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Protect and Profit From Your Intellectual Property

Lesson 7 of 13

How to Re-Work Your IP


Protect and Profit From Your Intellectual Property

Lesson 7 of 13

How to Re-Work Your IP


Lesson Info

How to Re-Work Your IP

So you guys should still have your intellectual property master class bonus out so we just covered prioritize which is step teo I want you to go to step three which is the following page which is re work okay and so that's what we're going to cover next and in this step um you're going teo essentially use your knowledge of the intended audience you some of the stuff that you've already kind of learned today looking at the mining right the content that you already have making some strategic decisions about how to prioritize which content you want to start working with right now and then it's deciding right what I create with it so I've got this stuff I've got this awesome content that I have kind of identified that sitting in my business I want to take steps to capitalize on and I've decided which ones are sort of like the top five that I'm really interested in now let's decide what you're going to actually create with it how you can sort of rework that content to create something new a...

nd the goal here is to avoid what I like to refer to as creativity cancer okay and that's a situation where every five minutes you're creating something new in your business um this is why it's a problem because if you're constantly sort of in creation mode first of all it takes a lot out of you right like how many people like you work super hard when you're trying to launch a product and bring a product to market right so if you're every five minutes creating something new that you have no time to really sell that thing market that thing and really work it right so that's one of the problems with sort of creativity cancer and then the other thing is is that that's really a symptom of a larger problem which is you don't know what the hell you're doing right like your stuff is all over the place um you don't really have a strategic plan and you're kind of just you know grab grasping at straws and creating new stuff because that's what feels good to you but you don't want to just do that you want to be really strategic about it so that you can generate revenue like I said right at the top um and if you missed it that this is all about money okay it's about generating revenue in your bed business and having a successful small business so and by successful I mean one that generates money okay profit that's the goal that we're trying to get teo that's actually step five right now we're in re work but the goal is to get to profit and so you gotta follow these steps on and then you know I just want to make sure you understand that you should avoid this issue of just constantly creating new stuff you've already got a ton of stuff already sitting in your house it's like I think about you know if you have kids like ideo your kids might ax you for new toys like uh they go to target and then they're like they want this new barbie or they want this new truck well guess what you have like seven trucks at home why don't you play with those that's what you say all right well I want you to do the same thing okay you've got seven trucks at home you need to play with those trucks okay? You know you can build you know, put some legos involved like painted you know, make a new truck but you know, play with what you've already got so I want you to do that um if you've created stuff already that content is valuable ok? And so one of the other options too is like we had alluded to earlier when we talked to charlie if it's something that doesn't make sense to sell under your brand then it's something that you could take if you've already created it and sell it to somebody else ok, so I'll give you an example of this like I had said earlier I have a lot of lawyers who sort of follow my work, right? I don't know why, but a lot of lawyers you know, come to me and asked me questions about starting a virtual office or just you know how I've built the practice that I've built for myself on dso for awhile I used to teach a course and teach lawyers sort of how to do what I've already done and then I realized you know what that takes a lot of time and energy out and I really want to dedicate more of my time to working with entrepreneurs so I stopped doing that type of work but I still get those questions all the time right on dh so I took that course that I've already created and worked out a licensing deal with another company that is still serving lawyers and they're going to deliver the course okay so I'm not going to say all right? I've created this I p I don't longer 00:04:00.403 --> 00:04:03. want to do the cust sir service I no longer want to 00:04:03.01 --> 00:04:06. make that a big focus of my work but it's still highly 00:04:06.87 --> 00:04:09. valuable intellectual property right there's still 00:04:09.21 --> 00:04:11. a demand for it so I don't want to have to deliver 00:04:11.68 --> 00:04:14. it myself but I can sort of offload it license it 00:04:14.7 --> 00:04:17. to somebody else they pay me a fee you get a percentage 00:04:17.09 --> 00:04:19. of the revenue that's derived from this course and 00:04:19.9 --> 00:04:22. that can still be something where I get a check right 00:04:22.51 --> 00:04:25. now I gotta check on a monthly basis from this particular 00:04:25.6 --> 00:04:28. course that I'm still selling right eso you've got 00:04:28.73 --> 00:04:30. options there you don't have to sort of toss it out 00:04:30.82 --> 00:04:33. or throw it in the garbage or say it's old you know 00:04:33.71 --> 00:04:36. maybe