6 Business Resolutions to Rock the New Year - 008

This is Law and Wit Creative Counsel for Entrepreneurs. This is episode 8, 6 Business Resolutions to Rock the New Year. Welcome to Law and Wit Creative Counsel for Entrepreneurs. I'm your host, Brittany Rettell, mother of 4, entrepreneur, naptime lawyer, and attorney for creative entrepreneurs. I'm here to share inspiration and action so that you can tackle your business blocks and confidently own your business. In every sense of the word. Thank you so much for being here. Hello and Happy New Year to all. Sorry if this seems dated if when you're listening to this it's not fresh 2018 like it is now, but can you blame me for being excited about New Year and wanting to harness all that energy into what I wanted to talk to you about today? First, a little business out of the way. I have to give my disclaimer. While I am an attorney, I'm not your attorney unless you want me to be, in which case please head over to BrittanyRettell.com, sign up for a free consult. I do them online for 20 minutes. We can talk about your business, about what you might have that's bugging you, that's keeping you up at night, any problems that I can maybe help you with, and then we can go from there. But anything that I talk about today will just be for informational purposes only, for your own ecumenement and education. So Please do not assume that this is professional legal advice, that you should customize your own business without talking to a professional. So thanks. But with that, I want to get into what we're talking about today, and that is 6 different business resolutions to rock the new year. I know that I have been, I'm one of those people that I like resolutions, even though I know that it is a completely arbitrary day on the calendar that we happen to mark the 365th day that we've rotated around the sun. You know, I get that all, you know, on a metaphysical level, but it is— I think it's exciting. They're turning over the new year. I really like that we're in 2018. I really like even years. I think they're especially better than prime number years. Those are my least favorite. And I just think it's a really good opportunity to be reflective, introspective, all the things about your life, your business, your goals, where are you spending your time. And what better way, especially as you think about where you want to be taking your creative business this year, then to think about what can you be doing to maybe lay some better foundations, to take care of some of those pesky problems that have maybe been bugging you that you know you should have taken care of and just haven't done yet, or to maybe set some things up for some of your bigger goals that you want to reach. What I will be talking about today will be part of the business, legal, administrative side because that's what I am comfortable with and that's, that's what I speak to in my expertise. I know there's a lot of other information out there about growing your email list and getting, you know, social media marketing under control and, you know, all kinds of amazing information. That is not my bag. That's not my expertise. But what we will talk about today is what you can do in your business to support those goals, to support those other activities, and hopefully in a way that can make it easy and digestible in a way that you can check off your list. So stay tuned, and if you are interested in what we're talking about today and want a little bit further help to have this stuff get done, I will include a little checklist of what we talk about today in the show notes. So make sure you go to that after and download that. That's going to be at brittanyratelle.com/8. So b-r-i-t-t-a-n-y-r-a-t-e-l-l-e.com/8. So let's get to it. Okay, so the first thing that I suggest, if you haven't done it yet, as part of your new, new year, new you, is to register your LLC. Now I talk extensively about the benefits of an LLC how you do it, why you should do it, kind of what it will look like. It is a state-specific action. You register your LLC with your state. It's usually your state commerce or your, you know, whoever is your Secretary of State in your state, like here in Utah, that is the one who kind of holds the registration, the database for LLCs. So that's what that looks like. So if you've not listened to that episode, please go back to episode 6. So again, you can either do that on wherever you listen to your podcast on here, or if you want to go to my website, I include the little mini link player from Libsyn on there. Um, so that's going to be brittanyroedel.com/6. Um, so, and that will be Do I Need an LLC? So, and hopefully that episode will convince you that if you are making money, then yes, you probably need an LLC. The only caveat I'll put on there is if you're not making a lot of money, meaning less than $800, which that's almost kind of quasi-hobby, you know, you, you could say that's kind of just maybe a profitable hobby, and probably the IRS would consider it so too, because some states do have heftier fees like California does to register an LLC. But outside of that, or if you're making more than $800, then I think it's a really good idea to register your LLC. So again, that episode will walk you through all of the process and we'll kind of get give you some groundwork in terms of the decisions you need to be thinking about. If it's just going to be you, if you're going to have partners with you, and especially if you're going to have partners, that I recommend really looking and having an attorney help you with, especially with an operating agreement. I know you can go on websites on LegalZoom and the like, and, um, and, or even just through your state portal and set up your LLC, and that can be fine if it's just you. But as soon as