Intellectual Property: Your Secret Weapon

Are you an entrepreneur struggling to protect your most valuable business asset—your intellectual property? Join Jim James as he delves into the critical world of IP protection with Jeff Holman, founder of Intellectual Strategies, revealing how startups can safeguard their innovations, brands, and creative works.

Discover why up to 90% of a business's value lies in intangible assets and learn about the four key types of intellectual property: patents, trademarks, copyrights, and trade secrets. Jeff explains how entrepreneurs can strategically protect their brands, avoid costly legal pitfalls, and create a robust IP strategy aligned with their business goals.

This episode is a must-listen for founders seeking to understand how to defend their innovations, attract investors, and build long-term value through strategic intellectual property management.

Recommended Book: "Nail It and Scale It" by Ryan Furlong and Nathan Furr

Everyday AI: Your daily guide to grown with Generative AI
Can't keep up with AI? We've got you. Everyday AI helps you keep up and get ahead.

Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

Graphic design toolbox - Visme
Visme is an online form builder specifically built to optimize for better conversions.

Vidyard - Use Video In Your Emails
Vidyard is the easiest way to record and send videos that build personal connections.

AI Writer - Content writing made easier
Generate Accurate, Relevant & Quality Content in 2 Minutes

Peppertype - Virtual Content Assistant
Generate better content copies in seconds with the power of Artificial Intelligence.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Chapters

• 24:55 [Ad] Everyday AI: Your daily guide to grown with Generative AI
• 25:42 (Cont.) Intellectual Property: Your Secret Weapon

Transcript

Jim James (00:01)
Have you got your intellectual property assets protected? That may be something on your mind. It may not be on your mind, but it should be because when you're building a business and you're building a brand, that is gonna be part of the value of the company. And if you build a good one, someone may try and come and take it from you. But also if you build a great one, it's gonna be part of the value that you sell to the next owners. So it's a really good conversation that we're gonna have today with my guest.

We're going all the way to Salt Lake City in Utah to talk to Jeff Holman, who is the founder and general counsel. He has a firm called Intellectual Strategies. He's run it for over 20 years, but he's been inside the companies as well as general counsel. But he's also a great entrepreneur. Jeff, welcome to the show.

Jeff Holman (00:52)
Thank you so much. I'm excited to be here. I've listened to so many of your episodes. It's great to talk with you.

Jim James (00:56)
Well, that's very, very kind of you to have listened to the show and also agreeing to come on because I know as a legal counsel, your time really is so valuable. Jeff, you run a firm that helps entrepreneurs and larger companies, SaaS companies, e-commerce, tech companies, to protect the value in what they create with legal means. Can you explain to us that are not in

in this area, the basic principles behind intellectual property. What do we need to start with when we have our business?

Jeff Holman (01:38)
Yeah, for sure, for sure. So let me start by saying, you mentioned up front the value of IP. So there are some statistics out there. I'll just, I'll reference them very roughly. That somewhere between 85 and 90% of the value of a lot of businesses these days is tied up in their intellectual property. It's intangible assets that are driving a lot of that value. That's particularly true in economies where they're knowledge-based economies, right? So you get a lot of

knowledge-based economies with these idea-based companies. And statistically, 85 to 90% of the value of that company might be tied up in their intangible assets. Intangibles, of course, are the non-physical things. Intellectual property is part of those intangible assets. So a huge, huge value driver for companies, although maybe not necessarily in the way that people think they are.

Jim James (02:34)
That's interesting. I had no idea that there was that much. When you say 85%, are you talking about the brand or you're talking about something else? Because normally we associate value that's intangible with being a brand, but Jeff, you're saying there's IP that's of value in the business that people may not be protecting.

Jeff Holman (02:55)
Yeah, yeah, that study is probably, I recall correctly, that study is probably tied most directly to like large corporate enterprises. So just to get that framework out there. Now, I don't think it's untrue for smaller businesses, because if you look at how these entrepreneurial businesses pop up these days, they raise $2 million off of an idea sometimes, right? That idea

is a version of an intangible asset, right? Somebody has an idea, somebody else says, I really like that idea. I can't touch it. I can't see it. I can't hold it, but I like it. And I think you can do it. And so here's $2 Million. So at the early stage of a business, you could argue 100% of the value of the business is often tied up in the intangible assets of that business. And intellectual property is just some really specific, often government

sanctioned and government-defined versions of intangible assets. So we can go through the list.

