Legally Legit Workshop for Creative Entrepreneurs, Influencers and Creators

Hello everybody, um, and welcome to the Legally Legit Workshop. I am Brittany Ratelle. I'm an attorney for creative entrepreneurs, online entrepreneurs, and I'm excited to have you here. Thanks so much, especially for joining me on the replay. We have, uh, for those of you— and we have a couple people who are, uh, jumping on live for this session who graciously are here giving their time, giving their effort, working on the sexy, sexy part legal compliance of their business. No, I'm self-aware. I know this is not the funnest part about being an entrepreneur, but it is important. Um, and I promise to make this as painless as possible so that you can be the confident business owner that you want to be and show up the way you want to show up and serve people. So let's get brief introductions and then get to it. So I am a licensed attorney. I practice in Utah and Idaho, but because of the nature of my work and how much involves intellectual property, I actually have clients from all over the US, which is pretty awesome. And I deal in all kinds of matters of internet compliance, social media law, contracts, entity formation, licensing, all kinds of fun stuff. And here's my information if you want to get in touch with me via email or follow me on Instagram. I'm @BrittanyRatelle. That's where I love to hang out because that's where my creatives are. I want to be where my people are, like Ariel, and my people are on Instagram. I also have a podcast and I have a template shop where I sell ready-to-made downloadable templates ready to go for your business. Okay, so let's get to it. What are we talking about today? Getting your business legally legit. Okay, I want to have a little incentive to share something that you might have learned here today. We're actually going to extend this. I was going to have this for tonight. This is Wednesday the 18th, but I had a little bit of tech problems, so I had to restart my recording. And so I want to give enough time for this to actually go out and you guys to consume it and be able to share. So we're going to do it for tomorrow night. If you want to tag a screen grab or something that you get or a video or Boomerang or whatever from this presentation, um, tag me @BrittanyRatelle and tag Get Legit with Britt. Um, not only are you helping maybe a friend of ours, yours, or someone else that you follow help find me and help find some content and answer some questions that they may be having in their business, um, but you also get a chance to win a $100 gift card to Creative Contracts, okay? And get a new little something for your business on me, okay? Okay. First of all, I want you to repeat after me. I will not be overwhelmed by this. Are you saying it? I really want you to say it. Okay? I simply know more than I did before. Okay? Got it? That's it. We're not, we're not, I'm no Macaulay Culkin, we're not gonna Home Alone this. We are going to get through. You do not have to know the end from the beginning. You do not need to know everything about avoiding all legal headaches and stress and problems of your business or how to build every step of the way. That's impossible. You don't know what you don't know. But what we want to figure out and what we can is the next step. What's the next thing you can do in your business to move it forward, to help protect your revenue, protect your brand and your content, to make sure that you have cleaner communication and boundaries with people that you're working with inside your team, outside your team. That's what we're going to work on today. Okay? And why? It's because the universe is not going to manifest to you that you are ready. Ever. Okay. There is not going to be some Jiminy Cricket guy that's going to appear. We are not in a Star Wars movie, um, you know, or Joseph Campbell, uh, rhetoric that the, the guy's going to appear and tell you, you, you are there, you will have arrived, you have a real business yet. So you have to decide that you're a real business. Okay. And 99% of that is inner confidence and mindset work. Okay. The other small part of it is doing and taking action and doing stuff in your business so that others will take you seriously. And sometimes You gotta get the contract ready so you can take yourself seriously so that when you push send and you send it off to someone, you take a deep breath, you have the swagger and the confidence to know that someone can pay you for your time, pay you for your services, that you guys can collaborate together, you can land that event sponsorship, you can have that deal, that book project, whatever it is to move forward, okay? That commercial lease, and you want to know that this stuff is legit, okay? And that it's moving forward and that you've done all you could do to protect yourself. Okay, with modern businesses these days, they're so democratized and there's so much lower barrier to entry, which is amazing, amazing news. What that means is that we kind of have to handle more of this on our own shoulders and kind of have more radical ownership of that. There is not going to be a bank that's going to force you to probably write out a business plan, you know, especially if you're self-funded, especially if this gig of yours is a side hustle. In addition to other things that you might have, or other revenue streams. Um, so no one is going to make you take care of this stuff legally. And so you could probably limp along until maybe you end up in the ER. Okay. We want to avoid that. We want to instead be of like the yoga chiropractic model. Okay. We want to do little things, take little bites of the apple to set ourselves up so that we can get legally legit and try to avoid mistakes. So what are the big pieces? What are those big buckets that we're going to try to talk about of getting legally legit? Okay. If you've got the Legally Legit Workbook, if you have gotten that from my email list, why don't you go ahead and get that out and take a look at that. We're going to talk about the 3 big areas, the buckets. Okay, first is protecting our name and foundation. Okay, this is the underlying structure and scaffolding of our business. We're going to protect revenue streams. How do you make money? That's important. We need money for business. Okay, without that money, honey, you know, business starts, starts to disappear quickly. Okay, it's a downward spiral. So we got to make sure that however it is that you're making money, whether products or services or content or combination thereof, that we're protecting that. And then we got to protect our brand and our content, okay? If you love your name, if you love your brand, if you are investing in a community, into content, into building a little nest in a corner of the internet or social media or whatever it is that you gather people, let's make sure that we can protect that so that people can have a consistent experience with with you and your brand. Okay? Alright, protecting name and foundation. What are we talking about here? Okay, we're talking about making sure that your name of your business isn't confusing to someone else's. Okay? So the first step, number 1, is we're gonna do a really deep Google search. Okay? And with this, the big thing is that we want to go way past the first page. Okay? So this is not something we're like, "Oh, I didn't see anything on the first, we're good to go." You know, Brittany says it's fine. No, no, no, my friend. Au contraire. We want to keep on going, keep on digging, okay? And we are looking for things that are not only exactly the name of your business, but things that are close, things that are confusing, okay? Things that could be mixed up by someone putting something into a search engine or into a social media channel, okay? That's what we want to be checking out. We want to look at related goods or services. If you sell beauty goods, you're also going to want to look at beauty services because a lot of those times people, businesses sell