you start adding other human beings with their own humanness and all the mistakes and oversight and different expectations they might have and the way they run their business up in the brain. Um, I think it's really important to have on paper how things are going to work, who's making decisions, what happens when someone wants out, what is that going to look like, um, how to wind up the business, whatever. All those decisions, and a good operating agreement will lay that all out. So, okay, so that's that. Number 2 is get some contracts. Um, I want to say it like the Suzy Orman voice: get yourself a little jacket, like get yourself some contracts. I'm sure there's something that you're doing in your business where you're working with other people. Either you're working with clients or you're working with vendors, or you are working— maybe you have independent contractors that work for you, maybe you have some freelancers or a virtual assistant, maybe you do collaborations with people. No matter what type of your business, you know, from photographer to fashion designer to you're in the, you know, you're a music producer or artist. I just did a lot of work in that field, so that's on my mind. There's gotta be people that you're working with probably pretty consistently, and especially enough dealing with enough money on either end to make it worth having a real contract, something in writing that sets out what's going on, who's taking the risks, what happens if there's a dispute, how we gonna handle this, how we gonna handle intellectual property and copyright, what about work for hire and how is that gonna work if someone is doing work for someone else. Just to take an example, if you have someone who's building a new website for you, if that's part of your goals for 2018, awesome. I'm sure it's gonna look beautiful. Good luck on the fonts. But here's the thing, you wanna make sure that whatever contract you have set out with your designer makes it very clear that you own the content to your website, all the content. And that may include the templates that are being used, whatever fonts, if there's other supporting files or stock photography that's part of it. You just don't want to assume that all of that is yours if you haven't gone over that. And have you talked to your website designer about, you know, ADA guidelines to make sure they're complying with that? You know, or do you have the things on there that you should in terms of your legal disclaimers? I'm kind of jumping the gun because that's going to be my next one. My number 3 resolution is do a little website audit. But those things would be covered in a good contract. So please get yourself some contracts. You know, if you, as a starting point, you can ask among friends, you can look online. I do custom contracts for people and I'm building my template custom, you know, contract shop right now. It's not open to the public, but I have most of my library built. So if there's something that you want for your business, shoot me an email, hello@brittanyrotell.com. And, you know, I'll especially honor, give you a good deal because I recognize that I don't have my website up. It's It's not a very easy commerce process right now to get the contract, but I want to make sure you guys have what you need to do business, to move forward, to be confident that you're making deals and making things happen and all sides are being protected. So get yourself that, make it happen, no excuses. Okay, Terry Crews voice. Okay, all right, number 3, do a little website audit. So make sure that on your website, and I'm going to refer you to another podcast episode, not to be self-promotional here, but hey, you know, what can I do if the shoe fits? If I've already talked about about it. You know, I don't like to hear myself talk that much, to repeat ad nauseam. Listen to podcast episode number 4 where I talk about the 5 legal docs that your website needs. And in this episode, I go through exactly what you need on your website, so, and why you need it and what those policies should contain and deal with. So if you have some of those or you think you maybe do and are not sure, take a look at your footer on your website or on your page that might say legal or disclaimers or something like that. And make sure that the things on there actually match up to what your business does. So if you, you know, stumbled upon something, if you, you know, Frankenstein some sort of website policy from somewhere else and are not actually sure it complies and it makes sense to the kind of business that you do, then let's maybe get that looked at. You know, if you— especially if you're running some sort of digital business, you know, if you are selling products, if you have courses online, you know, your main assets are all just sitting there on your website. And you want to make sure very clear that you have set out user terms in terms of what people can do with your content, what the penalties are for abusing that content and trying to make commercial use out of it or copy it or share it in a way that is contrary to what you have laid out. All that needs to be really clear. And especially you want to make sure you have a privacy policy. It's required in California. So it's just good policy basically for anyone doing business in the US is you need to have a privacy policy. Tell people what you're doing with their stuff, with their private information. So especially if you have any kind of third-party links on your site, you know, if you allow people to log into your site using, you know, a Google or Facebook admin, if you're letting people upload content, how is that going to be handled? All of that jazz. So anyway, please consult that episode, episode number 4. Okay, next is business resolution number 4, and this