Legal Q & A on IG Live

See you, Fine Marissa. Thanks. Thanks that you're here. So anyway, today is just kind of a freestyle. If you have any questions, legal questions that you want to talk about your small business, I'm here for you. My main channel that I give tips out to people is on Instagram, but I also am trying to use more Facebook, trying to use Pinterest, you know, all the things, all the things you're supposed to be doing. I know that Instagram is where a lot of my people are, and just like Ariel, I want to be where my people are, and so that's why I'm usually on Instagram. If you guys have any questions that you have for me, just put them in the comments and I'll see if I can answer them for you. In the meantime, while you may be thinking about some questions that you might have, some other business resources that I would recommend as you're trying to think about your business and developing it, growing it, and what you would, what questions or concerns you might have. There's a couple good podcasts for inspiration, inspirational entrepreneur stories. If you're not already listening to How I Built This podcast, it's awesome. It's NPR, so it's really great production quality. That's a great one I recommend. Smart Passive Income, Pat Flynn's stuff, pretty much everything he does is great. He's been in the space for quite a while, the online space. Even though he's in a space that tends to get pretty spammy with the sales pitch and the online courses and the, "I'm going to make you a million dollars and you don't have to work at all," he actually, I think, does a really good job of being realistic and honest and trying to be positive and inspirational, motivational to people, but also not overstating. And not underwhelming people or glossing over the amount of work it takes to really get to that point and to be proficient in having income come from multiple streams and using the online space smart, in a smart way. Not just working hard, but working smart. Whatever else? Oh, also I recommend Office Talk by Annette Stepanian. She's another fellow attorney like me and she concentrates a lot on offering business advice tips, legal tips on running your business. Her kind of specific niche that she addresses is the wedding planning and event planning industry, but her stuff is really applicable to anyone who has either a service-based business and does a lot of work online in advertising or marketing, or who really has online products. A lot of her tips about what you need on your website, you can handle intellectual property issues, everything from business entity formation, can really reach out to a broad audience. That's another one that I recommend. Do you guys have any questions? Any questions for me? Anything at all? Okay, Marissa says, "Do you recommend a standard contract for services? Should a lawyer draft this or can it be written by a business owner? I do consulting and fundraising reference." Great question, Marissa. So I do recommend, I think, especially if you are in a type of business that repeats itself a lot and it's generally within the same parameters, I think it's worth it to have someone draft it, kind of your template, for the first time, um, or at least for you to reach out and maybe find a template that you like that seems to match up well with your business interest. And then you could also take that to an attorney, um, and that will save you some time and money because I'm sure, as you're probably familiar with, most attorneys to charge by the hour basis. And so anything that you could do on that front end to figure out exactly what your services are and then to offer those can really save you. So that would be my recommendation, is to find a standard contract for services. So for doing consulting and fundraising, if you do a search for, or, you know, look at, go to DocRacy, D-O-C-R-A-C-Y. It's like democracy but it's missing some letters, DocraCy, is a great place to start. They offer a lot of just crowdsourced contracts. So again, you're never quite sure exactly how good of a match it's gonna be because it's whatever someone put on there, but it's a really great starting point. So I would look on there for a contract and then really do some soul searching in terms of what are the things that I do for people and make sure that you kind of have that written out in a clear way of expectations of These are the services I provide, this is the timeline, and what are the normal problems that you have. That's kind of the other most important thing to include in a contract is when things go wrong, when— or there's miscommunication with your client, what is that normally entailing? Is it because the client's not getting back to you on what you need from them? That happens to a lot of my clients in the graphic design space. I was actually just giving some advice to someone about that because a lot A lot of times you're working back and forth, and if you're waiting on someone, that's going to stall the project and can be really frustrating. So that would be my tips, is to kind of start having all those expectations written out, and then see if you can have someone help you with that contract. And if you have a really great contract like that, that's going to give you a lot of benefits