both., okay, under the same name, all right? We're looking at the big brand picture of related goods, okay? Next step is to do a trademark clearance search in the TESS system. So if you Google trademark clearance, look for the TESS, you'll see it's part of the trademark website. It'll come right up. Now, this is a '90s database, okay, which means it operates on like Boolean operators. So depending on your research skill strength, what's hard about this database is you can totally run a search on your own and But it's a little tricky in that you might— it's kind of an exact match database. And so if you put in Starbucks with a whole bunch of S's, it'll tell you zero, goose egg, no results. Obviously, that's not the case. Do not start a brand, especially don't start something in the restaurant or coffee services niche under the name Starbucks with a whole bunch of S's. Because the law behind trademarks is that we're supposed to protect consumers and we need to make sure that we're not having anything that's too close or too confusing to them, okay? So that's why I put in here asterisk, this is an attorney recommended. If you really love your name, if you've got big dreams, if you've started already investing money into branding and a pretty website and colors and business cards and signage and you're about to place an order for 10,000 of product of something, please spend just a tiny little bit of that money and get at least a trademark clearance search, okay? I do these à la carte. For some of my clients, and then as soon as they just want to stop, they stop there. They're not ready to do a full trademark yet, but they just want to know what does the landscape look like. Do I have a clear runway, or am I already having doors closing on me because of my offerings and what I'm choosing to do, okay, and where I want to go? That's really good information. We want to know that, okay? So reach out to me if you're interested in looking into that. So the other thing is if you want to register— and the last thing is register as a limited liability company. We'll go on the next page. Why an LLC? Just know that if it's a single person, it's really straightforward and you can, you can really DIY this on your own. Most of the time I talk my clients out of having— hiring me to do this. Sometimes people, they're just not going to do it and they want to pay me, and that's fine, and that's fine, and I take their money and we get it done. But maybe you don't necessarily need done-for-you services. Maybe you just, you can get it done. Just put on a fun show and make it happen. Go to your government website, your Secretary of State website for your state, and register. If you have more than one person in your business, if you have a partnership, I highly, highly recommend an operating agreement or a founder's agreement or partnership agreement. These are called different things, but these are really important agreements that can help protect your relationship, and they basically function as like a prenup, a business prenup, okay? And if you want to avoid an ugly business divorce, you got to have that. We want prenup, we want prenup, okay? I ain't saying she's a gold digger. I'm not going to quote the rest of that, but you know what I'm talking about. You know, okay. All right. Why do we want an LLC? It's because our heart will go on forever. No, this is our, this is our Titanic. This is our life. Okay. And an LLC are like the compartments at the bottom of the Titanic. Okay. Those engineering compartments, when, when they started flooding, they pulled the doors down. Okay. Ultimately, this did not save the Titanic. I know, spoiler alert, but The idea behind this is that it contains the mess inside of that. And so when something starts to flood in our business, and if you get sued and someone wins and they have money to come after you, we put the boundaries down, we put those doors down, and it just floods that compartment. It doesn't get to the rest of your assets. So it means your personal assets, when you own with a spouse or a partner, you know, your 401k, your house, your home, your retirement accounts, whatever, that is off the table. They can only get what's in your business. Okay, so that's pretty useful. That's, that's probably worth $80, don't you think? Um, so that's why LLCs are so common. They're so popular. They isolate the risk. They're super flexible. They don't have a whole lot of maintenance or upkeep that you have to do with them. Um, they're usually really cost effective unless you live in California. Sorry. Um, and, uh, and they— what I— why I like to recommend and to do the LLC sooner rather than later is not that I find that there's tons of people who are getting sued for huge amounts and it's wiping out their lives. Although that can happen, honestly, you know, that's what attorneys are trained to do. We think of worst-case scenarios. What a treat. But the reason why I like and recommend setting up LLC sooner rather than later if you're starting a business or if you have a business is because it gives a really good ripple effect. And by that, I mean when you set up an LLC, you usually go and get your tax ID number You set up your payment processing the way you're supposed to. You set up separate business bank accounts and a separate business credit card. You'll see that on your Legally Legit Workbook. Um, and then you're going to start keeping track of your money, honey, and you're going to make sure that business money comes into an account, it comes out of an account, we have good bookkeeping, we have answers about what is our profit, what is our loss. That's what a P&L stands for. You, you have good information, uh, on which to base what am I pricing correctly. Am I paying myself or have I just given myself a crappy job with the worst boss in the world? Me, this girl. Okay. All of those decisions are easier to make. You know, whether you want to invest in coaching or a course, or if you can hire and when you can hire, all of that starts to become, you know, easier for you to do when you get a handle on your business and you start treating it like a business and you want other people to treat it like a business. Too, okay? And that's why I like having people set up LLCs, okay? And it's also less of a pain. You don't have to go back and re-register all this stuff and separate out and tease out all your business things, okay? So how do you set up an LLC? It's a great question. So these are the steps. Um, so first you're going to Google your state plus LLC, and you're going to look for the.gov website, okay? There are going to be some other ads because they have bid on this search result, and they're going to tempt you with their little form fillers. Um, these are bots. All these websites will do is take your information, ask you some questions, and go and fill it out on the other website that asks the same questions. Okay, cut out the middleman. You can do it yourself. Okay, I promise you it's not that hard. All right, your big decisions here. Uh, don't get stressed out— name versus DBA. A DBA is a doing business as. It is a bridge in between a legal entity I know you, I've got my green screen here, so I'm moving real quick. I've turned into the Star Wars kid. Um, so a DBA is a legal bridge between you and like yourself and what you're operating your business under and what your maybe forward-facing name is. So for me, I operate Brittany Ratelle LLC is one of my business entities, and that's what I operate my contract shop. Okay. It has to be a separate business because of ethical rules, because attorneys are lame. So, um, so when I have a DBA that links Creative Contracts is doing business, or Brittany Ratelle LLC is doing business as Creative Contracts. Does that make sense? That is a bridge, and you can file those usually at the same spot at the same time you set up your LLC. Sometimes it's a different page on the website. It's all up to the individual state how they set up their thing. Okay, so don't let the name trip you up. You