an A o L email simply won't do. Your website contains copyrightable material, and by the way, if it doesn't have that C in a circle with your name and the year of creation in the footer, put that in there today.

Erin Austin: that content is part of your common card. It's a chance to lay out your expertise to potential clients and others who might wanna know more about you, whether they wanna make a referral or invite you to be on their podcast or to collaborate with you. What would you, what would it say about you if the same exact materials that appear on your website pop up on somebody else's?

Erin Austin: Even if you aren't planning on scaling your business, although I'm sure you are, if you're listening to the Hourly Exit Podcast, even if you aren't planning to scale your business, you don't want your materials copied wholesale by your competition. Another area are methodologies, processes, and procedures.

Erin Austin: To replicate successful work with clients, it's neither efficient nor necessary to recreate the wheel. As an expert, you are amassing important ip. That could be modules or formulas or templates or frameworks, and every time you use them with a new client, You're probably improving them, adding tweaks based on whatever additional information that you receive with every new engagement that's part of developing your expertise and this, these methodologies and processes and procedures, they're part of your accumulated wisdom.

Erin Austin: and there is major value in this, and it is intellectual property and you want to protect it. So this affects how you pitch your clients, the types of offerings that you have, how you approach a project once you receive the work, how you track the value of your services. The list of reasons that you are successful due to your original thinking is extens.

Erin Austin: Now some of us learn our craft from other experts. We might take a course or we might get certified, but that just proves the value of a methodology, of a framework because we are paying third parties to get access to theirs. So as you grow and your expertise grows, you wanna be the one who's creating those frameworks, those methodologies.

Erin Austin: Secret sauce. You wanna develop all that stuff in-house that is unique to you and to your work. You know, the reason we love having niches is that, let's say you have that certification from a generalist. . But then as you work in your niche, there'll be very specific patterns that emerge that are that, and you, you add that to your base of knowledge until you get something that's really unique to you, and that would be your own protectable intellectual property.

Erin Austin: So whether it is positions you serve, whether it positions you to serve your clients, start. . Whether it positions you better to serve your clients, or it is an IP asset that you eventually sell as a standalone product, or that you sell as part of an exit from your business, it is important to take protective measures.

Erin Austin: All of the assets that are created in connection with third parties, whether with clients, with collaborators, with contractors, even with employees, all, anytime a third party is involved with a creation of content, you want to have a written agreement in place. This will make sure that you're protecting your rights in your original.

Erin Austin: And it'll also make sure that you're receiving the rights that you're paying for when somebody else is creating them for you. So back to the question, why does IP matter? It matters because unless you're Tony Robbins, there's only so much you can charge for your services. There's only so much that Margaret will bare for day's training or coaching session or facilitation.

Erin Austin: It matters if you're exhausted by the feaster famine cycles of large one-on-one engagements. It matters. If you wanna stop being an implementer and start being a strategist, it matters, especially if you love what you do, but you don't wanna do it at this pace forever. IP is required to decouple your income from your time, and that's what we're talking about here.

Erin Austin: Building a scalable and saleable business requires the development and ownership of assets. And when you're in the expertise business, those assets are intellectual property. This applies whether you wanna grow through services or products to scale with your services. You need to develop methodologies and SOPs to ensure efficient, dependable results for your clients.

Erin Austin: Whether those services are provided by you or by your employees to scale with products such as courses or trainings. Oh, that's of course. Oh, I. The only expert who doesn't need to think about their IP is the hired hand. That freelancer, who simply executes the work assigned to you by the client and collects a check.

Erin Austin: If that's you, this is not your podcast, but since you're here, I'm going to assume that you don't fall into the hired hands bucket. In that case, you need to protect your. and your value and IP writes like many things that are legal are a little bit too complicated for unspoken and unwritten assumptions.

Erin Austin: There is that fine print in the client's contracts that you have to understand. Some of them can even restrict how and with whom you can use your expertise. You know, that makes me insane. and protecting your IP is not a one-time thing. It takes attention and care throughout all the cycles of your business.

Erin Austin: 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. and beyond that, if you do decide you wanna expand your business by offering courses, or if you wanna sell your business when you're ready to move on to the next chapter or any other way, you wanna maximize the value of your work, you need to make sure your IP ducks are in a row.

Erin Austin: That might sound a little overwhelming, but it doesn't have to be like all areas of our business achieving goals. It's all about having a. with the goal of building a scalable and scalable business. Again, that's simply building a business that decouples your income from your time. The path in the hourly to exit world is clear.

Erin Austin: There are three steps, IP inventory, IP protection, and IP deployment. So first IP I. I have that as the first step. You may wonder why isn't IP creation the first step? You're all about creating IP and, and then protecting it. Well, it simply isn't necessary for me to make a step because you're creating IP all day every day as you use your intellect.

Erin Austin: Creation is not your challenge. Your challenge is making sure that you're tracking your IP like inventory, because when you're in the expertise business, your inventory is intellectual property. So I create a ton of content. My content is here, there, it's all over the place, but having a central location for tracking and storing your IP inventory is the first essential step.

