187: Licensing 201 — Q&A (Part 2) on Pricing + Packaging, Train-the-Trainer, Delivery, and Legal

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If a company is ghosting me or they're not responding, maybe the person that was reaching out is no longer even there. It's so hard to know how to improve your programs or your process or your pricing or your proposals because there's very little feedback. So a lot of this feels like a shot in the dark.

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Welcome back free timers to part two of licensing 201. Now we're getting really intricate, but there was just so much to say on Al Dia's great set of follow up questions to episode 140. Al helps MBA students and grads achieve their career goals. He's the host of the MBA Insider Podcast and a fellow bff. My usual caveat that I am not a licensing expert. I am not sharing the way, just what I've learned along the way and how the heck does this all work? How do you price? How do you negotiate? What kind of legal protection do you need? We're going to dig into all that in today's conversation. Before we do, one more friendly reminder that we have a very special workshop coming up in the BFF community and I encourage you to join right now so that you can be part of it. Longtime friendor of mine, Pamela Slim is going to be delivering a workshop just for the BFF community on certification and licensing. The workshop is going to be on May 11 at 1pm Eastern. Even if you can't join at that time. If you're a part of bff, you have access to all the recordings from any workshop we've done in recent months or in the history of the program these last several years. You also get access to a bonus private podcast feed where I release a bonus episode every single month you get a community of friend tours of your own that you can give and receive feedback. Brilliant sparter with and and I do a live Q and A call once a month. We have hot seats the following week. There's so much good stuff in here. Even if you just joined for a couple months, I know that it will be well worth your while. And if you want to join for this Pamela slim workshop on May 11 or you're hearing this far into the future and it's already passed, join and you'll get the recording because these can be very profitable business areas and there's a lot of complexity to it. Pamela is going to be walking us through how to know if and when adding a certification to your business makes sense. I tend to call this B to small B. For example Brene Brown's daring Greatly Facilitators or Profit First Professionals Certification is usually when you're training many people to get certified in your method or and and or how to know if and when adding a corporate licensing offering is a fit for your business. I call that B to Big B. That's more similar to what I do where you're doing train the trainer within a company and then they are disseminating your wonderful information out. It can be done in other ways. It doesn't have to revolve around train the trainer. For example, I do licensing of the Pivot workbook in and of itself even if it's not a training. Companies can license that as a self guided career toolkit and pay an annual subscription to have access to that IP to that material. Pamela will talk us through the first steps involved in creating an IP certification or licensing program and even ways you can work with her and her team because she's building out this capability in her business with instructional designers on the build out and even helping with a little bit of the business planning behind it. And Pamela is one of the first people I learned licensing from in addition to MBS who's been on the pod many times. And so we're also going to leave plenty of time for Q and A where you can ask anyone anything and everything that's on your mind. Whether it's a question for Pam, whether it's something I can answer, this time is for you. So again I'm telling you, if you just joined BFF for a couple months, this information alone will be worth your while. Visit itsfreetime.com BFF to learn more and join us. That's itsfreetime.com Bff apply promo code podcast to get 10% off your first month foreign.