Jim James (04:02)
Yeah, let's do that, Jeff, because you're breaking this down in a way that I certainly haven't heard before. And I'm sure that my fellow UnNoticed Entrepreneurs really haven't had access to this kind of counsel, because one of the challenges of being an entrepreneur is legal counsel is often out of, it's off the budget at an early stage. So please do tell us the different types and then we can look at how we can start to protect our IP

even before we've got lot of turnover.

Jeff Holman (04:34)
Yeah, yep, no, and you're absolutely right of people are like, how do I make sales? How do I create a product? But they're not necessarily looking at how do I protect the value that's going to come from all of that? Or how do I make sure that I have the freedom to do the things that I want to do without infringing on somebody else's ideas or protected property? So there's really four types of intellectual property, right? And I'm going to list off five things, because I think there's one more thing to add to that. But first off, a lot of people think of

inventions. I created this new product, this new design, this new thing, and it works differently. It has all these benefits. It might be a product. It might be a tool. I created a new thing. We protect new things, structures, functions. We protect those with patents. Patents are essentially a government monopoly. They say, hey, if you invent something and you tell everybody about it, we're going to let you protect that if you qualify for a period of

say 20 years, it can vary a little bit, but 20 years of exclusive protection, you can stop other people from making and using and selling the same convention. So that's the patent side of things. Then we have your brand, you come up with a brand and we know brands, brands can drive the enterprise value of any company. Your brand represents the reputation you have, your brand represents perhaps the client base you have. It's how people find you, they look up.

They say, want to look for a really cool podcast. And I heard about this one called The UnNoticed Entrepreneur. That's your brand. And it's driving people to your business. So your brand isn't protected by patents. Your brand is protected by trademarks. Trademarks being the things that you use to identify your business to consumers. It could be a name. It could be a logo. It could be a tagline. In some instances, it's

colors or graphics or even sounds. There are ways to protect all sorts of identifiers of the brand of your business. So aside from those two, you have copyrights. We hear a lot about copyrights and copyrights might be the biggest, I don't know, I have never researched this, but it might be the biggest category of intellectual property that's out there. It also probably is in a lot of instances, a lot less valuable than your trademarks and your patents because

it's not leveraged as much, I guess. You see every website copyright, 2024, or whatever. Copyrights protect unique works of authorship. So when you create a creative work, we'll call it something, anything creative, like this podcast, the way that you're creating it and you produce it and you release it, you edit it, all of that is your creativity. And so you could copyright this. Now you can also copyright

you know, creative images, can copyright statues and paintings and musical works and plays and all sorts of creative things. So, and sometimes you can see that you have creative things that you can protect with a copyright and then you turn around, you use that creative graphic, for example, as your logo, well, you can also protect that logo with trademarks. So you might be able to double up on protection or create some of these IP layers, depending on, you know,

if you created it and if you decided to use it as your branding, then you are now eligible to protect that with two different types of intellectual property. So we've got patents, we've got trademarks, we've got copyrights, and then trade secrets are really the fourth bucket. Trade secrets are those things that bring value to your company that you keep secret, you put processes in place so that nobody else has access to it.

I don't typically go too deep into trade secrets because everybody thinks they have trade secrets, but very few people do what it takes to actually create the status necessary to call it a trade secret and to protect it from other people. It's an interesting place to be. There's a lot of reasons people should be doing more with it than they do, but just for today's purposes, that is its own category. Stuff you keep secret, whereas everything else, you have to disclose your invention to get

protection. You have to use your brand in commerce in order to get protection under trademarks. You have to publish your creative work to get copyright protection. Your secrets, you keep them secret. So those are the four. And then that fifth thing that I mentioned is really all of the contracts, the legal rights that you enter into with other people around those types of intellectual property, whether you're selling or licensing or whatever it might be, transferring the rights for some reason.