Erin Austin: You can't protect what you aren't tracking, so acknowledging the importance of this step and the resistance to it. I created an IP journal to help you. The idea behind the IP journal is to make a regular habit, whether it's daily or weekly, depending on your content creation cycles, to make sure you're tracking what you're creating.

Erin Austin: and because you probably have some IP inventory that you haven't tracked before to also go back and, and, um, catalog it. So the IP Journal has a number of things that it does for you. It helps you identify what IP you own and what you use, cuz sometimes we use IP that we don't own, like software. Uh, create a timely record of the IP as it's created by you or for you so you don't lose track of ownership rights.

Erin Austin: Determine your IP usefulness, whether it's enforceable and whether it conflicts with any third party all uh, ip. You can access its relative value to your business. You may have some IP in your business where you couldn't operate without, and some like, you know, third party software where there's always gonna be another software provider, right?

Erin Austin: And determine what additional resources are required to protect your most valuable ip. Some is more valuable than others. Every blog post, maybe you don't wanna protect that, but there, you know, obviously if you have some sort of manifesto or major workbook or guide that's more valuable, then you wanna protect that.

Erin Austin: So that is the IP journal, and I do have a link to that in the show notes. So IP Journal, that is your, your your IP inventory step. The second step is IP protection. So once you understand what you have, then you can allocate the appropriate level of resources to. It might mean registration for some of it, as we spoke about earlier, whether that's copyright registration or trademark registration.

Erin Austin: For most of us who are listening to this podcast, patent is not, um, part of your business, but it might be. Um, but whether or not registration is appropriate, , it will always mean having written agreements in place regarding its creation unless you personally made it. Again, whenever there's a third party involved in the creation, you want those written agreements.

Erin Austin: Intellectual property ownership rules can be confusing. Clients who believe they have full ownership of, of a deliverable, even when it includes your preexisting material because they paid for. Likewise, when you're paying for a subcontractor to do work for you, what rights do you have in their deliverables?

Erin Austin: In the absence of assigned contract, you may be very unpleasantly surprised by the default ownership rules under intellectual property laws. Regardless of your thoughts on contracts, I'm pro. I hope you are too. There is one agreement you simply can't avoid. I think you know what's coming. The old N D A Love 'em or Hate 'em.

Erin Austin: Confidentiality agreements, also known as non-disclosure agreements, NDAs, they're everywhere. these days, they're the entry ticket to almost every two-party interaction before pitch meetings in response to RFPs. You know, even when you hire someone, you, that N D A tends to come out. So because of the ubiquity of, hold on.

Erin Austin: Okay. Start that. Because of the ubiquity of NDAs, I created an hourly to exit N d a negotiation package. It includes, An N D A template. This is a plug and play template that you can start using immediately. So when you're hiring contractors or anytime you're gonna share some of your, uh, confidential information, you wanna have that n D A in place.

Erin Austin: There's the N D A annotation. This takes the template and fully annotates it, provision by provision to make sure that you actually understand what those provisions. It includes a sample client side, N D A. It's the typical N D A you might receive from your client that you're expected to sign, and it has been redlined by yours, truly, including detailed explanations for why I made each change that I made.

Erin Austin: And then finally, I have the hourly to exit. If this, then that chart. Now, while I recommend that all agreements be reviewed by a lawyer before you sign them, I understand that sometimes that review won't fit into your schedule if you need a very quick turnaround or it may not fit into your budget, if it, you're just at the talking stage and there's no revenue attached to that n.

Erin Austin: So this chart, which, uh, is a companion piece to my N D A Hotspots LinkedIn Live. Um, if you don't have that, I'm gonna, I'm gonna include it in there. It's gonna be in your package, uh, that gives you suggestions on how to deal with the most common issues that you'll come across in your nda. So a link to, uh, get the N D A package will be in your show notes.

Erin Austin: The last step is IP deployment. So I've decided I'm going to use the word deployment instead of monetization, which I think you've heard me use before. I'm gonna use deployment from now on because too many people confuse monetization with creating product. Deployment means bringing resources into effective action.

Erin Austin: You know, I like this better than monetization anyway, because we don't create IP for vanity's sake. We create it so that it works for us because it provides leverage. The reward of our investment in creating and protecting our IP is to use it as a leverage to make our businesses more profitable. This might be.

Erin Austin: any number of IP offerings. Licensing courses and training might be through productized services, or it might be through a customizable, sorry, or it might be through a customizable signature solution. All of these. Are very different ways of deploying our ip, but they're all IP based, or I should say they're all more profitable when they are IP based.

Erin Austin: Through my one-on-one services side of the business, think beyond ip. I love to work with people to find that intersection between, you know, what their IP is, what their goals for their business are, and the market that they're in to find the optimal deployment. Oh, that's such a good word. So I hope you found this helpful.

Erin Austin: Uh, shoot. Start again. I hope you found this helpful. I am continuing to beat the drum that all professional services can be scalable and saleable businesses star, sorry. I hope you found this helpful. I'll continue to beat the drum that all professional services providers can build scalable and saleable business.

Erin Austin: If you're interested in learning more about the offerings I, uh, discussed today and any other questions about intellectual property, you know where to find me. Thanks.