could have a boring legal name and you can do a DBA with your fund name. Okay, um, decide if you are working virtually. If you are a home-based business and you don't want your home address out for the whole world to see, which maybe you don't because times are crazy, people are crazy, and cancel culture and doxx culture is a real thing, then I highly suggest setting up a virtual mailbox and a registered agent service. These services are awesome. They— I like to use Anytime Mailbox, or Mailbox Server One is another one, but they're usually like $10 a month. They give you a real street address, okay? And they will accept your mail, your business mail. They scan the front of it and they email to you and they're like, what do you want us to do with it? Do you want us to shred it? Do you want us to forward it to you? Do you want us to open it and scan it to you? They give you options, okay? Um, no one has to know your home address, okay? No one, okay? Except for your mom. She should probably know. Um, and it's great. Uh, also registered agent services or commercial registered agent services are like usually $60 a year. That is the person where if you've been served, they are the, the person who receives that. They receive service for you. That's literally all it is. Is it a huge rip-off? Yeah, kinda. But again, this has to be a street address, and it has to be a real person here. So that's why you cannot, um, you either have to do your home or you have to do a commercial agent services. You cannot use a PO box. If you put a PO box in, it's going to get rejected. It's going to get rejected, mark my words. Okay, so don't do that. So set up your virtual mailbox, do yourself a little favor, protect your privacy. And then LLC steps, you— they usually have to be renewed yearly. Sometimes there's a fee, sometimes they're not. It depends by state. Sometimes they'll send you a reminder, sometimes they won't. So you take ownership of it, put in your calendar 11 months, you know, and 2 weeks from the day that you set it up, do a reminder, hey, renew my LLC. Okay, you don't want that to lapse and lose your liability protection. Okay, let's keep that umbrella in place. Okay, so now let's talk about protecting those revenue streams. We want the money, we want it all, because it's all about the money, money. Except like, it is, because if you're not in business and you're not making money, the business is, is doomed. We can only survive so long unless you're a tech company, and then apparently you don't ever have to worry about being profitable. So okay, when we talk about contracts Like, who do we need contracts with? What are these contracts per se? You know, pray, what is a weekend? We're talking about protecting clients and customers relationships mainly, especially if you are a service relationship and that's how you make money, or if you sell products. Okay, we want to talk about protecting relationship with affiliates, vendors, and sponsors. These are people who are like laterals next to us that we're working with, and we want to talk about protecting ourselves and our team member relationship. These are independent contractors and employees, okay? These are the major buckets. There's some more, and we'll talk about those, but most of them fit into here, okay? So client service agreement— why, why do you need one of those? Well, my friend, because if you are one of these awesome things up here— freelancer, coach, designer, consultant, plant, you know, planner, stylist, makeup artist, or the other hundreds, literally hundreds of jobs I sometimes get to hear about because coolest off-the-wall jobs, things that like would never fit on a business card. I love it, I love it, that's my job. Um, if you're doing all that, that's great, but here are some of the issues that can happen when you don't have clear boundaries about what the client and one-on-one service relationship looks like. Um, you really want to clarify expectations because people most of the time conflict, and then how that escalates to conflict and chargebacks and people not paying or people giving you bad reviews. Sometimes people are just crazy, we all know that, some people are just crazy, but majority of the time, if we take care of the customer relationship and we have clear expectations, a lot of that hassle and headache can be avoided, alright? So let's set up good roles and boundaries, especially around termination. If we have to reschedule or things have to terminate, how is that going to work? Do people get to keep their money? How much of their money? They want to know that from the get-go and you need to tell them from the get-go, okay? 'Cause it's so much easier for the contract to be the bad guy and to be like, "Oh, you know what? That is a bummer. We're gonna have to reschedule or terminate." The contract says this. I'm just me. I'm just a person. I'm the nice guy, but the contract says this. Make the contract the bad guy, okay? Do you have problems being a people pleaser? Are you the person who gets asked to do family discounts and friends discounts all the time and you do it? Have it in the contract, okay? Then if you want to be Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo Fairy Godmother, you can always be the nicer person and give out your fairy wand afterwards, you know, and be like, actually, we're gonna waive that fee, or we're gonna do this. Um, it's so much harder to do the reverse. So much harder to do the reverse, okay? You also want to avoid scope creep, okay? This is especially important for my client service providers, okay? Scope creep is this ugly, ugly monster where you have a project that starts out here and it starts ballooning out of proportion, okay? It's, you know, that, that law that says it will take up— Parkinson's, it will take up as many, as much space as you give it. So, you know, this website was supposed to be here and now it's ballooned to this giant project. And if you are working on a flat fee, yikes, because now you're losing money on that project. Okay, so we want to avoid scope creep. So my client service agreements have really good provisions about scope creep, and then they outline homework and revisions and milestones, especially payment milestones. Okay? Because if there's one way to set yourself up for a dispute about payment, it's to have— this is the recipe if you want to know. I'm not a food blogger, but aspiring. Have scope creep, have a little project that turned into a huge project, have no payments along the way, and then send off your bill. Good luck, buddy. Good luck is all I have to say to you. Okay? That is a recipe for disaster. And I'm not saying that they shouldn't pay you, that that's right, that they're gonna treat you that way, but I'm saying if you want to avoid that, let's do it differently, okay? Because when we know better, we do better. So let's do that, okay? So let's talk about getting our website legally legit. So that's why we're gonna have a client service agreement, and you're gonna buy one of those from my website if you don't have it already. Let's talk about getting our website legally legit. Let's talk about that footer and how it needs to not be naked, okay? We're gonna see that in the to the next slide. Okay, the things we need in our privacy on our website, this is what everyone needs. You don't have to me, you don't have to ask me anymore. I'm just going to tell you because the answer is always the same. You need a privacy policy. What's that, Brittany? But what about, what about what I sell, or where do I sell it, or what, you know, what platform? No, no, my friend, it doesn't matter. You can't tell me that you don't collect information. You do. If you have a website, you do collect information, you do run analytics, I'm sure you're collecting emails because you're a dummy if you're not, and you're not a dummy. So you need to have a privacy policy. It's required by federal and state law. It's required by third-party service apps like Facebook ads, okay? You have to verify and like