Part two of this licensing 201 Q&A session. We are going to talk about selling and packaging, delivery and legal selling and packaging. Al asks, how do you price or package? What are the elements you can even include? Maybe walk through some examples of benefits and trade offs of different selling and packaging models. What does selling look like? What does it feel like or look like to navigate the selling and procurement process? Let me work backwards by saying this is a long game. I find that selling licensing takes forever. Okay, let's just say it's not a one click buy now button. Although I would really love it to be, maybe if it's part of some larger program. But what I find typically is that the sales process does involve a lot of exploration, a lot of towing around budget. If they're willing to tell you up front, that's great. But they are not always. Sometimes you want to do a series of workshops and they want to pilot and test. Does this material even resonate in person? Let alone talking about train the trainer and licensing? These relationships take time. For me, it's often started with workshops. Sometimes it starts with one in person keynote. That's the domino that starts to tip the rest. As in they engage me for a keynote and that's all it is, that's all we think it's going to be. But of course I always mention, well, just so you know, if this resonates, I do offer licensing. So I'm always planting the seeds for licensing. But sometimes it starts with one keynote and it's a smashing success. Someone in the audience then brings me to deliver a keynote to their part of the organization and it's a smashing success. And then an HR person catches wind of it and they go, we want to do three more for these dates and these locations. And we do three more and they're a smashing success. And then it makes sense to start to talk about licensing. So it just totally depends who's hiring you. What's the word of mouth again? A lot of this flowed so much more smoothly pre pandemic when budgets were a flowing and things could be done in person. And things have changed so much since then. On the other hand, things have changed so much in a good way. I mean, now we could leverage licensing more than ever because it is scalable and it can be global and it could be virtual. And it gives organizations so much flexibility about the material they teach, how they teach it, how they deliver it and so on. So prepare for it to take a long time. I would say if you have a qualified lead that you think is an ideal client for you and they are really interested. I mean, that alone is already halfway to a miracle. Okay, but even from there, it can take months to go through the conversation and sales process. There's the initial outreach, then you might have an exploratory call, then they might request another call. I don't always give endless exploratory calls, by the way, but I'm just telling you what requests I've gotten. Then maybe you're sending a proposal. And even if it's not a bespoke proposal and it's your custom pricing, remember the example of good, better, best, they need to think it over. Then they might have a meeting with their manager or a meeting with a decision making committee, or it has to go all the way up to the decision makers at the topmost part of the organization. And then, oh, now let's negotiate on price. Oh, we don't have this much budget. Can you do this for that? And as Jeb Blount says in Inked, never give leverage away for free. So negotiation takes time. Then when there's even conceptual agreement on what you're going to deliver and for how much and at what recurring subscription or licensing fee, then you gotta go through the whole legal song and dance. So now you are engaging an attorney for me. My attorney is not full time by any means. I bring them in when I have a contract like this. A big fish on the line and you're going to go back and forth. They might send it to their legal department and the attorneys go back and forth line by line by line. Ideally you already have a standard licensing agreement in place that is the starting point. If not, you will need to invest some money up front to create something from scratch with an attorney. I work with Francine Love of Love Law Firm. Someone like her who has expertise in IP licensing will already have a base to start from. So it could be beneficial to reach out to someone that you know already does this with their clients. What you don't want is that the company just sends you their agreement from scratch because that's not going to be favorable to you. It's going to be a lot of work. You may still have to sign an agreement that they generate, such as an NDA, but there's basically all kinds of legal stuff goes on and on and on and on. Then let's say the magical miraculous event happens where both parties have signed the licensing agreement you're going to invoice. And sometimes companies have tried to tell me oh, we have 120 day payment terms. It's like, are you joking? I'm not going to float your ginormous organization for the next 120 days. So I've gotten really strict about I don't hand over anything until the money is in my bank account. And so you can either wait 120 days or you can talk to your finance team and change the terms. But basically that might take 30 days, might take 60 days for the money to land in your bank account. Then you're going to have the kickoff because you're going to transfer the files or give them access to the files in some way, and you're going to want to schedule a meeting with the person who's bringing you in. You probably will want to schedule a train, the trainer. So, I mean, just imagine, like, just imagine how long these things take. And that's at the best of times. That's if no weird things happen. That's if some crazy news event doesn't spook everybody. That's if the organization doesn't suddenly go through a reorg. So many organizations, as I joke and pivot, that we were reorgang more than we were org ing, there's rarely an org there. You would be lucky if in the near year, if not two years, that all this at least has taken me. I never want to assume it's going to take this much for you. You're just lucky if it's even the same point person working with you from A to Z through this process. If their company goes through a reorg or a budget freeze comes down, or in the pandemic, some entire teams were getting furloughed, then there's no telling how long it could take. I've sent out proposals where I didn't hear anything back. It was crickets. And then six months later, a new point person reaches out and says, we're ready to pick this back up again. As I said, I've tried everything over eight years. I've truly tried everything. And it's hard to know, was my pricing wrong? Was my proposal not good enough? Did it have nothing to do with me? If a company is ghosting me or they're not responding, maybe the person that was reaching out is no longer even there. It's so hard to know how to improve your programs or your process or your pricing or your proposals because there's very little feedback. So a lot of this feels like a shot in the dark. Now, again, if we can get Tony Schwartz, hop on a podcast mic and record this episode instead of me. I'd be thrilled because they're raking it in. There are businesses like Stephen Covey's licensing business at one point was $100 million run rate of recurring licensing revenue. I'm really trying to just give you a head start here. At least if you can learn from my mistakes, maybe you can make different ones and then you'll share what you learned back with me.

