1990 – The Power of Intellectual Property for Sustainable Business Success with Think Beyond IP’s Erin Austin

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1:05With us right now, it's Aaron Austin. Aaron, you help consultants and coaches turn their expertise into new scalable revenue streams by creating, protecting, and licensing intellectual property. This is a topic I am a big fan of. You are also the founder of ThinkBeyondIP, and that's your website, ThinkBeyondIP.com. Aaron, thank you so much for joining us. Very excited. Thank you, Josh. Yeah. Well, give us an overview of your work, who you serve and what you do. Yeah. So I love working with experts, especially those with corporate clients, to help them decouple their income from their time. I mean, when we're experts, a lot of us start off by selling our time, but you get to a point where there's only one so much time you have, so much you can bill per hour.

1:56And if you want to continue to grow without working more, you have to figure out a way to sell something other than your time. And when we are experts, what assets do we have? Well, our assets is our intellect. And how do we make assets out of our intellect? Intellectual property. And so that is what I help people turn their expertise into intellectual property so that they have something to sell other than their time. That's fascinating. If I could, if I may, I'd love to maybe talk about generally what I do and see, you know, help me brainstorm on this idea. And I hope by proxy to our friend that's listening may hear some great ideas.

2:36So, you know, as an agency or consultancy, you know, we're really kind of focused on the revenue of a, you know, B2B coach, consultant, agency owner, service provider. And we really kind of help focus on driving a lot of introductions. And we do that through a platform that we've developed. But maybe we haven't been thinking, you know, in regards to, you know, obviously we've gotten copyright, you know, we've trademarked our brand and so forth. But I don't know that we've necessarily like patented our processes, so to speak. Can you maybe walk me through this? Or I don't know what questions we're typically asked in a conversation, but I am all ears right now.

3:16Yes, absolutely. Honestly, a lot of people have the same question. They understand like the trademarks. If they have a trademark for their name, they have their website and they understand that those things, the content that they're creating, that that's intellectual property. But they're not thinking about the intellectual property that they create all the time when they are providing services. Like if you're using your intellect, you're creating intellectual property. If you're creating a marketing plan for someone, that's intellectual property. If you're doing strategy for somebody, that's intellectual property.

3:46All these things are intellectual property. The question is whether or not you own it or the client owns it. So let's say I do marketing strategies and maybe I'm just doing 100 % custom work. You know, I talk to my client. They tell me they want something big, bold and exciting. I start from the drawing board and I create something brand new. I sign an agreement. They own 100 % of it. That was intellectual property that I created, but I sold 100 % of it to the client and I have nothing left other than my time, right? Or I can go, you know, I have been working with doctor's offices and I've noticed that they all have similar issues reaching patients.

4:32I'm making this up. And so, but I know from working with them that they all need, you know, this type of outreach. They need these types of assets. They need to show up in these places. And instead of just starting from scratch with every client, I've created a whole framework around how I'm going to help them, you know, reach people. And now I've created an asset that I can leverage over and over again. Either it can be me, I can take that asset and I plug in this client's information in it, but I have the leverage of starting from my framework. So I'm probably the same value. So presumably I'm charging as much or more, but look how much more efficient I am.

5:18That is a form of leverage to increase my profitability. Or maybe I don't want to do it myself anymore, but I put this whole process in place so I can hire somebody else who's obviously just the owner. And now I have leverage that way. Or maybe I just sell it to them and say like, here, here's my process and you implement it. These are all ways that I can use my expertise that doesn't involve me, you know, plodding along by the hour. Wow. Aaron, my mind is swimming right now. We'll need to continue this conversation offline.

6:00And again, I think you're, again, addressing intellectual property in a way that maybe not all of us are initially thinking about Do you mind maybe sharing a bit of your evolution, how you discovered, you know, just how valuable this is? And maybe an example or two of someone that you worked with and you were able to help them realize and think about their systems, processes, and services, and so forth as something that they can package up and actually sell the rights to. It's like that. So I'm just kind of previewing my own thinking on this, like how I would do that. But I just eager to kind of sit at your feet and learn more here.

