Feeling that need to get your life story on paper? Want to share your life knowledge with those who could benefit from your experience? KPI told you to write a book? Before you start tickling the keyboard and dreaming of a lavish book launch, here are five things you must know before picking up your quil.
If you own your own business, the fastest way to double its value is by protecting your Intellectual Property (IP). It is so effective at increasing the value of your business because you don't have to create anything new! It's simply protecting what you already have created. In this blog I will share my top three learnings from a recent webinar I ran with my IP lawyer and also the biggest mistake most companies make that could cost them their brand.
This whole conversation came about when I was catching up with a friend and colleague Gareth Benson. We have been partnering on a few business deals over the years and he has recently come on board with Social Star as a Personal Brand Consultant to help his clients with their personal brands. This fits nicely into his current business, True Blue, which brings clients stories to life using digital technology such as video and photography. We were discussing how I licence the IP I have created in Social Star to my Consultants and my growth plans over the coming years and he pointed out a massive hole in my strategy - IP protection!
I was shocked at how much I didn't know about this! After all I have a Masters of Entrepreneurship, worked in corporate branding and just sold one of my businesses which was effectively all IP. Yet I realised my knowledge was woefully inadequate and I had left myself exposed when it comes to IP protection. Even worse, when I reviewed some of my larger clients I realised they were exposed too. Thus, I quickly ran a webinar to inform my audience on what they can do to protect their IP and offered a cost effective way to understand what shape they were in. Here are my top three take aways from the webinar:
1) Trademarks: If you have a business name and logo, you have a trademark worth protecting. I learnt this from my University studies and registered Social Star a while ago. That means if anyone in Australia uses that name, the logo or the star in a similar industry I can dispute it.
My impression was that having a TM on your logo gave you some protection until you can get the R symbol. I was wrong! You have to have the registration for full protection. But I was right in that you need to use the R symbol on your logo as much as possible to prove that you want to protect it. Being a curious person I checked a few large and well established companies to see if they were doing this. I found that quite a few didn't have either TM or R symbols on their logos which was surprising. I even found a new competitor to one of my clients who had copied a clients name and logo. The scary thing is that this new player could force them to take their logo down if they are not properly protected! Imagine the cost of having to change your business name and logo after 20+ years of business. New business cards, stationary, website design, social media, lost SEO for the name, lost market presence, client confusion - scary!
It's a no brainer - get your proper registration. But getting your trademarks protected is just the start and it's important to get advice on this area as there are some tricky parts to this too. Such as you need to register the trademark in each country you operate and also in each class of business you have. Best to get some advice before doing this to ensure you are fully covered. The next few tips are where the money is.
2) Systems: The biggest learning for me was that I need to protect my systems. The value in Social Star as in a lot of modern businesses lies in how you do things. Your processes. If you can replicate your skills to others by creating a process and they can deliver equivalent value by following it, then you have effectively created a system for your business to grow. This system can be protected by IP law to ensure your competitors can't copy it.
This is so vital for information businesses where the main value lies in the knowledge you have created. Once you have protected this thought leadership you can leverage it through franchising and licensing, but IP protection is the first step. This is where the real value in your business lies and it provides tangible proof to any potential that you have something unique. It also means to get what you have they must purchase or partner with you as they are unable to directly replicate. BOOM easy way to double the value in your business!
3) Patents: This is a challenging area and one not suitable for everyone. I went down this path once when I thought I had the best idea in the world and wanted to protect it. (sure every entrepreneur has been there...)
I consulted an IP lawyer and spent tens of thousands on my branding and IP protection before I even had a product! Unfortunately the idea was way ahead of technologies time and I let it go. (Tile is the new version of my idea 10 years later...)
My learning from this experience is for any IP protection take it in stages. Once you have a business, protect your logo with a trademark. Then when you have worked with hundreds of clients and have a repeatable system and process, protect that. Finally, if you have some unique technology or software you can patent it.
Patents are really expensive as after the first year you have to register it in each and every country you want protection. This is massively expensive and time consuming so only start this process if you have investors who can afford to do it properly. Also remember it's not use protecting your IP if you can't afford to defend it. So think logically about how you would discover breaches of your patent and also how you would react to any breaches you find.
In summary, review if you have IP protection in your business. Not having even simple trademark protection could cost you the brand you have spent years growing. If you are unsure if you're covered it's well worth a small investment to double check. If you have a trademark use the R symbol on all your public facing logos and once you have well used systems protect them too. Finally, have a realistic approach to IP protection and how you would use it in your business. Good luck!
Andy
P.S. If you would like to take advantage of our 90 minute IP business consultation with Gareth be one of the first 10 to click here and get a 75% discount.
Do you remember the 1980's? I was a teenager then and remember fondly one particular TV commercial where a young Naomi Watts gives up a date with Tom Cruise for a lamb roast. Fair enough today, but back before couch jumping on Oprah he was a huge star! Today I did something similar.
I thought the ultimate question was that one about the meaning of life! But ever since the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy delivered the answer (42, by the way) there has been a gap in the market for a new ultimate question.
According to author Fred Reichheld, this question is actually "how likely would you be to refer a friend or colleague to my business?". In his popular book, The Ultimate Question 2.0, he spends a lot of time detailing why he believes all business owners should consider this to be the most important question you can ask your clients. He is referring, of course, to surveys of customers - not the meaning of life. But for some businesses, referrals from clients could be almost as important.
I know that Telstra and some other large corporations take this question so seriously that everyone is measured and paid on the answer customers provide. That's pretty serious when the CEO gets part of his bonus based on whether customers appreciate his company enough to recommend their friends.
So why is this question so important? Here are three reasons why:
The three reasons why how likely you are to get a referral from a friend or colleague is the ultimate question for your business.
1) Because it tells you about your brand. The value of this question is that is encompasses so many answers to other questions. If you were to ask how happy you are with the service, if the price was right, how was the perception of the brand, etc., you would get a good idea of their satisfaction. But we know that people will not refer you to a friend unless they score you highly in all of these areas. It's a short-cut and in this day and age, short is better.
2) Because it is short. Have you seen these surveys that promise to be only a few minutes but actually are so long they remind you the lines at Disneyland. You know the ones - you think you are about to get on the ride, but it's actually just the end of line 1 and the other 5 lines are hiding just around the corner. Grrrr!
If companies are prepared to offer me an iPad, I would spend some of my precious time to answer the 58 questions but, for free? You’ve got to be kidding. Telstra, on the other hand, do it well. At the end of every call, the automated recording asks you to hold on for a survey and it's one question - the ultimate question. Neat. Xero accounting software has a nice survey on all their website pages too: "Overall, how are you feeling about Xero?" with three faces. Cute and simple but not quite as compelling as that ultimate question.
In the fast-paced world where short is better if you can only squeeze one bit of feedback out of your customers, make it this one.
3) Because referrals are gold. Referrals in businesses have a closure rate of about 25 - 50%, depending on the type of business you have and how respected the referrer is. In my business, the closure rate is about 50% or greater. Needless to say, it's a vital part of our business. When you compare referrals statistics to an internet marketing campaign where a good close rate is 1% of click-throughs, referrals suddenly look pretty good! You can read more about referral marketing here.
The Ultimate question and use of the Net Promoter Score is a genuinely effective way to measure exactly how many clients are prepared to refer you. Then you can work on increasing this score over time.
There you go - Andy's personal guide to using the Ultimate question in your business surveys to e-ttract more clients to your business via referrals.
Keep e-ttracting,
Andy
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