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Al asked in part of this how do you price or package as shared more of this in episode 140 so I apologize for some of you if this is a repeat, but maybe that helps it sink in. You can price per end participant. You're going to license Pivot programs, and every time an individual contributor, an employee, goes through training, it's $97. I don't like pricing this way. I just don't like it. I don't like having to track it. And I don't think it incentivizes the organization to train as many people as possible because they may try to keep the number of trainees below a certain budget threshold, but it can be done. And it might feel safer to the organization to roll it out this way. But I don't love it. I would rather not even put this forward as an option unless they ask me for it. You can price per Train the trainer. So in the case of pivot, at one point it was 3500 per trainer. Now inflation has raised. Maybe I'm going to raise my rates to 4,500 per trainer. I don't know. But you could say minimum of 10 trainers and I'll come in, I'll do train the trainer. It's 4,500 per person and you then need to license the material. So these are two different things. Train the Trainer involves me and my time. Although I have trained sub facilitators in case I ever can't be there to facilitate train the trainer, then those trainers want to go forth in the organization and deliver your materials. So there still needs to be an underlying license for all those what I call end participants. And again you're either pricing per participant or it's just a flat fee. That's how I like to do it. I'm going to charge you separately for train the trainer because that involves my time, minimum 10 people and unlimited use. So I would rather charge ideally a 6 figure fee in my dream world to be 250k. But that's in a dream world, I don't know. I never know the size of the organization I'm working with, what's their market cap, how many people are being trained. It does depend a little bit on the variables involved like billing. 100,000 person organization for a flat fee is going to be different than a 10,000 person organization. But one way or another I love the flat fee on an annual subscription because I encourage them to track participants but it's not required in order for us to handle the billing because that just becomes a nightmare. So train the trainer is going to be separate and you can give a discount. You can say minimum 10 people, but anything over 20 in train the trainer will do a 5% discount off the top or 10% discount because yeah, that's great. You actually want to encourage more trainers in the room because that's more likely then that they can help that material spread far and wide in the organization and it helps the organization get the most out of the underlying license. If you are licensing something like an assessment, I gave the example of Jonathan Fields, Sparka type assessment, mbti, Colby, True Colors, whatever it is, you can charge per assessment. Some people in that model, the train the trainer is even free because the real money isn't in the trainers that you train, although you should, you might as well charge for that as well. The big money is each time somebody takes that assessment it's $50. Sometimes there's even a reseller model built into this. Stay with me, where let's say I'm an independent consultant, I, Jenny Blake, get trained in strength scope. I get to buy that assessment bundle wholesale. So I can buy 10 at a time for $50 each and I resell that to companies and I say I will facilitate this assessment for 10 of your employees for $100 per person. Do you see what I did there? I'm paying the assessment organization a wholesale rate. That could be up to 50% off the sticker price of what the assessment company encourages consultants to charge to companies. Ideally it's consistent because you don't want the company to say, wait a second, why do I have to pay you $100 per person who takes this assessment and debriefs it with you? When this other person selling me the same assessment, it's only $75. So usually the assessment company will set standard pricing, but they're going to build in something for those independent consultants who would be essentially resellers of that assessment. Okay, we talked about unlimited use fee. That's for companies. And then if you're going to be doing the certification model, as Pamela Slim calls it, the per certified coach or per certified consultant, often that will be a one time training fee or a join fee and annual renewal because you are supporting this entire client base now of your certified coaches. So if you train a thousand people in your method once and they're going to go out and resell your method and sub license it to me, that's a big headache. But a lot of people do it and a lot of people make a lot of money this way. I get too nervous about the brand dilution and right now I don't