again and again, because you are going to be able to recycle that contract. And use just an e-sign provider, you know, a HelloSign or DocuSign or something. To have both people answer it. Hopefully that answers your question. Hannah Hill, "Does a small business need to trademark anything, logo, name, product, and at what point is that something you need to look into?" It depends on, it always depends, that's the general legal answer. Trademark can be a little expensive. It normally runs, on the low end, it's gonna be probably at least $1,000. And then go up from there. Less, you know, you could maybe swing it for $500 or $600 if you wanna do everything yourself and do the search yourself and do the application into the USPTO and manage the office claims, which is like when you submit it and then they're gonna get back to you and say, this is what we need from you, da da da da da. And that's called the office claim or the claim action. And that's what a lot of attorneys specialize in is giving help for that. But it depends on what your goals are for your business. If you think that you are going to expand, um, and it's not, you know, a local business but it's one that's going to have more of a national reach, um, if you think that it's going to be— have multiple kinds of goods or services in there, then it might be worth exploring getting that trademark protected. And in terms of thinking whether something's even trademarkable, normally names that are not functional Meaning like Dave's Pizza House is a really hard one maybe to trademark, or The Pizza House, because it's a house that has pizza and there's probably a lot of houses that have pizza. That's why you see a lot of businesses do made-up names, things like Xerox or Qualtrics, Omniture. Those aren't real words. Those are made-up words that have some sort of marketing kind of speak attached to them that make us think of something, whatever kind of business industry they're in.. So it's good to do a little soul-searching in terms of, is this a good fit for a trademark? Is it original? And is it fanciful or frivolous or something else where it's not descriptive of the actual product or service? Those are things that make a good trademark. And then you can go through that step. And a logo is basically a similar process. You register the name and then to do the mark is actually a separate application. So most people do both, if they're both strong things that really are cohesive and important to your brand. If you know that those are part of your brand assets, you wanna put a lot of time and money in promoting those and making sure that those are recognizable by people, then it's good to start that process. There's also a way if you don't and you just start using it in commerce and then later wanna go back, you can also protect it from when you started using it in commerce. So it's not necessarily a bad idea just to kinda get started and then bootstrap that money when you have it to start the process, you are not necessarily preempted by someone else using it at the same time, if that makes sense. Again, it is like a lot of things, it kind of comes to a cost-benefit analysis in terms of is it going to be worth it right now for me to trademark and is that money that I have right now or can I put some effort, at least put some effort maybe into looking around before you put a lot of branding effort and money, time and money behind something to say, is this something that I even could trademark? Is there some— something that has someone else has similar in the same space? So, um, does that make sense? And you could just go online and you could do a search. And, and that's what's most important, is that if someone else is selling your same kind of thing in your same kind of space, that it might be very difficult for you to secure that trademark. But if it's not, you know, Apple— Apple's a pretty common name, but Apple selling computer parts, now that's interesting. That's different. That's exotic and unique enough, and that's why Apple was able to secure that trademark and is able to protect it even to this day. So, okay, any other questions that people have? Just go ahead and shoot if you have any questions. If I can answer them, I'd love to be a resource for you. Those that jump in, I'm trying to do this regularly on Mondays to kind of get people excited about what they're doing with their businesses. And that depends on if you have an online business, if you are you know, a brand enthusiast or an ambassador doing multi-level marketing, you know, I still think all of those businesses, you need to make sure that you're being smart and being prepared about what you can do to protect yourself, protect your business assets, protect your time and money that you put into this. So if you have any questions, go ahead and share. I wish I had like some Jeopardy music. That would be better while you guys are thinking. I'm gonna repeat the advice that if you have If you want to hear more information, I post tips on my Instagram account. I'm also on Pinterest and Facebook and Twitter. I don't use Twitter that much. Snapchat, I don't even understand Snapchat. My kids understand Snapchat more than I do. But if you have any questions, feel free to post them, to pop