Your brand is more than colors and a clever name. It's the trust you build, the experience you deliver, and the systems that make your business run. It is vital to protect that brand and the intellectual property (IP) behind it. This is not an action to assign to your legal department and then forget about. It's a growth strategy.
In a recent discussion on the Systems Simplified Podcast, Adi Klevit, CEO of Business Success Consulting Group, and Tenicia Moulden, Esq., The Entrepreneur's Lawyer™, discussed the value of protecting brand assets and intellectual property. They shared several steps you can take to protect these assets and make sure they work for you now and into the future.
Read on to discover the steps you can take right now to determine what should be documented and protected, and how to establish systems that make your IP a durable asset.
Why Protect Your Brand and IP?
Before we share more, it's essential to have some definitions in place:
Intellectual Property (IP) includes the intangible assets your business creates and uses to compete:
- Trademarks: Names, logos, taglines, and identifiers that distinguish your goods or services.
- Copyrights: Original works like articles, videos, images, slides, and course content.
- Patents: Novel inventions and certain processes (mostly relevant to product and tech companies).
- Trade Secrets: Confidential know-how that gives you an advantage, including formulas, pricing strategies, SOPs, intake methods, training playbooks, and more.
IP agreements often include this critical multiplier:
- Contracts: NDAs, confidentiality provisions, IP assignment, work-for-hire, and vendor/employee agreements that make rights enforceable.
Your brand is the market’s perception of your business. This is built from your promise, positioning, visuals, voice, and delivery. Strong brands share three traits:
- Relevant: Solves a pressing, current problem and delivers clear value.
- Exclusive: Has a recognizable “only we do it this way” factor.
- Distinct: Looks, sounds, or behaves in ways people can instantly identify.
So, why should you focus on protecting these assets? It’s probably pretty clear to you that IP needs to be protected, and your brand is how clients see you, so you can game out the value of protection. However, here are four reasons to protect your brand and IP:
- Revenue preservation: You must prevent copycats from siphoning the demand that you spent time and money creating.
- Monetization options: Of course, you want to license your IP, build successful partnerships based on brand recognition, or offer premium pricing. Protecting your brand and IP gives you those monetization options.
- Valuation: Protected IP and documented systems materially increase company valuation. If you ever plan to go public, exit the business, or obtain a business loan, your company's assets must be protected.
- Operational confidence: Teams must be able to share and utilize assets without hesitation. Creating clear access rules and standard operating procedures about information sharing allows teams to work within a solid, reliable structure.
How to Document Your IP and Systemize Protection
So, you understand that your intellectual property and brand are integral to your business. These assets need protection! But how does one do this?
Follow these steps to move from “vulnerable” to “buttoned-up.”
1) Run a rapid IP audit
Create an inventory of assets and include their storage locations. This should include:
- Brands & logos: Company name(s), product names, taglines, logos, domain names, social handles.
- Creative works: Articles, guides, videos, presentations, courses, website content, marketing collateral.
- Methods & know-how: Intake scripts, qualification criteria, playbooks, pricing logic, delivery checklists, training manuals.
- Technology & data: Proprietary tools, code repositories, datasets, templates, and automations.
- Relationships: Customer lists, vendor arrangements, and partner frameworks.
For each item, capture: title, type, owner, creation date, current use, location link, and status (unprotected, pending, protected). Then maintain this inventory in a database that can be and will be updated as you modify logos, update software, or begin protecting IP.
2) Establish creation evidence
You have to prove that you/a team member employed by you made the IP first. Additionally, you want to capture how you use it. Here are three steps you can take as you establish this evidence:
- Keep a dated log of first use and subsequent uses.
- Save source files and version history.
- For content published online, store timestamped snapshots of pages and posts.
- For items that have already been created, obtain the earliest version of the IP and track down any old contracts or employment records that show that your business created this media.
- Build a system for the creation of future IP that ensures the creation evidence is captured.
3) Assess business impact and prioritize protection
Not all filings are urgent, and you do not have unlimited resources. Focus your initial resources on what drives revenue and differentiation. This could include your company logo, trade secrets, and copyright registration of high-value or high-visibility assets.
This is another place where documenting systems is incredibly helpful. After you protect high-impact properties, you will likely have to follow the same process to protect medium to lower-impact properties, and having a process in place will make this simple and repeatable.
Additionally, building standard operating procedures around what future properties will be confidential, copyrightable, and fall within your licensing will help establish your IP as your business expands.
4) Implement access controls
As you document your standard operating procedures, you can define who has access to company assets and how they can utilize them. This includes:
- Role-based access: Ensure appropriate access is given to each role, and that access is documented and included in the onboarding process. This will also help you establish NDAs for any roles with a high degree of access.
- Folder hygiene: As you have established the vital trade secrets of your company, you can now place that information in a restricted space with access logs.
- Offboarding checklist: Offboarding is just as vital as onboarding. Setting up an offboarding checklist for each role will help your team automate a former employee’s removal from drives, tools, and email, and confirm the return or deletion of confidential materials.
6) Monitoring and response
You can now set up a brand monitoring system. This is often something that can be automated. If you choose to automate monitoring, ensure that a human is still in charge of checking in to your system and build a process that allows the responsible team member to address infringements, update inventory, and reprioritize filings.
At Business Success Consulting Group, we help companies document, optimize, and implement the processes that protect brands and accelerate growth. We are here to help you build the business systems you need to keep your company's IP protected and ensure your team understands priorities. If you are ready to systemize, let’s talk.