is something that I just posted on today and I got a pretty good response from people, which tells me that I— it's something that people needed to know about and that got screenshotted a bunch of times. And that's if you are running a Facebook group, um, do a little review of your admin policies. So either if you have a Facebook group or you plan on setting one up this year, if that's kind of part of your social media community building strategy, here are 3 things you need to think about there. The first is make sure you set up a pinned post disclaiming responsibility or liability for content on there. This is especially important if you are in the health and wellness field of any kind, if you're doing any kind of coaching, especially in anything that kind of fringes on mental health, wellness, exercise, if you're doing boot camps or you know, essential oils, or I mean anything like that, especially, I, um, you need to make sure that you are disclaiming responsibility, that you make it very clear you're not offering medical advice, legal advice, professional advice of any kind, unless you are holding yourself out as that professional, and then you should include your credentials. But if you're not, if you're just a person with something to say, that's fine. Just make sure it's very clear to everyone else what the position is that you're speaking from. Number 2 there is list a way to contact an admin, either if that's you or you have someone else that's administering that group for you, and what to do if there's a problem with content. If someone sees something that's offensive or that somehow abuses community guidelines, whether it's ones that you've set out or you're pretty sure it would infringe upon ones that are set out by the platform, by Facebook's, there should be a way to get in contact with an admin and make sure that that can be resolved. The third is make sure you reserve the full discretion to post or remove content at will, and make sure that you put that in that pinned post and say, look, this is my community, these are the rules that I'm setting out. And if, you know, it's usually better to give people a heads up on what you expect to see. You know, if you have specific rules about, you know, promotions and when you can do that, you know, that's a really common thing to put on your Facebook. If you have other specific guidelines in terms of, "Hey, I don't want to see this kind of language," or "I want to really stay away from this topic," or, you know, "I reserve the right to edit and remove content, you know, hope you can all understand, please be professional, yada yada yada," something like that. And the overarching idea here, what you want to remember is that anything that you set yourself out to be and any promises you make to your group, you really need to deliver on them. So if you are promising a safe place to talk, then, you know, make sure that you can follow through on that, that it's a safe place to talk. If you want this to be a positive community where we are building bridges and singing Kumbaya and making daisy chain necklaces, then you gotta make sure that someone's on there and that if people are bullying or putting weird stuff or crappy links on there, that someone's taking care of it. So just know that there's, you know, there's a little bit of power in that queen bee admin group responsibility and some responsibility that goes with it. So you just want to make sure that that doesn't get abused and that you understand those, those responsibilities and that onus that you're signing up for and plan for that accordingly, whether that needs to be put in your schedule or that's something that you want to look to hire out to make sure that it happens the way you would like to see it happen. Okay, that brings us to our next one, number 5, which is FTC disclosures. And what I'm talking about here is if you do any kind of influencer marketing where you are either doing affiliates or a system where you are interacting and using influencers to create sponsored content, or they're promoting some of your goods or services, all of that big umbrella of type of marketing, you want to make sure that you are— that your FTC disclosures are up to par. And what I mean by that is that you are making it clear to people that when you are paying for something, content, meaning when you are paying an influencer or you gave them something for free, whether it was product or comped service or a discount or whatever else, um, that it's very clear to the audience that that happened. So, and the overarching statements here is that it needs to be— any disclosures need to be clear and conspicuous. This is language the FTC has given us, and the Federal Trade Commission, that's who's in charge of keeping people in line on this account. And the second is that you need to disclose any material connection. By material, I'm not talking about a scuba skirt or that kind of material. Material means anything that's important or relevant to the relationship at hand. So, um, and before I get any further, I do want to remind you that I have a whole little mini course on this. Um, it takes about an hour, but it's, it's, it's worth your time, honestly. So, um, and that's on my website, and it's a free little video course. I run you through a PowerPoint presentation with me talking in your ear about how to kind of clarify some of the vocabulary of FTC disclosures, how to do it on different platforms, um, what doesn't work, what a lot of people think still flies, and I, and I still see people violating it. So I, I wouldn't, you know, keep harping on it if I didn't think it was still a really important issue. Um,. But I still see people doing #spon, #thanks to, collaborating with, and frankly those things just don't cut it because that's not