it feels old to you but it's not necessarily 00:04:36.18 --> 00:04:40. old too you know whoever it's for you know so think 00:04:40.02 --> 00:04:43. about it that way be strategic and don't waste your 00:04:43.0 --> 00:04:46. I p there there shall be no I'd be wasting okay so 00:04:46.18 --> 00:04:48. even if you don't want to deliver any more don't want 00:04:48.14 --> 00:04:51. to use it anymore you can still get value from it 00:04:51.26 --> 00:04:54. all right so that's just an example so let's talk 00:04:54.2 --> 00:04:56. about this whole reworking step 00:04:57.64 --> 00:04:59. so here obviously what you're going to do is we work 00:04:59.69 --> 00:05:01. the existing material you already have to make it 00:05:01.69 --> 00:05:05. even more powerful marketable and profitable okay 00:05:05.59 --> 00:05:08. so we're not starting from scratch here we're starting 00:05:08.0 --> 00:05:10. like maybe up like almost the seventy five percent 00:05:10.18 --> 00:05:12. point in a lot of cases you've already got a lot of 00:05:12.06 --> 00:05:14. great stuff and you're just gonna repackage it to 00:05:14.64 --> 00:05:15. make it more marketable 00:05:17.04 --> 00:05:19. and so I want to be thinking about what can you add 00:05:19.94 --> 00:05:22. to the product to raise the level of quality? One 00:05:22.84 --> 00:05:26. thing we talked about was designed design is a really 00:05:26.21 --> 00:05:27. easy way all the designers are gonna love me because 00:05:27.91 --> 00:05:29. I'm going to get them tons of business 00:05:30.48 --> 00:05:34. but design is a really easy way toe add some spit 00:05:34.72 --> 00:05:37. and polish onto something you've already got okay 00:05:38.24 --> 00:05:40. um and it's something that I use in my business all 00:05:40.89 --> 00:05:43. the time every time we create a cheat sheet if we 00:05:43.57 --> 00:05:46. create an e book if we create any sort of guides any 00:05:46.6 --> 00:05:49. kind of info product anything that we're putting out 00:05:49.05 --> 00:05:52. there we make it pretty because it shows people that 00:05:52.33 --> 00:05:54. first of all we're raising the level of quality we 00:05:54.37 --> 00:05:56. want you to know that this information is incredibly 00:05:56.54 --> 00:06:00. useful so it's hard for you to see that if it's in 00:06:00.11 --> 00:06:03. sort of ugly package but it s so you want to give people the opportunity to really see the quality of your work so you could take something that's old like say you haven't oldie book and it looks kind of old and maybe your brand is sort of grown up a little bit and it's not sexy anymore you can hire designer to make it sexy you know and take that same content make it beautiful and put it out there in the world and the beautiful thing about that too is that you don't have to do it unless your designer yourself you don't have to do that work you know you can hire someone to do that work and soto frees you up to then be minding other stuff what else can I send to my designer over here and make pretty and beautiful and have a whole suite of amazing stuff that really helps my people so just wanted to give that design tip and then one other thing that I want to make sure you understand is that design does make it harder for people to steal your content. Okay, it also makes it really easy for people to identify your brand when you have, like, sort of a design aesthetic. And everything you put out is in that aesthetic that, in and of itself could be a way to rework. So you could say, all right, I got this whole suite of stuff. It all looks sort of funky and it's all sort of jumbled together. But if you create a sort of a certain look for that sweet, and they all look the same, right, and they all sort of suggest, you know, either you're edginess or whatever it is, you're trying to communicate in the design. Then all this on all your stuff has grown up, has become more polish. So, honestly, design is an easy, easy way to just make everything that you are to rework the content that you already have and make it really awesome. Okay, so this is a quick tip. Uh the other thing is you know, thinking about building a team around your intangible asset right? So let's talk about that a little bit so during the break we actually talked about this if you've got content and you want to add something to it so let's say you want to have an illustrator come in and illustrate the stuff that you've already got let's say you're an accountant and you have you know, content around how to how entrepreneurs khun do their own accounting but then you want to bring a lawyer and like maybe a tax lawyer to help deal with some of the more complicated legal stuff that's part of that so there's some ways that you can write bring other people in and have other people on your team create content for you now this is a little different than a joint venture right or even a strategic partnership like the point is is that I hate to say it this way but we're not equal rights you're hiring them to do a service for you and at the end of the day you need to make sure that you own the resulting intellectual property that's very different than doing a strategic doing venture where both parties are bringing you know bringing things to the table on both parties may have joint ownership or there may be some interesting things there but usually it's more equal right? This is different this is you hiring people either contractors or freelancers to work under you on to create something that you want your company to own and this would be a really good reason to go check out the advanced type for entrepreneurs because we go into a lot of detail about what kind of clauses do you need in your contract