check a box that you're doing this, so get it on your dang website already. Move on with your life. And please don't try to draft this on your own or frankensign it from your friend and then leave in provisions that don't apply to what you do, okay? I see that all the time. I saw someone once who said sells socks and they reference the American Medical Association. Really guys, let's just pony up and get a real agreement, okay? The second thing you want on your website footer are website terms. These are sometimes called website terms of service, terms of use. I call them terms. Let's keep it brief, okay? These are our clubhouse rules. They help prevent copyright infringement, chargeback hassles, okay? If you get in a chargeback with somebody, this is the first thing your payment processor is gonna ask for., and it is so nice to be able to send something off to them. And I've had clients who have won these disputes because they have these agreements in place, okay? You're able to better enforce community standards, especially if you have community stuff happening in your, you know, if you have content on your website or people able to have comments or leave, you know, put up images or interact with you in any way. This happened with a client of mine who offers personalization of products, and they had someone who wanted a hate group emblazoned on the front of a product. Obviously they weren't okay with that, so we went to their terms to see how can we make sure that that doesn't happen again, okay? To make sure that they can say and verify, hey, according to our terms, we don't do that. Here's your money back. We're not going to do that. Yeah, that's not, that's not what we're about here. Prevent class action lawsuits. Again, we hope that never happens, but that's what we're trained to do is try to minimize, okay? We're going to keep those— cover your butt as much we can. Um, the last category here is disclosures and disclaimers, okay? And these depend on the type of content that you offer, especially if you are connected to the health or wellness or financial industry. These are regulated industries, and, uh, there are more stringent rules about how you can advertise and the kind of claims you can make about results, about curing and treating disease or illnesses, about the kind of money people will make when they use your program or your services, your products, we got to be careful here. So my, my product that I sell, my website bundle in my shop, has all of this stuff, has all of this, and it is definitely— and also has the affiliate and earnings terms. Okay, this is important if you have affiliate links on your website, and again, if you talk about how much money people earn, we want to make sure that we are getting that all up to, up to snuff. Okay, this is what we're looking for. Okay, this is your fun website. This is your hat selfies, okay? Um, we want to have in our footer here, we want to have privacy. This is how I like to set it up: privacy, terms, legal. This is where your affiliate disclosures and your disclaimers can go. Note, you should also be having in-text disclosures, okay? If you have a resource page on your website and it is just a freaking bullet list of affiliate links, which is awesome, good for you, making that money, honey, um, You should also have in there a little asterisk, contains affiliate links, okay? Because we know that nobody— ain't nobody ever reading actually this right here. We know that, okay? It's here to protect you, okay? Let it protect you. Also let people know. Don't be— you don't have to be coy about it, okay? People know about the swipe up. They know, okay? They're just— so just let's be— let's just be honest. Let's all just be grown-ups about it, okay? Um, okay, here's a copyright statement. Uh, this is the other thing we want to have. We want the year things that were published or updated, your name. If you haven't listened to me and set up your LLC yet, which is, you know, that's a choice. That's a look for you. Don't love that look, but it's a look. Or your LLC. And then that magic words, all rights reserved. Okay. We want that. Okay. Let's talk about growing your team. Okay. And with this, we're, you know, we're going to say growing a team with air quotes because we all know we've seen people who talk about their team and, oh, I have to, you know, was meeting with my team, and it's like, girl, that's a person from the Philippines who did your logo. Like, like, team, come on, let's be real. Um, and this is throwing no shade on people who are using, you know, outsourcing or whatnot and being smart about that, but, um, like, just don't feel bad if you feel like you're the only one without like some big extensive team because, like, come on, some of, some of that is just pandering, okay? And it's just, it's just fronting. It's just, it's the equivalent of the, of the software sales guy, you know, or the, the alarm salesman summer sales guy with their BMWs. It's the same thing. So it's just, you know, from a different side of a coin. Okay, let's talk about independent contractors versus employees. This is an important issue, and this is like a 16-part test that the IRS has. It is very extensive. There is a lot of case law to go through here. Accountants and attorneys could argue about this all day, and they do. Okay, but what do you— you want to know, like, what's the best advice here, you know, in terms of setting me up for success? Here's the rub. If you have someone who you want to be a 1099, an independent contractor, okay, called 1099 because that's the form that you need to be sending them every year. They're in the miscellaneous form that tells them how much money they made, unless you're paying them electronically, in which case you don't need to send this. Your white-hat accountant is probably going to argue with me, but I'm right, okay? Because electronic payment methods have their own form that you don't have to send out these, which is great, simplifies your life. It's only if you're paying them either cash or check. So if you have the right to control the manner and means of work, you as the business owner, okay, and they don't, That's more like an employee, okay? And if it looks like an employee and smells like an employee, it's really an employee, okay? If you want them to be a 1099, they have to have the right to control the manner and the means of work. They really have to be more like a freelancer, okay? You can give them projects and deadlines, you can have them do training, but they should probably be using their own materials, they should probably be using their own computer, they should probably be doing it from their own space. They should be able to do the same thing that they do for you for other people. They don't have to do it for other people, but they should be able to. Okay, see that distinction? They have the right. They don't need to exercise the right, but they have the right. So be very careful about here about non-competes. Non-competes and independent contractor agreements are usually non-sympathico. They are usually not— they're at odds with each other. So I've had people and I've seen these in their independent contractor agreements that they've gotten from other business coaches or like courses they took and stuff. Be careful about that, guys, okay? Ask yourself, if you get a contract from somewhere, who drafted this? You know, what's the chain, the source chain here? And does this person know what they're talking about? So be careful with independent contractors because they are not employees. There is not going to be that automatic work-for-hire relationship. When someone works for you as a W-2 employee, automatically the cool stuff that they do during their employment belongs to you. That's part of what hiring something, someone means. Okay, that is not the case with an independent contractor. It's not automatic, and copyright law says it actually needs to be in writing. So enter the independent contractor agreement. That's why we use this