clear to someone that you're actually collaborating it. Nor does actually using the feature in Instagram or Facebook of paid partnership with. The FTC says you really shouldn't rely on the platforms on their types of features to cover your FTC disclosure responsibilities. The onus is on you. The buck stops with you. You are the business owner. It is your responsibility to make sure that if there's any kind of connection between you and whoever it is that is speaking for your company in any way, that someone knows it. And again, you gotta, you gotta think about the grandma test here. You got to picture your grandma, your lovely, amazing grandma. Hope maybe you saw her over the holidays. She's on Instagram, she sees the post, Is she going to realize that that cute blogger who is talking about the amazing diaper bag that's on her back, is she going to realize that she got that for free? Or that she not only got that product for free, but she's being paid to talk about that. Is that clear to her? If it's not clear to her, then it's probably not clear to someone else. So that's a test you got to think about in your mind. So no offense to grandmas. I know my grandma listens to this and she's amazing. She's a savvy realtor. Who's 83, but that's, that's who you gotta have in your mind in terms of making it very clear. Even though you think, well, everyone knows how the world works in terms of, you know, pay-to-play, and we send monies around and people send me things because I'm beautiful, but, um, not still everyone realizes how it works. And you need to make sure, just own it, you know, own it. If you're an influencer and you're getting stuff for free and that's part of your business, own it that you got it for free.. And you can use either hashtag ad, or you can use natural language. You can say, I was gifted this product, or I was sent this for free from him, but this is what I think of it. That's fine either way. So, and again, I go into that more in depth in that little mini course. So you can find that on my website under courses. So again, brittanyrotell.com, and you can sign up for that course, which will, I think, dispel a lot of the myths. You might have a misunderstanding and really get you up to date so you feel confident in treading into that all-important burgeoning field of influencer marketing. Okay, the last thing I'm gonna talk about is doing a little IP audit, and by this I mean a little intellectual property audit of your stuff. And this really involves you taking a good bird's-eye view look of what is going on with your content and where are your assets, where is your brand and where, um, what's strong about it, what's really working, what do you plan to grow with, and what should you be doing to protect those brand assets. So whether that's content, whether that's color scheme, the name of certain products, your name, website, um, and because there's a lot of myths, you know, out there that are circulating of, oh well, if you have the domain name, then, you know, you've obviously protected it, intellectual property. No, no, no, no. A domain name is just what GoDaddy said you could have. That actually doesn't connote any type of rights to your property. And a copyright— as a little refresher, copyright is normally used for any kind of created work. So these are literary works, photographs, graphic design, music. Those are all original copyrights. Those are things that they were ideas in your head, and then you put them into a fixed medium, meaning an actual thing that someone could see or touch or listen to. And then you can copyright. And things are automatically copyrighted as soon as you create them in there. But they are not registered. There's the important word there. They are not registered as a copyright until you go do that and register at the Copyright Office. And it's actually a pretty simple procedure. It's something you can do on your own. Something I talk about a lot, my little Monday Q&As that I do on Instagram Live on Mondays. At midday, and people can do it on their own. It doesn't have— it's not actually too terribly difficult. The second part of that is a trademark. And a trademark is, as you've probably seen, is the little TM with the circle. That's like the provisional trademark while you're in process, or the R with the circle under a brand name, and that's the actual registered you get when you have a successful registration. And a trademark is there to is basically something that the US Patent and Trademark Office gives to you to recognize the— and label, clearly identify the source of goods. So it's actually not meant to protect the business owner, it's actually meant to protect the consumer, because the consumer wants to know that if they paid for a Louis Vuitton bag, that it's actually a Louis Vuitton bag. And so they want to have that mark there to make it very clear that this was the source of goods. This is the person that created it. They know this is what the supply chain was when they purchased it. They had that reassurance. But how trademarks are used, and they can be used in a variety of ways, is they can be used to trademark your actual brand name. Nike's a great example because a lot of people are familiar with it, and it has the 3 elements. The brand name would be Nike. The swoosh would be the logo element that's also trademarked, and they actually have this logo trademarked as well, which is just do it. Typically, short phrases are hard to have copyright protection, like, as we discussed, because they're short. And frankly, it's hard to get protection to that because those could be uttered in a lot of different places. That's why it's easier to copyright a book than it is to a short phrase. So I have a lot of friends who run Etsy shops and clients who come to me and say, you