even have enough keynotes, let alone if a thousand people were out deleting delivering pivot keynotes, it would kind of take away from a joyful revenue stream for me. But if you go that way, you're essentially shifting your business model in some ways because yeah, there is way more competition. But if you're Brene Brown, you don't even want to be doing keynotes. Maybe she does five a year, I don't know, I don't know her personally, but maybe she only does five a year or ten a year. But the demand is so big because she has a Netflix show and an HBO show and these best selling books that having a ,ousand or even ten thousand daring greatly facilitators works out. And then it's a ginormous revenue stream. You don't want to just have them pay once a training fee because you are supporting them. They are part of your community now. These are part of your best advocates. You got to support them. You need to assign a team member or two or five to help manage this community. Moderate a private forum if there is one, send them updated materials if there are some, answer their questions, help them get clients in their local market areas. It's a lot of work. But if you have 10,000 now, that's a huge number, times the $2,000 annual renewal fee for them to continue being certified in this method and able to resell it to clients. That's $20 million annual recurring revenue right there. Pretty amazing if you want to deal with that type of business model. In the last episode I shared my licensing sales process documentation and so make sure to go listen if you haven't already because that has the full pipeline, status categories and also all the stages of our licensing sales process. And then in episode 140 I shared what goes in my licensing kit, what elements you can include. But let me repeat it because this is often a mystery for people. And again, this is just my way. It's not the way, but what I am delivering when a licensing client signs on. Usually there's two tracks, okay, managers and employees. But it is some combination of a slide deck, a facilitator guide for that slide deck might just be a couple pages, an in depth facilitator training guide, the workbook and participant handouts. And there's also the Pivot book and the pivot LinkedIn learning courses. There's even the Pivot podcast that sometimes doing train the trainer, I might have them listen to an episode for pre work. There's a pivotability self assessment that could be good for anybody to take in advance and you could create a separate survey instance per licensing organization. So if I'm working with company xyz I can duplicate my pivotability self assessment and have then unique data just for that organization and share that data with them. And then don't forget the post session survey, they may already have that. If not, that's something that you can include in the delivery. So let me say it one more time. For the folks in the back row we have the self assessment that's helpful for measuring participants. There's a slide deck, there's a facilitator guide, there's an in depth train, the trainer guide. Mine is like 150 pages, coil bound, beautifully printed. There's the workbook that can be digitally distributed as a PDF or split into one off pages and used as a resource. There's participant handouts and then there's also the book. There's LinkedIn learning courses and there's the post course survey. You don't even need to have all these elements. These are just the different ingredients and elements that you can include. That was Al's question. What could you include? I would say at a very minimum clients could just license the Pivot workbook. And I highly encourage that clients if you're out there, I highly encourage this it's really beautiful. It's well done. It goes with the book, it goes with the LinkedIn learning courses. It could be distributed, printed and coil bound or digitally. You can distribute the whole thing as a self guided career toolkit or one off pages so that alone they would be paying to license all that content, that ip, the branding, the exercise, all of it. Could someone recreate this within the company? Of course, but they don't and it's not that easy to do. The workbook is based on the pivot method. That's my ip. It's road tested. It's been tested for so long now, you know, almost a decade. It's not that easy for someone in L and D. And I know because I tried when I was an L and D to create these types of resources and sometimes it's hard to get traction or get them branded and beautiful and functional and working. And so licensing allows them to just get something off the shelf, pay an annual subscription fee and be done. So it could be as simple as a workbook that I've rebranded as a self guided career toolkit or it could be as in depth as the whole training slide deck, facilitator guide, handouts, self assessment, post assessment or post course survey and so on. All right, so that's selling and packaging.