agreement, because it clarifies, hey, you know, social media manager, you know, website designer, a copywriter, you know, community manager, so excited to have you working with me to help me in my business. You're going to be creating this cool stuff. We just want to make sure that we have all the rights to that so that we can then turn around and slice and dice this and do our copyright cake the way we want to, because that's how licensing works. You need to have all that cake so that you can then pass out the cake and charge people for that cake, and it can make you lots and lots of money in different revenue streams. Okay, let's talk about employees. If they are integral to the business, um, and they don't work for anyone else, um, and they can't work for anyone else, that really starts to sound more like an employee. If they're using your materials, if you have hours for them, a set schedule of where they're supposed to be and how they're supposed to work. This, you know, people have like set customer service hours or they're doing fulfillment in a warehouse. Uh, that really starts to sound more like an employee. Okay. And here's the thing, guys, having employees is not that hard. It's not as hard as it used to be. Okay. Um, go set yourself up with gusto and pay them and, you know, put in where you're located, where the employee is located, even if they're working remotely. And you, and you can pay them, and you can take care of the payroll taxes and get everything legit. Um, it's not that big of a deal, okay? And it's a whole lot easier and headache than having an unemployment office or workforce services investigation, okay, or IRS investigating, and you owing state and federal back taxes because you thought someone was an independent contractor and they say they're an employee, or the state does, okay? Because they want those tax money. Okay, so be careful about that. You know, if you're working with a great accountant, they can also help you here, but sometimes, you know, people aren't and they're working on their own, and so this guy— this can slip through, especially if you're growing fast. Okay, we already kind of covered when we use an independent contractor agreement. This is what I see most commonly, is like these kind of jobs. Okay, so if you have someone in this, we want to make sure that they are any of these jobs. We you have an independent contractor agreement, okay? And why? Again, we're clarifying those expectations, we're setting up boundaries, we're keeping stuff confidential, especially if we're working with more sensitive business information, okay? You know, if you have an email list and the money's in the list, let's make sure that's protected because that's protected by trade secret law, okay? That's the only way to do that. That means you have to keep it confidential, and the people who work with you need to know that there's an expectation that there— that that should be kept confidential, okay? And it can keep people from poaching, you know, your clients and your, your business know-how information. Okay, let's talk about a couple of the other most common agreements and the ones that I sell on my contract shop. If you run giveaways, you need a legal promotions kit, okay? You don't want to fall into an accidental lottery thing. You don't want to be embarrassed or publicly shamed by people. You don't want to get in trouble with the FTC or your state gambling board. These are all real things that can happen, so please set yourself up for success here. That kit contains the language that you need for like your short-form captions and also the long-form rules that should live on your website. Make sure if you are hosting events that you have an event liability and media release. The one I have in my shop is updated and has COVID language in there, and so if you are tiptoeing back into the in-person event space, get yourself one of these and protect it. Make it easy and have people sign and agree to this as part of your, you know, checkout process wherever they're buying tickets for your event. Okay, you have affiliates, get yourself an affiliate agreement template. Make sure that you clarify what they can and can't do. They can't do spammy stuff, they can't, you know, be rude in Facebook groups on part of your behalf. How are they getting paid out? What's your commission rate? When are they getting paid out? Is there a minimum?, you know, to cover your costs of implementing a program. Um, you know, make sure that they're doing FTC disclosures. They need to be saying ad or affiliate or sponsor, okay? Um, every time they're talking about you, and they need to make it really clear. If you have photos of people in your business, make sure you have a model release, okay? This is anytime anyone is identifiable in a photo. A lot of, you know, commercial photographers will take care of this, but again, the buck stops with you. You're the business owner, and so. If you have people, you know, in either photography or videography, if you have events, um, again, there I do have a model release language basically built into that media release so that you can take, uh, you can, you know, have content recorded at an event and then you can use it for purposes, for commercial purposes. So if you have guest content as part of your business, either a blog or a podcast, let's get a release for that. Let's make sure that you can wheel and deal and recycle the good stuff in that business, um, to do all the things that you want to do with it, okay? Especially if, you know, you're taking a piece and you're finding, oh, this is amazing information, I need to turn this into a blog post or a YouTube video. I want to have like a best of product. I want to turn this into a workbook or a handout or ebook. You see what I'm saying? We want to be able to do all that stuff with those rights, but to do that, we need those rights. We need that copyright cake, okay? If you don't know what I'm talking about here, I have a whole podcast episode that's all about licensing seen in the copyright cake, and that explains it. So go look up in Creative Council. And then influencer marketing— if you are into influencer marketing or trying to tiptoe or have aspirations of as either the influencer or the brand, either one of those, sometimes the other party or the PR agency, the ad agency, will have an agreement for you. And sometimes it's nice to have one on your own and to at least be familiar. I get all of these major agreements that I'm talking about here especially the influencer marketing agreement, um, the— let's see, what are the other ones— an independent contract agreement, client service agreement. They all include ScreenFlow instructions, which is me doing this exact same thing where I go through paragraph by paragraph of the agreement and I explain to you what your choices are, what the color code mean, what you need to fill out, what these things are. Because my goal at the end of us and this training and you having this agreement in your hands is that you feel more empowered in your next negotiation, okay? Because it doesn't do a whole lot of good to have something, some legalese living somewhere in your business, if it doesn't match up to the way you're running your business. And certainly, it's not going to help you at the negotiating table for you to be able to get what you need, okay? And for you to be able to make that bigger ask and get paid, okay? And get paid what you're worth, and then add tax. Okay? So let's, let's do that. Let's all do that. And let's all get paid. The way we need to get paid. Okay, okay, guys doing good? Doing good? Okay, let's talk about protecting your brand and your content, okay? And we have a couple tools in our toolbox here that we can use, all right? So the first one is copyright and contract, okay? It's going to protect our creative works. Trademark protects brand elements. And then we're gonna have clean processes to make sure that we know where our content comes from and that we can stand behind