Those contracts are really the scaffolding that we use to support the intellectual property that we have. So I hope that's a good overview of what types of intellectual property exist.

Jim James (09:32)
It is, Jeff. And there are different structures, as you say, different scaffolding and different structures for different kinds of assets, right? Whether it's a workflow or a brand or, example, like Ed Sheeran's music, you know, the copyright where he was sued, that's a fairly famous recent case, isn't it? Where creators were suing each other for infringement. We could talk about how to protect oneself from people that come after you for infringement

Jeff Holman (09:51)
Yes.

Jim James (10:01)
a little bit later, Jeff, but first of all, just take us through what would one need to do, for example, like The UnNoticed Entrepreneur, and thank you for the kind reference. If I was to want to trademark or should I trademark it? But what decisions should I be taking when I'm looking at a brand like the one that I've got? When do I need to think of it and at what time does it become

sufficiently of value to invest the time and money in protecting it.

Jeff Holman (10:35)
Yeah, great questions because these are expensive things to protect. You could spend $20,000 or $50,000 getting a patent. You could spend $3,000 or $8,000 or $12,000 getting a trademark, perhaps, depending on what you're doing. They're not cheap. And so a lot of small businesses don't just have money sitting somewhere saying, this is allocated to spend on a bunch of legal stuff that I don't know what I'm going to do with it. So I don't want to f***ing

If we were talking in a client setting right now, I would flip that question around and I would say, well, what is your objective with your business? Because a lot of times, whether or not the expense is worth it depends on where somebody is going with their business. Outside of that context, I, you know, just in a more abstract setting, I would say trademarks on your brand anytime you're building a brand and every company out there is building some sort of brand, B2B, B2C, whatever it might be.

I think trademark protection is extremely smart because you are building a brand and whether or not you're going to monetize that someday, that's up to you. But you're building a brand and trademarks simply strengthen your brand. They kind of do two things, one of them directly and one indirectly. They allow you to stop somebody else from writing your cocktails or from copying what you're doing, right? Which every successful business I know,

is followed by copiers, right? They just copycats. There are some people that's how they operate. And so every successful business gets copycats. Some people think that's a status symbol, right? I've gotten so good. I now have people copying me. And so they allow you to stop people from copying you if you want to put the effort into stopping them. The other thing that it does in a less direct way when you go get trademark protection is you start to do an analysis of what is out there

and you say to yourself, okay, in order for me to get protection, I have to be unique. If I'm not unique, they're not going to give me a trademark. Well, when you start asking, looking at whether or not you're unique, you kind of dive into the world of it. By chance, am I creating a brand that somebody else will think is riding their coattails? Because if I'm doing that, if I'm following too closely to another brand, they might be able to shut my whole business down. And then what have I done with all the investment I've made in my brand?

So you really want to look at both sides of that situation, not just the one.

Jim James (13:01)
Jeff, I think that's a really, really interesting point that if you go through the process of filing, it's actually a very good sanity check against the proposition of your own business. And also that if you grow your business to a certain level, maybe someone from another state, for example, another country could come after you for infringement and you didn't even see that coming, right?

That is absolutely worth thinking about. And tell us when you file for, let's say a patent or a trademark, and I'm assuming there are similar structures for European filings and for American filings. We talked later about how to file across jurisdictions. But when you do file, do you want to just share with us about different categories? Because, for example, when I was importing sports cars to China,

I went to file the company name and there was another company, a British company with the same name, but in a different category. You know, one was in heavy engineering, one was in automotive. How does that work, Jeff? Because there are so many different types of products, aren't there? Do you have to file a trademark for all categories? How does that protection work?

Jeff Holman (14:27)
Okay, that's a great question. Patent and trademark protection, has a lot of similarities. They've got a few distinctions, but a lot of similarities. And the question you're asking about, they're very similar. In the patent world, you have an invention and there's an international classification system where the examiners will say, okay, your patent falls into this category, this type of invention. And then they'll look really closely at other inventions in that same category

to see if yours is too close to something that already exists. Because if it is, there's no need to give you protection for inventing something that's already been invented, right? The same thing happens in trademarks. You have classifications. Now, trademarks typically have classes of goods. And we say goods for whatever reason. Goods are products. In the US, products seems to make more sense. That's more of casual term, I guess. But goods, and then you have classifications for services.