know, I have this cute Etsy shirt on a onesie and everyone keeps copying it, and can I protect it? And Um, probably no. I mean, you can— you could copyright the artwork, um, if you— if it's original artwork, you know, from your head to paper, or, you know, to your iPad to Illustrator, or, you know, Adobe Illustrator, whatever you're using to create it. That you could copyright and register. But in terms of the phrase, it's very challenging to copyright a short phrase. Um, but you can trademark it, um, if you can protect the words and it's not already in use by someone else. You can get a trademark for words. So a good use of trademark is, you know, the name of your business, the name of— if you have any really strong products, you know, the name— if you have the name of a course or a line of something that's, that's doing really well, and you really want to make sure— you think that it's probably at risk of being confused with other people or other people trying to use that name and make money off of it, and you think it's worth the cost. Trademarks are you know, a little bit more of an investment. The fees start at $250 for just one class of goods, meaning if you just want to do it in t-shirts and protect your Nike swoosh just in t-shirts. If you want to protect it in all kinds of goods, then the cost goes up from there. So, and most attorneys will do trademark processes for you, and I do recommend using an attorney to do the trademark registration process because it's a little trickier. It involves making sure you have the detailed application, that you have really, really done your research beforehand. Otherwise, you could just get— otherwise, they could come back, the office can come back and say, look, this is too close to something else. And it's not always directly the exact same name. It could be something that sounds similar or that it's in a similar field and a confusing enough name. You know, there's a likelihood of confusion that it would trigger. You want to make sure that you're being strategic in the class of goods, and you want to make sure that you can properly respond to any office action that you get. And that's the letter that you get back, the response that you get back from the USPTO office. And if you don't respond in the right way in the right time frame, then your application dies and is abandoned, and then all your money just disappears into the ether, into some great government waste hole. So I do recommend getting an attorney for that. You should probably plan on budgeting at least $1,000 upwards in terms of cost for that. So just so you can think and plan about if that's worth it to you or not, that's what you should think about. And I do those for clients. I do both copyrights and trademarks. So if that's something you're interested in, again, schedule a consult with me and let's, let's talk about what we can do for your business. So, okay, that's gonna be all for today, folks. I want to make it short and sweet because I know people are busy and I don't want to overload you with too much stuff. But, you know, I'm super excited for this year. I've got some really great people and we're gonna have on some guests on the show from a variety of different businesses to to talk about. If you haven't listened to some of my previous ones, I had my dad on here talking about negotiation. I had the Allison Show, Allison Faulkner of the Allison Show, who's hilarious, talk about branding and a little bit about what she's kind of discovered as she's built her business and launched her audio courses that talk all about influencer marketing and the power of that relation-based business growth. So that's just a little sampling. So as we go forward, again, if you're interested in show notes for here, please go to brittanyrotell.com/8 If you haven't signed up for my newsletter yet, I send that out every week. I took a little break over the holidays with the podcast and with the newsletter, but I'm, I'm back on track. We're back in the saddle again, and I send that out usually on Wednesdays. And you can sign up for that at BrittanyRettell.com/newsletter. And if you do, I have a free little business legal checklist to give to you that will kind of give you a bird's-eye view of of some of the things you should be thinking about when organizing and administering your creative business, whatever it is that you do. So that's kind of your marching orders for today. If you've liked what you heard in the podcast, please share with a friend, or, and/or please leave a review. Reviews are super, super important, and I did not realize how important they were until I started podcasting, that it's really one of the main ways that you can get any tread into iTunes is that by the more reviews that you have, it raises you in the search algorithm so that people can find your content, that it shows up as relevant content. So I love getting good feedback from people saying, you know, I listen to this episode, or I really like the podcast, and I love that. This makes my day. It's really, it's really happy, makes me really happy. But it would make me even happier if you would just put that in writing and leave a review. And you can do that from your phone or from iTunes. You go to Law and Wit. If you look it up in iTunes to the page, you'll see the list of episodes and down in the corner you'll see leave a review. And that's how you do that. And you can put in, you can put in a, you know, a pseudonym. You don't have to put in your real name if you don't want to. And even just a short and sweet review, I'd really, really appreciate it. So thank you so much for tuning in today and I hope you have a great day. Hope you have a great year. I'm excited. I think 2018 is going to be a great year and I hope it will be for you too. Thanks so much.