what kind of contract you need to have with your independent contractors to make sure that you own the resulting intellectual property all right there's some issues related to work for hire and copyright that you really need to understand to make sure that whenever you're moving your intellectual property around that you are retaining ownership okay that's really important I want you to always be thinking about your business that way you are in the business of selling and licensing and transferring around intellectual property okay so every time you're doing a transaction think about alright what's happening to the I p when I do this transaction once I sign this agreement or once I pay this person once I do this deal what's going to happen to my I p when I do that very very important okay, so let's talk about creative ways to rework your theme now we've talked a little bit about licensing a couple of times. Licensing is one of my favorite things ever. Okay? Because it's a great way for you. Just expand the reach of your work and like honestly that's what I'm doing right now, right I'm taking my conta at my expertise my intellectual property and bringing it to the creative live platform and that's a licensing arrangement you know so so there are a lot of different ways that you could do this and I'm excited to have david moldow and a couple of minutes we're going to talk to him about what is he looking for when he's looking for people who are going to come and share their content and what does a licensing deal even look like what is the structure of that and you know why is that I pay that entrepreneurs air creating valuable okay so we're gonna dig into that but let's just talk about licensing essentially what it is is you are renting your intellectual property so it's very similar to like if you had a rental property right let's say you buy a condo and you know then you decide teo you know move in with your boyfriend in his house and you still have your condo would you decide to do is just rented out right so you rent out your condo you get rental income from it every month that's exactly what you're doing with licensing right in that condo situation you still own the condo um and you're creating a situation where you are going to make money from that condo by getting paid rent every month and that's what it is with licensing now so it's not always monthly sometimes it's an annual licensing fee sometimes it's ah per sale licensing fee there's a lot of ways to structure this it's up to you and whoever you're doing the deal with to make that happen and always remember that you can always negotiate anything okay so don't feel like you're stuck doing it some way because that's the way you've often seen it done so that's what that is it allows you to retain ownership of the intellectual property that you've created but still allow it to rent it out so allow you to rent it out and make money from it so um the way that you would do a licensing program is number one okay? So step one in creating a licensing program is protect your content and where in the next segment gonna go into a lot of detail about how to do that how to protect your ripe but just know that if you're going to do a licensing deal you need to protect your first trust me that everything that I create is registered with the copyright office um and then my brands are also registered with the trademark office so that I can feel free to do deals with other people and, you know, create a licensing agreement or create some type of situation where I congenital rate money from my content but I don't have to worry about someone misappropriating or stealing it without consequences. Okay? There will be consequences if you steal my stuff all right you're on notice eso so that's step one is you have to protect your content before you put it out there into the world for other people to sort of use okay so that step one and then step two is you have to have a licensing agreement and honestly I would even say that's probably step three step two is decide what your licensing program what's happening in it so you have to decide what are the policies and sort of the boundaries around how you're can or cannot be used okay that's an important step two so think about all right if I have a licensing deal let's say like we talked about earlier daniel report right she may have some parameters around what her workshop facilitators her licensees can and cannot do with her content you know for example if one of the licensees is you know maybe a porn star and they wantto use it in some way that is sort of against you now I don't know if daniel would even be against porn stars but let's say that she is she doesn't want a used in that way it's her choice it's her baby and she can decide how it is and is not going to be used so you create parameters and you have to really sit and think about it don't just do what somebody else is doing decide how you want your stuff used and to not be used okay on dh that will sort of help inform you when you're drafting your licensing agreement so the next step would then be to put together a licensing agreement and this is the type of thing that I would say it would probably be hard to find a reliable licensing agreement template that could work especially because it's so nuanced it depends on the deal that you're doing it depends on what your policies and boundaries are in relation to your intellectual property how you one it used and how you don't want it used so this is something that I think that you should just go to a lawyer for just pay the money and get her done you know I'm trying to think of what we charge for that just to give you some context like so you have an idea I