And so when you file your trademark, you're going to file and say, want to protect, like I would do, would say, OK, I already have a law firm, and I want to protect my name, intellectual strategies, in the category of services that includes law firms. I also might want to file it separately in a broader category for business consulting or something like that. And if I, for whatever reason, wanted to protect apparel,

that I might sell in the future under the brand intellectual strategies, which I haven't seen any to do that yet. Then I would pick the classification, the goods classification for apparel. And so you do select. And what that does is it directs the examiners who are doing the examination to look more closely at those categories to see if somebody else already has rights in there. Now, what they're looking for in the trademark world

Jim James (15:57)
Yeah.

Jeff Holman (16:20)
is to see if your brand might cause consumer confusion with another existing brand. Meaning a consumer sees what you're doing and they say, I've seen that before. And they think of a different company that does something similar perhaps, right? That would be consumer confusion. So they're going to look and see, that's the real test. their consumer confusion, is your brand

too closely related to another brand in the same class or the same types of products or services. So that's how that works there. So you really select. You wouldn't go in and just say, want to protect it for everything. Because for one, most countries make you pay a fee for every class. And if you're not doing it in those classes, you're not going to pay the fee. And then two, some countries require that before they actually grant you a trademark, you have to show that in the class,

that you've selected and for the specific services or the specific products that you've listed, you have to show that you're actually using it with those things before they'll give it to you. And if you're not, they'll make you wait or they'll make you delete that out of your application.

Jim James (17:32)
So couple of interesting points there, Jeff. One is that you do actually have to be operational before you file. Otherwise people would be just going ahead and filing speculatively, wouldn't they, in different areas and that would stop innovation. So that is a bit of a safeguard. You don't have to worry about someone else who just filed ahead of you, even though they haven't done that. Because that used to happen, for example, in China, people would file domain names

and the Chinese equivalent of a foreign brand. Happened to Lamborghini, actually. Lamborghini had to pay someone a lot of money in China to buy Lamborghini, the Chinese name. But that can't happen in America or Europe, presumably. They can't.

Jeff Holman (18:20)
Well, it actually can in a sense, There's a limited situation where if you're coming in, because as you mentioned, a lot of this stuff is speculative. Before you launch your business, you buy the domain name. With the expectation, the domain is going to be valuable someday for the business, right? You can do something similar with your trademarks, and you always do something similar with your patents. You have to file a patent application on your invention before the public knows about it,

haven't sold it, you haven't launched it, you haven't even told anybody about it typically. And so you're, but you're putting time and effort into protecting it before you even seen if there's a market for it or before, sometimes before you've seen if you can actually technically make the device. In the trademark world, it's, you can do something similar where you file what's called in the U.S. It's called an intent to use application. It says, I have a bona fide intent to use this mark or this

you know, graphic or whatever it is, to use this as part of my branding for these types of services. And so you're filing it ahead of time and they will put you in the queue. They'll let you sit there for a time. You know, they will eventually make you get out of the queue if you haven't actually used it. So there's an intent to use filing, but there's an actual use requirement in a lot of countries like the United States. And so,

you can get in, but you can't sit there forever and protect it and do what some people might call submarineing. You file something, you go underwater, you wait until a brand launches, and then you're like, aha, I have this. They've done a lot to get rid of that type of behavior around the world. And you make it happen. It has its own issues.

Jim James (20:04)
Yeah, because I guess that's the equivalent of domain squatting, where people would buy a domain without really any intent to use it and just stymie the real owners. So Jeff Holman, that's really useful. This intent to file, presumably that's the affordable first step that a company should take and that your firm, Intellectual Strategies,

You offer what you call SALT, right? Strategic Advisory Legal Team Services. So is sort of engaging a company like yours.

