Do you own your IP?

Making assumptions in business is dangerous.

I don't have any feel good or happy ending stories to share with you that come to mind when we're talking about business owners who just make assumptions and think it'll be right.

As you know, if you're a long time listener, when it comes to what can go wrong in business, hand on heart, there is nothing I haven't seen.

I spent the first 12 years of my career as a litigation and disputes lawyer, helping businesses when things went wrong.

Now, fast forward seven years into this business, I'm all about prevention is better than cure.

And so I'm supporting business owners to set themselves up so that they don't end up as somebody else's litigation client.

So as you can imagine, there is no room for assumptions in that scenario.

Like I say, I don't have any examples that I can draw from where the business owner made a whole heap of assumptions and it all turned out okay.

I don't have any.

One of the really common areas that I'm seeing lately with growing businesses is assumptions around the intellectual property ownership.

So if I said to you, who owns your intellectual property? You'd probably say, well, what do you mean intellectual property? And if it's something in my business, then I own it.

I imagine, like many business owners that I speak to, that would be the extent of the conversation unless I dig deeper.

So let me dig deeper.

Who owns your brand assets, your logo, your website copy? Who owns your internal documents? They are all really important assets of a business where intellectual property has a part to play.

In today's episode, I'm going to dive in and share with you why it's dangerous to assume that you own the IP when you don't own the IP.

And then I'm going to talk about AI in the context of IP.

I've got a lot to say on that.

First of all, as a business owner, IP is something that easily gets overlooked because growing businesses have lots of needs and often the business owner is wearing lots of hats and doing lots of things.

I get it.

But I want to draw you back and ask you to pause so we can just think through the IP and the IP ownership because sometimes by the time you get to thinking about this, it can be too late because either you want to bring somebody into the business by way of a shareholding or a partner where you want to sell the business or there is a dispute because you haven't been paying appropriate licensing fees over the use of somebody else's IP.

So I want to draw our attention to our business assets at the moment and have a think about the IP.

So if necessary, you can go away and make inquiries and check agreements and get clear on whether or not you own those assets.

And if you don't, we can talk about what to do then.