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Number four Delivery. How do you manage delivery? Al asks, what are the nuts and bolts of moving pieces? What are some of the options in terms of how it's delivered? Keynote workshop facilitated small groups, group Coaching, asynchronous, flipped classroom. What about getting others to facilitate on your behalf? How do you do that? How do you find people, pay them, et cetera? So many good questions. Can we all just give Al a round of applause because these questions are gold. First and foremost, delivery. Everything should have a virtual option. Now, because companies are so distributed with the pandemic, there was a stat as many as 60% of people are now working from home. And so you don't want to base any of your options for delivery on the fact that it has to be in person. Given that everybody wants things virtually now, I encourage you to make them shorter and more concise. So my train the trainer used to be one and a half days in person. Now I would suggest if we did it virtually, that day one is five hours with a one hour lunch break and day two is three hours with a 15 minute break in the middle. You can't teach that much in that amount of time, by the way. So this is where you start to let go of being a perfectionist about your material. Because of that, train the trainer probably a very small fraction of each of the two days. Day one is for teaching pivot to employees. Day two is the manager career conversation layer. Only an hour each day is delivery of me actually teaching how to teach the material. It's very meta and then the rest is discussion and practice. You just can't include that much. The key thing about licensing that I've said in previous episodes is do not throw the kitchen sink at it. That's not actually what organizations want and you're not going to be setting people up for success. When it comes to delivery, less is more. Let me focus on train the trainer because whether you're doing a certification or a train the trainer within a company, it will follow a similar arc. You're going to recruit the training group. Who are you training? Is it 10 people? Is it a hundred people? You're probably going to want to assign them some pre work. In my case, I would say please read Pivot in advance if they have a LinkedIn learning license. Please watch these two courses. I have done some podcast episodes on this type of content. Please listen to this one episode. And I would say please take this pivotability self assessment or in case of free time, have a free time self assessment. I might even create, which I have done in the past, a specific train the trainer pre course survey where I'm asking them to think about what are some of the biggest pivot points in your career. Can you think of a Time that you doubled down on your strengths. That's the plant stage. Can you think of a time that you leveraged your network to help you find a new role within an organization? I will send a pre survey that gets them thinking, that gets their story crockpot percolating so that when they come to training, they already have a basic understanding of the material and the method and they've already started to personalize it a little bit. That takes the pressure off the one and a half days that we're together, and it just makes them feel a little more confident coming in. That's already a lot of pre work and it's more than some people are probably going to do in the training itself. I'm telling people, listen, this is not about memorization. You don't have to get the material exactly right. You already know more than the people you will be training in the future. The key is to make it personal. Think of your own examples, stories. That's actually the hard part here. You can always revisit the facilitator guide and refresh yourself on the way. I've talked about pivot and the pivot method, but what's going to bring this training to life is your perspective, your stories, how you think about this process. And so that's where I train the trainer. It's more about the nuance and it's also trying to give the group confidence. Of course you're going to be overwhelmed. And I even have them do practice exercises where I say, practice explaining each stage of the pivot method to your partner or in triads. Because if it's in a triad, there's the speaker, the listener and the observer, and then they rotate. And so if you have them practice just even explaining it, they're not even working off a slide deck. I say, this is as awkward as this gets. You will never be more awkward explaining the pivot method than you are right now in this first time that you do it. It's like learning a language. It's just going to be so awkward at first and it gets easier every time. When I deliver train the trainer, I do not use a separate slide deck. I use the exact slide deck that they will be using. I might put in two additional slides. What's our schedule for the next day and a half and what do I want them to do afterward? What's their homework? That's it, though. Part of this is to build their confidence. So I say, listen, these are the same slides. I'm going to teach you exactly what you'll be teaching other people. It's not a separate deck or anything. And that keeps it really simple. So that as I'm delivering, I'm saying now when I get to this slide, here's some of what I do. And that's all documented in great detail in my facilitator guide. The in depth Facilitator guide. I'm sorry. Cause sometimes it's confusing. Sometimes when people say facilitator guide, it might mean a two page, usually in a table format that has very simple flow of a training of an hour, hour and a half training. It'll