it. All right, these get mixed up a lot— copyright and trademark. They get used interchangeably. I see a lot of stuff flying fast and loose on the internet and at the, you know, Google Law School University. And I just, I want to set the record straight. Okay, so copyright protects your creative work. So the way, you know, we have these great ideas in our brain, they come out of our brain and they go somewhere. Once they're on somewhere, once they're in you know, in a handout, you know, in, in a handout or in a book. Um, you guys can't see that— a book or a planner because it's white. Um, or in a podcast episode or in a video or, you know, in a thing, in an illustration, um, that it can be protected. Okay, you get some automatic rights just by creating that and putting that into the world. Okay, you get the, the rights as the owner of that, including the right to reproduce. Again, is to take that thing and then to slice out pieces to other people. You get the right to translate into different languages. You get the right to turn it into a movie. You get the right to put this on merch, you know, and put this on t-shirts or whatever. All those rights you can parcel out and make more money on, okay? But you have to have the original rights to begin with. So, and the thing with copyright is that you get extra rights. You get to perfect your rights when you register your copyright. What is that? That involves going on to the Electronic Copyright Office, okay, that's the ECO, and that means you fill out the form about what you created, what is it, is there anyone else who has rights to it, and you actually upload it and send it to the Library of Congress, okay. If it's a PDF, you can do it online through the database. If it's not a PDF, if it involves like an online course, for example, you want to register the copyright for, which I recommend, I'm and I have my clients do, or I do it for my clients, then we send it on flash drives and we send it off to DC and then it all, you know, send it to the internet and add hash browns. Any Cobra Kai fans in the house? So that's what that looks like. The reason why we want to register and do this extra step, because it costs $65, but it's actually, that's pretty, it's pretty reasonable, is because you can collect statutory damages and attorney's fees. What does that mean, Brittany Ratelle? That means you actually get to do something when people steal your stuff. If you don't, you can say, "Hey, person, you stole my stuff. You ripped off my thing. Stop that." And they can go, "Nana nana boo boo, come and get me. Oh, you sent me your cease and desist. Oh, I'm scared now." And literally, that's what it is. You can tell them to cease and desist, but you cannot file a lawsuit. And lawsuits, federal lawsuits, are expensive, and big companies know this. Especially those big box brands that are known to go and hone and look on Etsy for smaller little artisans and then to rip off their stuff and put their designs on things. I see it all the time. They know this. They know that you didn't register the copyright for it. So practically speaking, there's nothing you're going to be able to do about it because the cost-benefit analysis weighs in their favor. There is a small claims court for copyright law that is trying to get passed. It's called the CASE Act. Which I support, a lot of other attorneys and small creatives support, but it has not happened yet. So, and I have this much faith in our legislators, so we'll see if it ever happens. So that's why you want to register the copyright. It's a, it's a severely underutilized tool that a lot of people don't understand. And if you are in the business of creating stuff, especially if that's your revenue stream, you just, you just can't afford to not do it, okay? You need to have that copyright statement on stuff, okay? You need to have terms and a contract. We already talked about that, that like when people take your course, your membership or whatever, you can have terms of use, terms of service that protect the transaction. You can do that via contract law, and you should have a copyright registration for the thing because I can tell you, when you have that certificate in hand, if someone rips off your stuff, you can do a DMCA takedown and it gets taken down within hours. Okay, Etsy, Amazon, eBay, Facebook, they listen to you, they— Instagram, they put you to the front of the line. Your stuff gets taken down. That person is shut down. Case closed. Okay? If you don't have that, good luck. Okay? Good luck. Alright, let's talk about trademark. Trademark protects your brand elements. This is like your logo, your slogan, the name, the umbrella name of your brand, you know, your empire brand name, product names, course names, program names. All of that can be protected by trademark. Those are each individual trademarks. Trademarks. There's no such thing as universal trademark. Trademarks always protect the name of a source indicator in a particular class of goods or services. Enter, for example, Dove chocolate and Dove soap. Both have federal trademarks, both spelled exactly the same way, but no one confuses soap for chocolate. No one bites into chocolate and is like, I wanted to get rid of my B.O. You know, it doesn't happen. So that's why they're allowed to coexist because that's not confusing to the consumer. So for you, if you don't want to be confusing the consumer, you're gonna use trademark as a way, as a tool, so that you can protect your brand and eke out your digital real estate so that people aren't gonna get too close to you and people aren't gonna be confused about what they're buying and why they're buying it, okay? Because if you've built up your brand awareness and people want to buy from you, then let's make sure we can protect that, okay? Why do they want to do business from you? A lot of people who sell hair bows, why do they want your hair bows? Okay, so a lot of people who teach how to run Facebook ads, why do they want to take your course? Okay, that's what brand helps you protect. Trademark protects the brand. And the requirements, these are a little bit more of an investment. You can do it on your own. I don't recommend it because the failure rate is super high because it looks, it looks deceptively simple, but there are things that I see people do every day when I, when I'm in this database that people do to shoot their own foot, okay? They go too narrow or they go too wide in terms of descriptions. They don't do the right classes. Their, their trademarks are ornamental or descriptive and they were never going to get registered. And of course Legal Doom didn't tell them that. They just took their money and swiped it and forgot about them, okay? So, um, don't do that to yourself. Normally trademarks, um, my packages start at $1,000 for the trademark. We do a comprehensive search and analysis. Strategy depending on your offerings now and your offerings or what they're going to be in the future, if you want to kind of reserve any rights to categories that you may venture out to, that you may expand to. And then we have filing fees are on top of that, and they're $275 a class. So most of my clients end up spending like $1,550 for like 2 classes for a trademark, okay? And they take months, okay? They take on average 8 to 10 months to get back, so they take a while. So get, get started sooner rather than later, guys., okay? And that's when you can use that cute little R with the circle on it, okay? Trade dress is protecting like the look and the feel. A lot of people think that they have this in the business. This is hard to prove, okay? You usually have to be a more established brand and have invested quite a bit in your advertising and marketing budget, okay? We're talking like Tiffany Co. blue box, red sole Christian Louboutin shoes, In-N-Out, you know, the way that their restaurants look and feel. That's what's protected by trade dress. Okay, so it's just, it's not, it's not gonna be an amateur level protection for you. Okay, we got a little