think we charge around twenty five hundred to draft a licensing agreement and obviously if it's has got a lot of complexities that could probably go up from there but that just to give you a ballpark of what these things cost but just think of it as an investment in your business right when you create a licensing program you create an avenue to generate lots of revenue without creating more work for yourself so it's worth the investment so yes so you have step one is protecting your I p and then step to you're gonna think through okay how do you want your I p used what would be considered misuse what would be a problem and that you don't want to happen sort of think through what could go wrong in a lawyer could help you do this too and honestly you could even pay for just an hour of a lawyer's time get a consultation that's a little cheat okay with working with lawyers because the most valuable part is the advice they're going to give you so you could even just pay for an hour of their time get their advice and then try to sort of financial something yourself so let's say if you wanted to do this on a budget what I would say do is pay for an hour of attorneys time get the advice that you need then take that advice try to put together an agreement on your own um and then give that agreement that you drafted to the same attorney and asked them to review it and that'll make it a little bit cheaper than what it would cost for them to draft it you know from scratch but of course if you do a horrible job then they're gonna have to just start from scratch anyway so um you know, maybe you'd have to buy a book and get some you know, reliable template somewhere that you could sort of start with but that that's the only way I think you could sort of cobble together this on the cheap okay. Um and this is something I do in my own practice a lot of lawyers offer unbundled services now so you can just buy the advice or just by the contract review you need and you don't have to buy the full service if that's not if that doesn't work for you so that's a tip if you want to work with lawyers on the cheek so there's another step unfortunately so the last step would be to create sort of terms and conditions and you know maybe even a privacy policy around the program and the way it's delivered so it depends on the situation but in some scenarios you may want terms and conditions or a certain policy to be signed by all participants right so not only do you have a relationship with the licensee but you also have a relationship with the customers of the licensee you know I'm saying because they're they're messing with your stuff too that's your I p so maybe you make it a policy and you communicated to the licensee that you have to get all of your customers when they show up to this workshop to agree to my terms and conditions here's the terms and conditions make sure it gets signed by every works up attendee in order for them to participate so these this is how you you know you're gonna go hard when it comes to protecting your I p o okay, we're not messing around here. S so those are the steps that I would say to take if you want to create a licensing program all right? So that's one option the other option of licensing is just to license it to another larger platform writes you could license it to a large company I I actually have a friend who's a consultant and she has a ton of like just amazing content around building your team and making your employees really you know uh really productive and really happy where their work you know, which is good for the company overall so she goes in and does trainings in corporate settings and so she's got a lot of content that she's in licensing to them um and so she'll send them a proposal and say ok, I will come in and teach this workshop and then each one of your attendees will get my licensed material so you wanna pay me to do the workshop and they're gonna pay me per attendee to use my materials as well so that's another way that you could do it where then you have a licensing agreement with that person and you also probably have a service contract where you're coming into delivering a service there's a lot of ways to do this and I hope this is just helping you just sort of come up with some ideas. Ok? So thatyou khun implement things like this in your business? And I'm really excited to talk to david and a couple of minutes so that you can see that, like these gatekeepers, they need your I. P they want it. Okay, so you can set the terms, or at least negotiate the terms of nothing else of how it's used. So the sea here's some other ideas which is to create a technical solution for your people all right I've got some tech people here in the audience um eve courses are incredibly popular method for leveraging your I p in a sort of digital formats of course is our poor has to be a star so I should e education is poised to be one hundred seven billion dollars industry in two thousand fifteen holy shit mazzoli okay that's a whole hell of a lot of money that's being crude that's being made in this industry that's why you see everybody making of course every five minutes you hear somebody something about somebody's course because people want to learn they want this education and they don't necessarily have to go to a traditional educational institution to get that information and obviously creative live is a platform four online education so this is huge and that's definitely an avenue you should check out and think about and I would even say it's one of the easier avenues because there's so many tools nowadays like membership sites you know apse that are like sort of membership sites on dh there's a just a lot of different tools