6:39Yeah. Yeah. So my evolution is I was in house at big companies and all IP driven companies and IP was all day, every day. And so when I got to a point where I'm like, I would like to work with a different population. And this is population of experts. And I started talking to them about intellectual property. most of them are like, huh, what? And so there's been a lot of education to help them understand that their expertise is intellectual property. And so it was coming from big corporate to kind of really understanding how much value there is in IP and that we just have to learn how to control it.

7:18And so my experience with commercial contracts and with intellectual property kind of was packaged into helping this demographic to help grow their businesses. So that's how I got here. Yeah. So who have you worked with lately or in the past, or maybe there's a story of, I want to hear some more stories about this. Yeah. My clients are typically that learning and development expert. I will say not all of them, but this is the most common. And they have been providing one-on-one services to their clients. They have very happy corporate clients, mostly corporate clients, and they are doing all the delivery themselves.

8:01And they either, they, most of them, they want to bring on maybe a facilitator to help them deliver so they don't have to travel so much, even though now people can do it remotely, but still to be able to serve more than one client at a time, they want to bring on a facilitator. So what happens there? They know they want to do this, but they don't know how to protect their IP from the facilitator. They don't know, you know, how they protect their client relationships from the new person. They want to make sure that, you know, how do I get what I know? Because so much, you know, when we're experts, sometimes we just get up there and just perform, right?

8:40We don't always have a system in place, but we just use our genius, I'll call it, to get, we get in front of the client. We just know what it, you know, but when they want to bring on a facilitator or create something that they can license to a third party, that means they have to sit down and actually codify their process. They have to really think through it and create, you know, worksheets, workbooks, guides, you know, things that they can then use to train somebody else or to license to somebody else. So when I work with them first, we look at, you know, what is the thing that you use to create value for your clients?

9:20Whatever that thing is that you use, that is your intellectual property. And that's the thing that we want to capture into an IP asset. So one, do you own everything that you're using? When we work one-on-one with clients, we might use stuff that we don't own. We might use stuff that we got from a former employer, from the internet, from a certification program. You know, generally we don't get into too much trouble when we're one-on-one, but if we're starting to license it or have more people exposed to it, we want to make sure we own everything that we're using to create value for our clients.

9:55So that would be step one. Then we want to make sure we're protecting it. Once we know that we own everything we're using, we protect it. One, we register it in the copyright office to make sure we have the protections there. And then we make sure we're using contracts appropriately with our clients. You know, people worry about people stealing their work. But guess what? We give it away all the time when we sign clients agreements with our clients that give them all the rights that they can reuse it, repurpose it, use it with their subsidiaries, use it with new cohorts. If you don't limit that, they can do whatever they want to.

10:32I've seen people sign agreements with clients that said, we can repurpose it and resell what you've taught them. It's hard to make a business if you're giving away all of your work. Yeah. And and if you are bringing in, you know, other facilitators or contractors, making sure that let's say they create some a module for you, who owns it, making sure you own that they have relationships. They now have direct relationship with their clients. How do you make sure you control that relationship? Right. So these are the the contracts we put in place to protect your expertise. And then if, let's say you want to license it to your clients, instead of you delivering it, you're going to let them use it.

11:14Maybe they have an internal resource to lead these cohorts. You're licensing it to that client, then we have the agreements in place to govern that relationship. So that's kind of the life cycle of the typical person who'll come to me when they want to grow past just doing one-on-one custom work. Yeah. And you mentioned just this a little bit, but in terms of creating more value in your company and being able to exit, this is, again, just I think kind of like a next level e-myth evolution here that we're talking about, which is fascinating. Aaron, I want to talk about how you work with clients.

11:55And I wanted to mention as well that you have a newsletter on LinkedIn. It's called the Think Beyond IP Newsletter. And you recently launched your or published your 100th episode of the Hourly to Exit podcast. Can you tell us a little bit more about these resources? And to our friend that's listening, I think very easily you could just search in your podcast app right now for Hourly to Exit, and you'll find the podcast. Hit subscribe and keep listening. Yeah, yeah. The Hourly to Exit podcast is about the journey from what I call the unsustainable hourly business model to one that is scalable, that has some independence from the owner, and that is more profitable and hopefully someday building a business that you can sell.