talk about stuff you can protect. All of these awesome stuff you can protect. Be careful about book title. You can't just have a book title on its own. You need to have a book title plus some other kind of offering. Okay, a workshop, a handout, an event, something else. So I see a lot of people getting tripped up by this, you know, authors or thought leaders and speakers who, who don't know kind of this nuance, and their trademark gets rejected. It's too bad. Okay, you all, you cannot protect short words and phrases, okay? You could do it for a trademark if it's distinctive. For copyright, you cannot copyright like these phrases. They're gonna be too short and sweet, and they're super common. They're just like informational. They're already like out there, okay? Licensed characters and brands— please stay away from that in your business. Please do not offer stuff that's built upon someone else's intellectual property. It's not your foundation, okay? Don't build your house on borrowed land, okay? You're not gonna be able to protect functional things. That's patents that you're thinking of, okay? I don't do patents. I have some lovely people I recommend my patent work to. This includes like designs, business models, recipes, lists of ingredients, 3-step processes, letters and fonts. Sorry, hand letters. So sorry. And here's the other piece of that. We want to make sure that our content practices are clean, okay? When we are putting together our businesses, and especially if there's content and content marketing in our business, we want to make sure that we're not saying, "Oh, this is fair use because I gave them credit," you know? You're not in school anymore, so that's great that you're not plagiarizing, but there's a higher bar when we're in business, okay? It's not okay just to cite where you got something. It's not okay just to give credit. You need permission. Okay, I'm not talking about using the little airplane feature from Instagram posts to your stories. Like, in-app share features are going to be fine, okay, on social media. That, that's part of the license that you give when you show up and you post your stuff on there, is you say, hey Instagram, you're going to be able to— people are going to be able to license and use this in a limited way in the app for these things, okay? What's not okay is if you're like, oh, that illustration would look great in my grid, it would look great, and you decide that you're gonna repost it and put it on there, okay? What if you tag them? Eh, still not okay. Okay, you need permission. Permission, okay? So you gotta email them, DM them. That's why if you see brands, like, if someone, say if I post a cool picture with this Yeti cup and I'm like, oh, love my Yeti, you know, and I tag Yeti in it, there's software now that does this, you know, that helps people manage these databases, that Yeti might come in my comments and be like, hey, so glad you love Yeti, can we use this picture? Please type yes and confirm that you agree to our content terms and use, like licensing guidelines. It's kind of weird. No, not weird, because they're trying to protect their back because that picture isn't theirs. And if they want to use it and put it on their feed or use it in ads or do whatever, or put it on the side of Times Square, They need permission, and so that's why they're asking permission. Okay, so this is what the big brands are doing. You want to be as smart as the big brands to keep yourself out of, out of, you know, hot water, especially as a content creator, especially as someone who you want to respect other people's work and understand there's always a legal line and there's an ethical hedge around that. There's a fence around that, and we want to be, you know, thoughtful, especially when we're in the business of creating content that we're giving birth to other people, wide berth to them to protect their ideas, to try to hone in on distinctive voices that we're not getting too close, okay? If you find yourself that you're repeating or getting too close to someone else's captions or their content or whatnot, their brand colors, sometimes it's good to take a step away, to unfollow, to give yourself some breathing room, especially in certain verticals and niches, and to go look and have wider influence, okay? I have a couple podcast episodes about this because I get a lot of questions and angst and, you know, mindset work versus legal boundary work about copyrights and ripoffs, okay? And it's something I have a lot of passion of helping entrepreneurs because there's a fine line. There's things that you gotta move on with and like you gotta let that go because it's gonna hold you back and it's gonna eat you up inside. And then there's other times where you need to have good boundaries and you need to draw a line in the sand because this is hurting your sales or it's hurting customer experience, or if no one does it, then bad actors keep winning and they keep getting away with stuff. So anyway, there's some more podcast episodes if you want to delve into that, about what to do when you get copycatted, because it's not a matter of if but when. Okay, all right, we're getting close to the end here, so I want to— this is a good time when we want to look at this beautiful picture of Sprinkles, and I want you to repeat, I will not be overwhelmed by this. I simply know more than I did before. I know I move faster, guys, and it's because I respect your time and I don't like showing up for anything if I'm not going to provide value to you. Okay? And that includes on even a free workshop like I am here today. Okay? So I want to make sure this is useful to you. Okay. So we've talked about some of the steps to get our businesses legally legit. So next steps, what, what do I need to do if I need a contractor? I'm still not sure what kind of contractor legal documents I need for my business? Great question. Here's what you're going to do. You're going to go to creativecontracts.com. This is my contract shop. You're going to take the Get Your Biz Legit quiz. You're going to answer these questions about what you do in your business, okay? Now, I know that some of these multiple things will apply. Try to do the one that's the primary way that you, that you make money, okay? If you have your eggs in a lot of baskets, what's the heaviest basket, okay? Start there. If you need to, you can go back to the beginning of the quiz and take it again. Okay, I'd love for you to get as much help and direction as possible. Okay, it's gonna spit out some recommendations to you, and then after that, we can make sure that you can use that to know what you want to do. Okay, when you buy a template from my shop— because I know there's other options out there in the world, which is great, I want, I want my people to succeed, and I want you to have the protections that you need, and I think it should be at an affordable price and with some training that helps you implement it, because it doesn't do any good if this is sitting in a Google Drive folder on your computer, okay? That makes me sad when I see that, okay? When I hear that from people. My goal is to get this in your hands. It needs to be on your website. It needs to be in your client management software and onboarding people tomorrow, okay? So my templates are all in editable Word documents. If you don't have Word, that's okay. You can still open them in Google Docs. They're gonna look great. Great. Okay, they have color-coded fields. Yellow means put in your domain and, you know, customize to your business stuff. Pink means choose your own adventure. This is like how you get paid or how you want to handle intellectual property. You choose one and you delete the other ones. I have all the instructions in these. Okay, you don't have to remember this. Blue means maybe this is optional on your, on your, you know, your online course. If you have lifetime access, what does that really mean? You say you have office hours, how are those going to be governed? What if someone's being