What You Should Be Working on Now
by
Michael Mort on Apr. 18, 2016
Business Business Organization Intellectual Property Copyright Intellectual Property Trademark
Summary: Entrepreneurs often hear they need to work ON their business, not merely IN it. This five part series: What You Should Be Working On Now provides insight and a framework making it easier to focus yourself and your people on your business while performing the myriad tasks and projects present.
Every entrepreneur wants to own a business that is valuable, that has the potential to attract investors or to be sold. But the efforts required to achieve this goal are often put on the back-burner while you are working the projects that generate revenue. The problem is, few entrepreneurs have learned what they need to be working on that will create business value, so working on the urgent problems takes up 100% of their time. There literally seems to be no time to grow the value of your business.
It is not difficult to structure the projects you and your people work at every day so that everyone is working at least part of the time on building business value. You just need to know what the focus should be at all times. This five part series, "What You Should Be Working on Now," gives you a legal and business framework--a mindset if you will--that will guide your everyday thinking, and show you how to guide your employees’ thinking, so that everything you work on will help you increase business value. You really can propel your business further than you imagined.
Part 1 of the series provides a more in-depth introduction to this idea of focusing on creating business value in your company, and gives some insight on the framework for doing that.
Every business starts with an idea; however, if you don't protect your ideas you may find those ideas being developed by others. Part 2 of this article introduces the value of trade secrets and the legal steps you need to take as an entrepreneur to keep your ideas safe.
When your idea materializes and you are ready to start selling it as a product or service, you will start to create a name, for the products and for the business. The next step is to protect those names with a registered trademark. Part 3 of the series explains what trademark is, and why you should value having one. (Hint: both customers and investors value your brand, so you should too).
As you develop new content and other resources to promote your business, you may not even realize you are creating assets that add tremendous value for your business: Copyrighted materials. Part 4 in the series provides insight on the steps you can take to keep the creativity in your office flowing and managing the process of creating content to add value to your company.
As you grow value in your company and especially if an exit strategy is in mind, one of of the more important types of property to consider is a patent. Part 5 of the series offers insight on how to develop products your company can obtain a mini-monopoly on which will add tremendous value to your company.
If you haven't caught on, this series is 100% about securing the intellectual property of your company, which is what you should ultimately always be working on right now. For most businesses in the modern economy, the value of the business is tied up in its intellectual property. By having a framework to develop that property, you and your people will be adding to your business’s value with every project you work on. Before you know it you will be begin to see the true value of your business and realize what true wealth is about.
Argent Place Law, PLLC serves entrepreneurs throughout the life of their organizations in matters of business and contract law, intellectual property law, and succession planning, including estate planning with wills and trusts.
Argent Place, the silver lining where ideas are transformed into wealth.