12:47And so that is the hourly to exit journey I talk about. And that's, you know, not only the legal foundations that are required to do that, but also the things, you know, I have guests on that will talk about, you know, branding and things like that and marketing and having a niche or specialization, things that help you become unique and stand out in the marketplace. And so that we can help, you know, increase the value of our business. So that is, that's been a really fun one for me. Yeah. What do you talk about? And tell me more about the podcast. And, you know, let's say someone were to, you know, over the next handful of weeks, they were to listen to like 20, 30 episodes.

13:26What kind of impact do you imagine that that would have on them? Well, I really consider myself an educator, you know, so I have a number of series. I have a series on there about different types of licensing programs, you know, that you don't have to have this huge audience. So whether it's licensing directly to a client, licensing to an organization, or doing a certification program. I have a series about copyright infringement, like how to protect against what to do if somebody infringes your copyright. And a different series about how not to be a copyright infringer. I have a series about what the dangers signs in a client agreement, like you need to be aware of these things.

14:11And if you're not aware of them, you can get in trouble. And some things about, you know, the defaults under copyright law aren't what we think they are. We think they might be intuitive, but they aren't. And much more recently, it's been AI, AI, AI. Oh, yeah. And look, I'll just chime in here. And I'm sorry to intercede so abruptly. But I have heard this. What is AI giving you? AI is only taking available content, repackaging and repurposing for you. So there is absolute risk to taking something. In fact, I was just talking with someone who, like ChatGPT, gave them basically the structure of a business plan.

14:58And it turns out it was directly lifted from one of their competitors. And the competitor found out about it. And it was quite embarrassing. Thankfully, they had a decent relationship. And they were able to tweak that. But just, yes, be absolutely careful about this. I'm so sorry, Aaron. You're the expert on this. I just want to add emphasis to what you're saying. Yes, you got to be real careful with what AI is spitting out to you. Yes, absolutely. It is a copyright issue, both on the possibility of being an infringer, like an example that you gave that spits out something that somebody else is, somebody else's.

15:36And the other issue is that you don't own whatever comes out of it. So if you're, let's say you use it to write a book, you know, which you could do, but you can't own that because you can't, like, there is no copyright protection in what is spit out of generative AI. In order to have copyright protection, it has to be created by a human. And at this time, AI is not considered a human. And so anything that gets spit out of that is not eligible for copyright protection. It's something that is actually generative and not stealing somebody else's stuff. But so if you have, you're creating materials that you actually want to have exclusive rights to, don't rely on AI for that.

16:16Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Aaron, what does engaging with you look like? How do you work with your clients? Like if someone's saying, okay, can I hire Aaron? And if so, what does that typically look like? Yeah. I work with everyone on a fixed fee basis based on the, what their needs are. So let's say someone needs, for example, that I used of the leadership development person who wanted to bring in facilitators. And I would, you know, have a conversation with them and quote them for an entire package to audit their works, making sure they're registered, getting any clearances, getting any agreements in place.

16:53And also, you know, however, they're going to work with clients, whatever the processes are going to sell it, having those agreements in place as well. So the whole, whole suite of getting from where they are to where they want to be. Your website is thinkbeyondip.com. Erin, when somebody goes to your website, what would you recommend they do? Yeah, there is a free resource that is the audit, protect, and leverage framework. And that explains the step-by-step process to go from making sure you own what you think you own, that you're protecting what you do own, and that you are able to leverage it.

17:32So I would love for everyone to go there and download that for free. And do you know what they click on or how they find that? That is at the bottom. It's in the footer. Got it. Yes. Awesome. Very great. Okay. Think Beyond IP. Erin Austin, again, you're the founder. Thank you so much for joining us. It's been a great conversation. We're going to talk. Awesome. Thank you so much.

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