say first 10 minutes introduction. And you explain what that means. So you have like timing, timestamp, title of the module and description of the module. Those facilitator guides might be three or four pages or like 10 pages. My in depth facilitator guide is 150 pages. Here's everything you could ever want to know or need to know about being a pivot facilitator. Yes, it has the shorter table based facilitator guides within it. It has how I talk about the different slides. It has the whole pivot workbook in there. So they have access to that material all in the same place. Exercises for them to map out their stories. Just so much more than you can imagine. And that's my prized possession. That's like nobody sees it, nobody touches it, not my friends, nobody. That file lives only on my computer because that's the real gold. And so when I do a train the trainer, each trainer gets a printed guide. With some organizations I've opened it up where we call it self study Train the trainer. Which means that I don't even have to facilitate now this is only with a long term trusted client. But I don't have to facilitate the training. I still mail that person, even if it's to their home. Their own version of the pivot facilitator guide. And then maybe they buddy up with someone who was already trained to learn that material. That could be another sub format. I forgot to mention, part of this set of questions is the one of getting others to facilitate on your behalf. How do you do that? How do you find them, pay them, et cetera? First of all, I'm all for it because just as with anything in the business, you don't want to be the bottleneck. And as the business owner and IP creator, long term, you really shouldn't necessarily be the train the trainer facilitator. That role can easily go to someone else, believe it or not. So I love al that you're already thinking about getting others to facilitate on your behalf. The way I've done this is I've brought in trusted people, usually from my own community. As Dan Doyen said of Readwise. He said some of their best hires were already in their community. I find the same thing. My best facilitators are already pivot coaches or BFF members, because those are the people that have shown interest in this work and in this material for a long time and they already resonate. And so that's really where I source facilitators. It might be someone who already facilitated this material at a company that was licensing it, and then they might reach out to me. Maybe they're not yet part of bff, but that could be a likely candidate as well, who I would trust to know the material and facilitate on my behalf if they meet other criteria of my ideal certified trainer, which is you're joyful and relatable and you resonate with the material. I mean, there's all kinds of stuff I'd want to see from someone as well, to trust them being an ambassador for this material. But the best comes from within my own network, within people who've already demonstrated interest in my material in the books. You also want to look for people who are already skilled facilitators. That is so crucial. You don't want to teach someone how to facilitate from scratch. No, you really want to make sure you're already sourcing people who are already comfortable being up in front of a room. They already have facilitation experience, they have career experience, and now the layer that they love your material. One time I flew two people to Paris to shadow me as I facilitated a train the trainer and even had them help deliver a module or two within the two day train the trainer. When you get to that stage, this gets real meta again. You need to document everything about how to deliver train the trainer. So not only are you documenting everything so that you can teach the trainers how to develop your end material, you're then documenting everything about how to do a train the trainer. It gets layers and layers and layers of documentation. Or you could say, hey, person A and B, and I would definitely bring more than one because if something happens where one person just has life events or a business shift and they can no longer be one of your sub facilitators. As I think about it, you don't wanna start all over again from scratch. So invite two or three people to shadow you. I reimbursed for travel, but you could pay them to say like, please document everything I tell you in the next two days. Day one where we're preparing, days two and a half while I'm delivering, and day where we debrief together. And so you could ask someone else, can you document all this? I'll pay you for your time and I'll pay you to clean it up. But I would have someone shadow you. And then the next step would be the next client that you get. You shadow them, delivering the train, the trainer, and that's probably really nerve wracking. And then once you're confident and they've had enough practice and they feel confident again, they're always gonna know more than the people they're training. How do you pay them? This really depends. I've heard all kinds of things. I've heard that you can pay facilitators a flat fee. I like to ask people, what is joyful for you? And I've asked this to sub trainers in my world, pivot facilitators, where sometimes I have a client that cannot afford to bring me somewhere else in the country. And so I'll ask one of my local people who I know are well versed in the material. I'll say, what's a joyful jump out of bed rate for you for something like this if it's in your local city? Or what if you have to travel out of state? And they tell me a number, not what do you charge, but is joyful. And sometimes I'll even add to that joyful rate