The solution then for entrepreneurs, you're getting fractional legal support because the last person that a startup can afford is legal counsel. And yet from what you're saying, it's an essential investment for the future of the business.

Jeff Holman (21:09)
Yeah, it's really a catch-22 for a lot of people because we're expensive. We do charge a lot of money. Our team doesn't charge $2,000 an hour like some firms can do with their clients, but we're still expensive to be on a team. So you mentioned a few things that we do that are a little bit different. I think the one I would highlight out of those is our fractional approach. You hear about fractional CFOs and fractional CMOs coming in on a part-time basis to help with the financials or the marketing of company.

We do something very similar in the legal field that's often referred to as outside general counsel, where maybe your normal attorney will dedicate some time to you each week or each month to strategize on your business and help manage all of your legal things. The thing that we do that's different than that is we take that concept of one attorney being your fractional attorney, and we say we have a fractional legal team. So we take our whole team, we cover all the areas that a startup needs,

you know, kind of from idea to the time when they outgrow us, perhaps, and will be your in-house fully staffed legal team for all the things that you need to get done from the time that you have an idea to the time that you outgrow us. And so our team is essentially the legal team for the startup. That's something that I've been preaching to other law firms for five years now, you should be doing this. Like this is what

startups really need. It needs someone who can come in when they're small, offer a breadth of services, because you don't just need one type of legal service. You have an employment issue. You need a patent. You have contracts. You raise some money. You need a breadth, but you don't need all of them all the time. And you don't need one person with one area of expertise only. And so we come in and just, on that fractional basis, grow with your company.

Jim James (23:03)
Yeah, Jeff, that's

Jeff Holman (23:04)
It's an awesome way to practice. I really enjoy it. I do think it's the best way to service clients who are growing in a really dynamic, chaotic way.

Jim James (23:13)
And that's a great solution as well, Jeff, because when you're growing a company, you need a small amount of senior counsel and you need maybe a lot of junior counsel, but you can't hire a full-time senior counsel and junior counsel doesn't have the experience to add value at the top. So this idea of a blended team, your salt, as you call it.

Jeff Holman (23:26)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, that's a great way to put it. Yeah, blended team, I like that phrase

Jim James (23:41)
Okay, it's yours. I don't charge by the hour. Can I copyright that, Jeff? A blended team. No, no, I'm going to file for it with one of those presumptive filings, Jeff. I'm going to make it a global filing. Now, let us just talk. You're in America, Salt Lake City. I'm here in the UK. Tell us a little bit about the internationalization of protection. How do we protect our blended team? I've made a new copyright. How do I protect that

Jeff Holman (23:46)
was gonna say, you haven't trademarked that yet, have you?

Jim James (24:10)
worldwide because let's face it now with e-commerce, even my own podcast is listened to in about 140 countries, for example, about 1,400 cities. You know, and I did once actually have my PR firm, East West Public Relations in Singapore, a person said, I see you've opened in Indonesia. And I like, I hadn't realized I had opened in Indonesia. And it turned out someone had actually taken the entire branding

and built a website and everything in Indonesia, even owned the domain name dot iron for it. So how do you protect yourself internationally, even if you're a small firm?

Jeff Holman (24:56)
Well, first off, congratulations, because we mentioned before copycats are a metric of success, and it sounds like you've achieved some success to get copycats. The point that this highlights is with intellectual property, at the basic level, everything is country by country, jurisdiction by jurisdiction. So if I get protection for a patent in the United States, doesn't necessarily give me any protection outside of the United States.

Jim James (25:03)
Yeah

Jeff Holman (25:25)
You really have to pick and choose the jurisdictions where you're going to get protection. And a lot of people will focus on where do I practice? Where are my customers? Where do I manufacture? Where are my distribution channels? Where are my sales channels? Things like that, right? Where are the critical, where's the largest market? A lot of people, if it's e-commerce, we do a lot of e-commerce companies and e-commerce companies just come and they're like, well, the US is my market. So I'm going to start there. And then I might do something in China or somewhere else where I'm manufacturing prep.