out there that you can create courses and then of course like I said same thing as with license and you're gonna register the course first you're going to protect it with copyright and I would even also protect the brand name then you might want to be strategic about the brand names, you know, protected, you know, eighty thousand brand names. For example, if you're going to have a bunch, of course you could have, you know the same name. Wanna one the same name, too, alone or advanced, whatever the name of the courses, s o there's, some strategic ways you could do that without having to purchase eight thousand trademark, you know, registrations. So there are some other options proprietary software mobile aps calculators I actually my husband is actually in the process of becoming a developer okay? And one of the things he's actually working on is an app for us that does trademark searches so I'm super excited about this s so we can take sort of are brain are like knowledge base about intellectual property and trademark and trademark searches and he can distill that information into an app and make it a really useful thing that saves people time and money that is really you know useful to them so I'm excited about making that happen um there are a couple of other great examples of this that I want to share one example is base camp who's familiar with the company base camp okay awesome used to be called thirty seven signals now they started out as a design company right so they were just like sort of a small design shop there was a couple of them and they did you know high end design work for you no other companies and so their whole team that was remote I believe one of the founders like is from europe or iceland or something like that I could be wrong but one of them I know is european andi I know what you say yeah denmark exactly see, I knew it was somewhere like that thanks for helping me out um so yeah so their team was remote right so they had people working all over the place but how did they sort of continue to work together as a team and make it so that they're really they're workers cohesive when they're delivering a service to a client so they came up with base camp and they created their own app their own software solely for the purpose of making it easier for them to run their remote team and so then they told some of their design friends about it and then they were all like hey we want that too and so they decided okay, this is a thing and so now what they do is sell base camp instead of being a design you know firm anymore so that's how you know this kind of stuff can happen organically too you know there are a lot of times where you have a lot of industry knowledge that you can share with other professionals who are in your same industry I'll give you another example laura road or do any of you guys know laura eso laura wrote is a social media expert right and so she when she started out her business she's gonna kind of gone through this path a little bit right when she started out in her business she also had a web design firm, right? So she was designing websites for her clients and then she decided you know what? I don't wanna trade dollar for hours anymore I don't want to provide a service anymore? I'm going to start product ties this so she took her knowledge of social media and she started selling courses so now she's built like, you know, a multimillion dollar business selling all kinds of social media courses that they're not cheap either, you know, on dso people you know, she's highly sought after and people really respect her expertise and so then what does she do next? She created an act so she took that same knowledge base that she has of social media right from all those years of either consulting or creating her iv courses and she put it into an app that's called edgar and just so you know too that app has made her half a million dollars already it's only been out for six months. Yeah, exactly so this is why we're getting excited okay on dh then the last you know, sort of type of rework that I wanted to talk about is reduce reuse recycle um so that could be you know, if you have something that's really big charlie sort of alluded to that, right? If you create like, sort of the encyclopedia of a particular type of product, you might want to break it down, pull it apart and sell each piece of it instead of selling the whole thing too another so that's one way to sort of reduce and, you know, we've already talked about sort of collaborating with other people who have I p that aligns well with your own, and you could add something new to your old eyepiece. Sort of. How we've talked about one example of this, eh? You know, uh, a friend of mine actually inclined talked about recently was he wanted to take his manifesto and, like, turn it into articles of clothing, like, you know, create t shirts out of it, create hat's, great tote bags and just letter, sort of inspiring, you know, this inspiring content that he created and just put it in a physical format. So that's, another way to sort of reduce reuse, recycle. Okay, so hopefully that gives you some sense of, like, how we conduce this whole rework thing.

Class Description



You’ll learn about:

  • Conducting an IP audit
  • Licensing your work
  • Protecting your copyright and trademarks



Kerri Konik, Brandscape Atelier


Jas Faulkner


a Creativelive Student

If IP is a goldmine, Rachel is the excavator helping you uncover the gold. The course material was easy to understand and clear to apply. I really appreciate Rachel giving so much valuable information without being salesy and doing the &quot;dangle the carrot&quot; thing. Thank you Rachel for sharing your gifts.