and I'll upcharge myself because I want them springing out of bed, I want them elated if they're going to get on a plane and travel. Now, those numbers won't always match up. Maybe someone tells me, oh, my joyful rate's 2,500, and I know that I'm going to charge the client 10,000, well, I might pay them 3,500. So now they're ecstatic. I still have enough to account for taxes and team overhead and the fact that I'm bringing this client in in the first place. Some people I know split 50 50. Honestly, with what I know now, I think that's a little generous, but it would have to be a superstar. The reason I say it's a little generous. These costs add up. They really do. By the time you take out taxes and the fees and your time for marketing and managing the invoicing and contract process with a client, it takes a lot. So I don't think 5050 is quite it for facilitation unless you're working with a superstar and you're like, whatever it takes, I'll split the revenue 50. 50. Like, will you say yes? Will you fly anywhere and do this with me or for me if it's not someone you know? There might also be marketplaces of local facilitators, so you could do some kind of pilot or test run or virtual training just to vet people. I've never done that, so I won't speak too much on that. But in general, I think you want to find good people, pay them well, especially for their rates, and then make sure you have enough that goes back to the business. Because this is part of a much bigger picture of how much effort and overhead that it takes to create this whole business engine in the first place. And sometimes if you ask people, what's your joyful rate? And they say it's 25 grand, I mean, that just might not work as a sub facilitator. If you're thinking, why charge 25 grand? You know, maybe then the only reason you would do it is to do the client a favor so that they have coverage because it's a specific date and you're already booked. And then in that case, it's not really a subcontractor relationship. It's more of a straight up referral at that point, less of contracted facilitator to deliver your ip.

We'll be right back, just after this.

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The last set of questions for this round on part two of licensing 201 is legal. How do you protect your IP now? Of course, with the caveat that I'm not an attorney and this is not legal advice. And you should definitely have an attorney on your bench. Your roster of extended network of contractors. Again, shout out to Francine Love, who's wonderful, she runs Love law firm. You know, I just love the name. Resonates with heart based business. And she's been so great helping me with this kind of stuff. I laughed this morning as I was preparing for this episode. I heard Kira Swisher on the Pivot podcast. The other One I'm the OG 2015. Theirs was launched in 2018, but I digress. Theirs is obviously way more popular, she said. The line Some people say Disney is a law firm that runs a theme park. And that made me laugh because we know Disney's involved in all kinds of licensing for their creations, whether it's Little Mermaid or Cinderella or Beauty and the Beast to create products and all kinds of things that they sell. I just laughed at this line. Disney is a law firm that runs a theme park. Bottom line, if you're licensing, you must engage an attorney. It will be worth it because the contract size is ideally six figures or more. It's worth it and you need to have an attorney on your side. You need to be sure that your IP is safe, that it's clear how the IP gets delivered, that it'll be clear what happens to the IP when that relationship ends. It is just so important and you need to price your minimums accordingly. So this is part of the reason I won't take a licensing client for less than 50k, because the legal process alone can eat up thousands of dollars just going back and forth with their legal team. Not to mention the energy and effort involved from all team members, not just me, the owner, but a project manager attorney. It's just there's so much involved you want to price accordingly. Ideally, you have a standard licensing contract that someone like Francine helps create and then of course you're going to go back and forth between your two legal teams. I mentioned they might have you sign an NDA or they might have their own super long document. But you want to be really careful and watch out for what part of your IP is protected, what parts can they modify, if any, do they need to ask you for approval in writing to modify? How is the pricing going to work? How's the delivery going to work? How's the measurement going to work? Are they obligated to report to you how many people are going through and if so, at what interval? If it's per participant pricing you want to talk about, are you allowed to say that they're a client? I've had so many corporate clients say no, I can't say publicly or post on my website or use their logo anywhere. As small businesses, we need to be able to say who we're working with. And I've been incredibly private over many years for many clients where I've signed some kind of NDA where I'm just not even allowed to say who I work with. And that makes the sales process really hard because, yeah, it could go much easier if I was able to say certain things publicly. So they'll have their own quirks and quirky agreements. And then I've had clients try to say that if they don't use the full extent of the licensing, they can get a refund. And there's no way I'm refunding a cent, a penny of licensing that is prepaid. It's use it or lose it, use it or not. It's not my responsibility that you use it properly and to the fullest