So, but it's jurisdiction by jurisdiction, all IP is that way. Now that being said, a lot of the countries, or I learned that outside of the US, a lot of them called states instead of countries, a lot of the countries out there, are parts of, they've joined these treaties or these agreements, and there's a lot of what we call harmonization happening across international borders

people will say, here's how we run our patent program in the United States. Here's how we run it in Europe, European Union or individual countries. And they've worked really hard over the last, I don't know, 30, 40, 50 years to really come together on and make the major points across each of these programs harmonize with one another. There's still some outliers, right? In the United States, we have like this provisional patent application process that doesn't exist in a lot of other places

for the most part, it's all organized so that you you know what to expect when you go across state lines. And you can actually use your filings oftentimes in your home country or your home state. And you can use that as a launching point. If you do follow the rules, you do it within a certain timeframe, you file the right things, you can tie your applications, for example, trademark application

in another country back to your trademark application in your home country. And so you start to tie these together as a family, international family, and you can grow it that way.

Jim James (27:34)
So that's good. you, well, as you expand, you'd have more revenue. So you need to protect it globally. What about a duration, Jeff? If I trademark my blended team, blended salt team, is that something I own forever? Or is that something that you can pony up in three years time and say, haha, Jim, it's expired?

Jeff Holman (27:58)
Every type of IP is different. So in the trademark example that you're using, this is why trademarks are so awesome, I think, right? In most places, you go get a trademark, you use that trademark for your branding, you continue to use that over time, and you can pretty much keep that trademark protection, the federal, in our case, the US federal registration and all the great protections that come along with it, you can keep it forever. There's no expiration to it whatsoever for trademarks.

Copyrights, they're good for like the life of the author plus 70 years or a little bit different if it's a company that's considered the author. There was this whole thing about Mickey Mouse and every time the original, what was his name? Something Willie, Steamboat Willie. Every time Steamboat Willie's copyright registration was about to expire, there was this legislative process to extend the life of copyrights longer.

That's stopped and so there's still an end to that. But copyrights don't last forever, but they last essentially the life of the person that created it, plus a long time so that a couple of generations could benefit from it. Patents, on the other hand, if it's a utility patent on a new invention, it's 20 years. If it's a design patent, it's 15 years. So there are different lengths of time. And out of those, the most universal for every business and the longest protection is trademarks

which is why I'm such a big advocate of companies from the get go establishing that right for themselves

Jim James (29:33)
and Jeff, although you're in Salt Lake City, it so you can serve people with advice from wherever they are, certainly, guess, jurisdiction in America, right? So that's wonderful. You've given us an amazing amount of insight in a short amount of time, but I still wouldn't be an expert. I'd still need to come to you for more guidance. Just one sort of last question then. Let's just talk about the value of IP on the balance sheet

because we opened up with that, but we haven't really touched on that. Can you just share, know, how would someone monetize that IP, that trademark? How do you then declare that if you're raising money, for example, if you're looking to sell shares, is there some guidance you can give on how you attribute a value to it?

Jeff Holman (30:28)
Yeah, I think you've asked a few questions in there and I want to be not too technical. I'm thinking my MBA classes studying, you know, managerial accounting and an actual. We're not doing that right? So so so really the different types of companies at different stages monetize differently. They extract value differently. Early stage companies often use IP to go raise funds, right? They might use IP to kind of.

Jim James (30:37)
okay, yes, we don't have that much time. I mean, people have to come to you for a full answer but

Jeff Holman (30:57)
create this marketing shield where they say, hey, we own all this stuff and you shouldn't come and infringe us and try to really get a stronghold in the market of the first mover perhaps. Larger companies are building these multi-layered walls of IP and a lot of times they're not doing it to go out and assert against other people. What they're doing is they're doing it as defensive positioning and if someone does come and attack them, they say, well, that's interesting that you think that we're infringing your IP because we happen to have

this stack that you are infringing on us, right? And so a lot of times it's used in a defensive manner. As far as book value and good value of goodwill, that's probably a more technical accounting question there. But different companies certainly use it different ways. The one that I haven't mentioned that a lot of companies would love to use it, the way they'd love to use it, to essentially license it out. And so you take a franchise, for example, and the value of a franchise business is in large part

based on its intellectual property, both its trademarks and its standard operating procedures and stuff like that. So licensing is a whole other world and it's an awesome one if you can get into it with your invention or your brand.

