Jeff Dudan | On the Homefront with Jeff Dudan #60

Hey, everybody. Jeff Duden CEO, Homefront Brands and I wanted to talk a little about intellectual property. I can't believe how many business owners I meet that have a great business. They have a great idea, they have a great name. And I ask people, what have you done to protect your intellectual property? And oftentimes, small business owners, they haven't taken the time or the energy or the money to file for a patent on that great name that they've created that they're trading under, or they haven't file for copyright. I almost never find people that have applied for patents. Why does it matter so much to protect your intellectual property? What's the big deal? Well, I'll tell you what the big deal is. When you go to grow your business beyond your local market or when you go to sell your business some years down the road, when you're ready to do that. A recent study found that 84% of the value attributed to recent transactions was simply for the intellectual property. Now, that number is heavily skewed because a lot of the transactions and especially the big transactions are technology companies, social media companies, and those, of course, are largely valued upon the intellectual property and the patents and the trademarks and the copyrights that they own. So what is a trademark? Well, a trademark is something to protect your brand name. It's the brand that you want to be trading under. You want to have a first use of it, or you want to be able to prove that you used it first before anybody else did for the services or the products that you're using under the brand. It's managed by the Federal Trade Commission. Usually you can get a trademark filed for from between $200 if you do it yourself online, use an attorney for $1,000 or $1,200. It takes usually nine months. There's a process to go through, and it takes nine months for your trademark generally to be approved. There's different stages along the way. And then it has to be in place for five years before it's uncontestable, ready, but could come back and challenge it. Those are trademarks. If you have a new business, I would consider the trademark ability of a brand name that you're thinking about doing before you go and build a customer base and all of that inside of this business that you're building because you want to be able to expand the business at some point. And if you don't have your trademark and somebody else does, then it may not be today, but at some point you're gonna have to change the name of your Business. Second level or another level of intellectual property protection would be copyrights. So copyrights are pretty basic, pretty easy, and they just cover original works. So usually you can get something copyrighted file for less than $100. There's a great way to protect an idea or an original work that you have out there now. And I haven't been to the website, but it's called Easy ip. And you go there and they basically use blockchain technology to document the first use of an original work or something that you're looking to trademark or something that you're looking to patent. And they can document it. And then it's basically because of the blockchain element to it. It'll stand up in court as hey, this was what existed on this day. This is the person doing it and these are the people that are attributed to it. So check it out. I haven't been to the website, but I've a lot of people that I know are using that site. So I'm going to go there and see maybe they can come and sponsor the podcast, who knows. And then the last level of protection, which is kind of the cat daddy, is patents. So if you really looked at your business, how many patents that you could possibly apply for, there's all types. There's business process patents, there's inventions, any kind of innovation that you have inside of your business, any compilation of something that you're doing differently may be eligible for a patent. Now patents are little bit more expensive and there's a lot of people that will help you with it. But generally you can expect to take a good look at it for maybe $2,000. But to go all the way through, you might figure 10 to $20,000 because there's pretty extensive documentation that has to go through in the patent application process. And it's specialty work. You've got to get schematics, designs, small prototypes, things like that built and you have to have everything really detailed aisle. So you'll need to get some outside help to file for a patent. And there's different types. There's utility patents, there's design patents, there's plant patent, there's provisional, non provisional. So definitely get some expert advice there. But regardless of it, I encourage you, if you're a small business owner or medium business owner, to take a minute step back and just go through your business from the beginning to the end and say, is that something unique? Is that something that we need to protect? If and when I go to sell this business, is this going to be something that is going to add value to the transaction because you know, we got a 20 year Runway to be able to do it this way and we can keep other people from copying us and maybe competing in exactly the same way. So intellectual property up to 84% of the value of businesses transacted today. I encourage you to take a look at it. I'm Jeff Duden, Homefront Brand CEO. If you want to get in touch with me, you can reach out to me on LinkedIn just Jeff Duden, if you want to give me some information about your business, you can go to ww.dudinx.com fill out the form there. Our team will take a look at it and get back to you. And of course, if you're thinking about entrepreneurship, go to homefrontbranch.com, check out all of the great offerings there and of course slide into that homefront on the Homefront Podcast with Jeff Duden. Join all the hundreds of thousands of people that are listening to that every week and we look forward to seeing you all on the Homefront. Thanks for listening.