them up in the comment box and I'll see if I can answer them for you. One that I get a lot from people is, should I start, what should I do my business entity from? That question depends a lot about what kind of business you're operating, in what state. The, the fees that, that range from what it costs to start a business like a corporation or an LLC can range. Or, you know, in, in Utah, for example, where I'm licensed here in Utah, it's only $75 to register your LLC, so it's pretty cheap. In California, that's $600 starting. So that makes a difference in terms of is it worth to start start to formulate formally my LLC. But if you are in any kind of space where you have kind of some liability risk, especially if you are selling any kind of products, I think you should need to have— definitely need to have at least an LLC, maybe a corporation and a C-Corp or an S-Corp depending on what you're selling. And if you are in a business that is selling services to people, so either online digital products online services or in-person services, I think it's smart to have some sort of LLC because what that does is it tells the world that this is a business and I'm treating this like a business. And if you have a problem with me, it's with this business, not me as a person. So protects your private assets and it keeps things like your car, your home, your retirement accounts, it keeps those separate from your business assets so that they wouldn't be they wouldn't be able to be reached by, by people who may sue you for some whatever reason. Yeah. How much do you need to make a year to be required to have LLC? Um, good question. There's no dollar amount to have to have an LLC really ever. So it's totally up to you whether you decide that you want to incorporate as an LLC. Um, the steps are slightly different for each state. I mean, the, the process, but you'll go through your Secretary of State website usually, um, and it'll tell you on there for what your state— for here in Utah It's about $75 to register with your LLC, and it's just, you go through an online portal. You have to go through a couple steps. You have to get your EIN, which is your Electronic Identification Number, from the IRS. And it's smart because it's basically, it's a new ID number for your business so that when you do your taxes, you use that ID number and not your Social Security number. And you'll see sometimes vendors or someone else will say, hey, can I have your EIN number? It's a way to identify you without using your Social, which which is good. Let's keep our social private as much as we can. Let's get that off the internets. And so an LLC doesn't change your taxation if you do it straight as an LLC. It's called pass-through income. Basically, whatever money comes into the LLC, into your little bucket, keeps on being passed on to you as an individual. So, but what it does protect is it separates your business assets out from your personal assets. So it puts your business assets, whatever you have here in your business PayPal account or your business, um, and it separates them from your home assets, your home, your equity in your home, your retirement accounts, um, your cars, vehicles, anything else that might be that. So it's a good thing, and it makes it easier to do bookkeeping, honestly, because when you have business, when you have an LLC, um, that's normally what you need to set up your business bank accounts. You take that to the bank and say, hey, "Look, I have, I set up my LLC, here's my operating agreement, here's my articles of incorporation." Those are the two main documents you use to set up an LLC, and that's what they use to set up your business bank account. So that makes it easy because you, you know, use your business card for if you have to take someone out to lunch, if you are paying for your website hosting, whatever, if you're buying props for your, for a blog style shoot that you're doing, you use your business account and keep it separate from your normal day-to-day expenditure. So hopefully that answers that question. Anyone else have any other questions? Thanks, thanks, thanks for the heart. Appreciate it. All kinds of hearts. See, it's all about that first heart. Once you get that first heart, then no one feels really helpful. You're welcome. You're so welcome. Happy to be a resource. If no one else has any other questions, then I'll just bow out, because far be it for me to be on and be wasting anyone else's time. I'm hoping to make this more of a regular thing where I'm coming on. Mondays is a good day for me, so I think I'm going to try to make that a regular thing. And answer questions that you might have and just be here as a resource because I know that a lot of stuff is really overwhelming when you start looking online and that the prospect of sitting down in a traditional attorney's office with their leather-bound books and the fish tank can be a little overwhelming and scary and seem really expensive. I don't think that helping your business needs to be any of those things. Thanks so much for being here and please me along on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, all the things, if you're interested in hearing more ways to help protect you and build your business. All right, thanks guys.