extent of your satisfaction. Sorry, that's just not the deal. So you just want to be careful. I've had teams try to sneak stuff like that in where it was getting added to a DocuSign after legal had already approved a marked up back and forth word document. Like really sneaky things. So you have to have an attorney if you're going to be doing this kind of stuff. It's really important. And again, ideally, you already have a standard base contract where you've thought a lot of this through to the point about how do you protect your IP and what happens when the licensing contract ends. Part of the agreement will give this retraction process. They are obligated to tell you that they've deleted all the files or they've recalled them from everyone's computers. We know as again, what one of my mentors in this area, Stephane, said to me, you can't unscramble the eggs. Imagine if you have a training deck, even if it says in your contract, this deck shall not be duplicated. But you know, the 10th train, the trainer, or who ramped up the 25th via self study, they might not know that what's happening at the main contract level. They might have been duplicating this deck, like, oh, now it's in all these other languages and oh, I just wanted one sitting on my local computer because I didn't have good Internet that day. And there might be a hundred versions of your stuff out there. You ultimately probably cannot control all of that. But if it's in the contract, the company needs to do the best that they can to be above board. And don't tell any of my clients that I said this, but sometimes I've thought about the worst case scenario, that the material's out there and they don't recall any of it and they keep using it. Now they're not paying me and I think to myself, what's the worst that happens? Like, I Sell more books and I get more podcast listeners. Of course I'm not going to give it away for free. That wouldn't even be fair to my other clients. But it kind of helps me sleep at night to think, well the worst that happens if some client goes renegade and delivers it without paying me. I would, of course I would be pissed and it's not okay. But I could sleep at night because it means they really love the material and the material is still making its way into the world and I have many other aspects of the business, so I probably shouldn't have even said that out loud if Francine will get mad at me. But you heard it here first and only. Okay, how are we doing? Is your head spinning? Remember last week I gave you permission to be overwhelmed and today I give you permission to to start Tiny. If the only thing you do as a result of listening to these conversations around licensing your IP is create a page on your website that shows the path from one off workshops to full on licensing. That's already a huge start. Given how flipping long the sales process takes, you practically have time to start talking to clients about licensing. And when you have a real solid lead on the line, you could create all the materials in the backend in the months that it will take you to reach conceptual agreement, negotiate the rates, the package, go through the legal process back and forth, send the invoice, have the money land in your bank. You could create all the licensing materials you need by then. So don't over invest upfront. Go back, listen to my episode on rapid course creation. I don't recommend that you scramble and panic the second you have a viable client on the line, but you also don't have to have it all created up front before you have a viable client. You can do a lot in the back end, just don't let them know that. Because if you create it bespoke with that client, you're gonna have to recreate it all over again for the next one. So do yourself a favor, start tiny. Create a path, a public facing path to this route if you wanna add this or consider adding this as a revenue stream and you could just start planting seeds. If you do deliver workshops or keynotes to say, by the way, happy to talk about licensing and train the trainer down the line if that's ever of interest. So that's your permission. Start Tiny, plant a few little conversational seeds here and there and you can see what starts to blossom. Thank you so much for listening. And if you have follow up questions like these great ones that Al submitted, please let me know. You can email hifreetime.com or submit a question@itsfreetime.com ask. Don't forget. I would love your feedback anytime. Itsfreetime.com survey and last but not least, a friendly reminder. Pamela Slim is going to be coming to talk to us all about certification and her take on licensing and how to approach all this and even how to engage her and her team to help you do it so you're not working on your own. That's on May 11th. Join us at itsfreetime.com BFF Promo Code Podcast that's itsfreetime.comBFF Promo Code Podcast and even if you hear this far into the future, join us. You'll get access to the private feed and all the recordings of past workshops like this one. And previously before this one we even had one on how to protect your IP legally from two attorneys. So you will far and above get your money's worth, I promise you. And if you're not happy, just cancel. So you're just paying for a month. I mean, I hope you're happy for the long term. And you join us because it's a really incredible community of heart based business owners, but you're not obligated to anything more than a month. Try it out. You got nothing to lose. That's itsfreetime.com BFF promo code podcast and I cannot wait to see some of you in there. Have a beautiful rest of your day.

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