a pain and you want to kick them out? How are you going to handle that? I walk you through all of that in the agreement. Okay. All the agreements also include a license to use them for your business. Okay. Means can you use them and send them to your attorney or your accountant or your team members? Absolutely. Okay. All I ask is that you don't turn around and sell these, okay, on your own. And that you also don't distribute these publicly. Okay. Respect my business and my time and effort that I put into this. And if people ask you, "Oh, where did you get this?" or "You're a paid speaker now? Where did you get that contract?" You send them my way. If you want to be, you know, compensated for your time and your effort, become an affiliate for my shop. And I'd love for you to solve problems and make a little money, okay? For us all to win. Win-win-win, okay? That's what we want. And like I said, the major agreements all have video screen flows, okay, of me walking through this agreement so that you feel more empowered at the end of it. Okay, you have more information than you did when you started. Okay, again, they're compatible with all this stuff— Dubsado, HoneyBook, 17hats. I use Dubsado myself with my own agreements, and I've had clients who've implemented with all of these. Okay, please don't fuss with making people print or scan or sign agreements nowadays. You are not Harry Potter with a feather quill going to Hogwarts. E-signing is awesome. And it's legal and it's legit and it's so much easier and people can do it from their phone. Okay, so that's where we want to live. We want to live there. Okay. So, you know, are people actually buying this? You know, is this actually make a difference? Because this costs money. And I understand that you always have choices of where to invest money in your businesses. I got this testimonial from someone, someone reached out to me on Facebook Messenger because she couldn't get ahold of me. So that's my bad for not making it easier. She says, look, You know, I didn't know where to post review. I downloaded your online course terms last month, added the refund policy like you said I did. You know, thought it was better to lay it out and be the bad guy in the beginning than later. Like I said, within a month I had a high-ticket offer that purchased and wanted a refund. I confidently— look at that in bold— she confidently sent an email declining the request and processed per the terms. Attached those terms in her email. She did not give me any kickback. None, nada. She said, okay, the student is happily back in the course and they are all moving forward and the student is getting the transformation she wants and my customer still has her money in the bank. Okay. That's what we're talking about. That happens once for you and this contract template has already paid for itself in spades. Okay. Um, I've had several other clients who love the videos. They said it really helped them understand what was going on in the backend of the business and Jan, to make sure that this was matching their marketing and what happened and what was on the language of their sales page or the way that they were doing discovery calls or closing deals with clients. We want all of that to be in alignment because that's just kind of the, the business owner that you're going to show up as. Okay, we want that to be consistent. So, um, I know that, you know, uh, Michelle said that running a creative business can be a little tricky. When I found Brittany, I felt peace and confidence knowing I was finally taking care of my business the right way. So that's, that's, that's all I want, guys. That is my big Simon Sinek Golden Circle Why is I want you to be more confident. I don't want this stuff to get in the way of you getting your big business dreams. Okay, so thank you so much for joining me today. I know I threw a lot of stuff at you guys, but I hope this was helpful. So again, if you want to tag me and share something that you learned from this training today, I'd really appreciate it. Okay, not all caring is sharing, but this kind of, you know, not all sharing is caring, but this kind is. Because when we take this stuff out of the boring or the overwhelm or the shadows of business and are able to talk about some of the ugly stuff and the unfun stuff, it allows us and other people who follow us and other people who might be looking up to us as entrepreneurs, as colleagues, as small business owners, as creatives and creators, move forward and be able to like draw a line in the sand and kind of perk up a little bit. Because you're a real business owner, okay? I don't care if you just have an Etsy shop. I don't care if you just do photography on the side. I don't care if you're a florist or a balloon artist or a business coach, or if you do, you know, yoga meditations, you know. I, you know, I don't care if you're, you know, a vegan dog whisperer. Like, there's all kinds of stuff that you can do to harness your skills to solve people's problems, okay? But I want to make sure that you can do it confidently, that you can price confidently that you can support yourself and pay yourself and make it worth your time and effort, and that you can help people solve the problems they want to, and you can do it because they have clear expectations of what they're getting. And that's what contracts help you with, guys. That's what legal helps you with, is it takes complicated, complex human relationships and transactions and puts it on paper, because these things are beautiful, but they're not computers, and they remember stuff differently, okay? And so that's why we got to take it out of here and we got to put it into something else. Okay, and that's what legal documents will do for you. Remember, I have a 20% sale going off right now on my shop. It's already marked down. And then if you want to use code Brittany15 or any other one of my affiliate codes, you get an extra 15% off. That's a total 35% off every single one of my contracts. That deal is still live until Sunday night. That's going to be the 22nd. Okay, it ends at midnight Pacific. So please, please, please don't wait to the last minute. I always get DMs and texts on Monday morning saying, oh no, I missed this. I didn't see the email. I didn't see the thing on text. And I know not everyone sees stuff because of the algorithm. And you may be not liking all my stuff. I totally understand. I don't want you to miss out on saving money, okay, and solving your problems. So please look sooner rather than later. Take that quiz sooner rather than later. If you have questions, reach out to me on DM and I'm going to be doing some additional legal trainings on Instagram Live over the next couple of days. So if you see this and you still have questions or if you have some other friends that you want to send my way and make sure they get legally protected too, make sure to share here. Tag me, Brittany Ratelle, and get #GetLegitWithBritt because it's time, guys. 2020 has been a dumpster fire of the year, but let's still get a win on here. Let's make sure we can keep keep ourselves and our businesses legally protected and move forward with confidence. Okay. All right. I'm going to dispense with the question and answer here because I want to, you know, close this up and keep this under a tight hour. Thank you so much for being here and for your time. I really appreciate you and for you doing what you do and allowing me to be a small part of your business journey and the backend of your business. Okay. I love working with business owners. I especially love working with my female business owners. I think there's something really amazing about getting to be a woman in 2020 and getting to raise a family, raise a business side by side, and to do it in a way that feels really congruent with our values and the way that we want to run our lives. So thank you so much for being here and have a great night. Remember that you are a real business owner, so let's own our business in every sense of the word.