Jim James (32:09)
Yeah, Jeff. So thank you for taking it. I understand you've got a huge body of knowledge there and you've simplified that for me. I appreciate it. But if you want to get hold of you, we're going to share your details in just a moment though because the whole idea of being able to license your IP to generate revenue from something you've already created is another podcast in itself, I think. let us in the final couple of moments, let me just ask you for that one tip

that one piece of advice, Jeff Holman, for an entrepreneur when it comes to IP.

Jeff Holman (32:48)
So this is tough because I have so many things that go through my mind and they're very fact specific as we would say in the legal field. But I do think that companies should recognize that your intellectual property needs to be aligned with your business. you have a business strategy and you have an IP strategy that is doing something different than your business strategy, you can't see how the one supports the other, then you need to rethink what you're doing. You don't really have an IP strategy. You have an IP

plan that probably is wasting time and resources and money in your business. IP is really just one slice of overall business strategy and the one needs to support the other. Otherwise, it's not a good use of resources, which is probably the worst thing you can do, especially when you're a startup or small business trying to grow. That's what I would say is a general takeaway from this.

Jim James (33:45)
Jeff, I think it's a great takeaway that we need to consider the IP dimension to our business along with the commercial and every other aspect of the business operational and marketing. Jeff Holman, finally a book or a podcast for those of you that can't see behind Jeff, he has not one but two shelves stacked with books. So I'm gonna try and pin him down to give us one. He's plainly a scholarly man. Jeff, one book

that you would recommend.

Jeff Holman (34:17)
Yeah, I'm going to go. I've got a couple on my desk here that you can't see that I'm reading at the moment. I kind of read in in in sections, I guess. But the one that I'm going to mention is one that it's a kind of tried and true tested book called Nail It and Scale It. And I bring that up because I talked to another person just yesterday who was really fascinated with it. I think it's a very simple concept in your business. You really need to. And you talk about this when you talk about Crossing the Chasm, Jeffrey Moore's book. You really need to nail that

business model before you try to scale it. And since I work with a ton of startups, I think that's a very foundational issue. Nail it and scale it. Doing it any other way often leads to a lot of spent money and a flame out.

Jim James (35:04)
Jeff, okay, nail it and scale it. We'll find out the author of that book. And if we want to find out more about you, Jeff, where can they come?

Jeff Holman (35:13)
I'm very active on LinkedIn. So you're welcome to reach out to me on LinkedIn anytime. If you look up Jeff Holman, you'll see my tagline says something about building fractional legal teams. You'll know that's me. And then we also love to connect with startups. I love hearing about the chaos that's happening in startup land with people. And so we'll do a free strategy call with any prospective clients that call in. We'll spend 30 minutes, talk about what you're doing, talk about the business milestones you're working on, the legal things that go with those.

So anybody who wants to is welcome to schedule a free strategy call with me just from our website intellectualstrategies.com.

Jim James (35:50)
Jeff, you said the name of the website before I got a chance to. So thank you so much for joining me and giving me, well, half an hour for a legal counsel like yourself is invaluable in more ways than once. So thank you for sharing your time and energy with me today.

Jeff Holman (36:07)
It's been my pleasure Jim.

Jim James (36:09)
So Jeff talked about nail it and scale it. Today we've nailed a small amount of IP, but if you want to scale the conversation, I suggest you go to intellectualstrategies.com and book yourself a proper time with Jeff or find him on LinkedIn. So that is a deep dive, as deep as we've ever done about IP on this show. And it's longer than the normal show, but it's a very, very deep and important topic. And what

really deserves this much time. So thank you to Jeff for giving us the benefit of his over 20 years experience. And thank you to you for listening to this episode of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur. And if you've enjoyed it, do please review it and share it with a fellow UnNoticed Entrepreneur because we don't want anyone to go unnoticed. Until we meet again, I just encourage you to keep on communicating.