Transcript
Speaker: There is more than enough room. Hold on, Kimmy. Lauren wouldn't believe that.
Speaker: Hello, hello, and welcome back to another episode of Where's Your Humanity. I'm your host, Gail Fraser, and I am so excited to be joined by our guest today, Brayden Drake. Brayden is a California licensed attorney and tax professional. He works with online creative small business owners through his law firm, Not Average Law, and with wedding pros through The Aisle Advisory. He's He and his team provide support through one-on-one services, memberships, signature programs, the Contract Club, and Unfuck Your Biz. Welcome, Brayden. Thanks for being here. Gail. Thanks for having me. We're all excited to chit-chat about all the stuff.
Speaker: Same. Tell us a little bit about the Brayden behind the scenes. Who's Brayden? Yeah, i feel like I feel like nowadays I don't have a whole lot going on. I'm not all that exciting. My husband and i we, um so we just got married in April, which has been very fun. bra Thank you. I'm on husband number two. So it's been a little bit confusing for people that have been following me for a few years because like the divorce to dating, the like remarried pipeline like went pretty fast this time around. I met a military man and they do not joke around when it comes to that kind of stuff.
Speaker: um So that's what I have going on personally. Outside of my business, I train for CrossFit like three hours a day. I do CrossFit competitions and restarted playing Roller Coaster Tycoon on my iPad. incredible And we launch a lot of drag race and that's like basically it. That's those those are my hobbies right now.
Speaker: I love that. I have a friend who's really into Roller Coaster Tycoon and Sims and just have a soft spot in my heart for people who like those throwback 2000s games. Yeah. i So if any of you need, if any of you allow, like have children and allow your children to have iPads, um a Roller Coaster, i I feel like I am an evangelical for Roller Coaster Tycoon. The app is $4.99.
Speaker: I have probably played it for over 500 hours and it doesn't require Wi-Fi, which is really great for like when you're on road trips and stuff and you don't want to have to deal with like hotspots and all those kind of things. And I'm determined that someday I'm going to like craft an online curriculum teaching like microeconomics to children and teenagers Rollercoaster Tycoon because think it's such a good lesson and like running advertising campaigns, like a hiring staff, understanding profit margin. There's like so much that you could do with it. I think it'd be so fun. That's so genius. And I think that you should. You would have that market cornered. Yeah, I know. But it's like, it's the whole like, we get business ideas and we want to like create the business. But do we actually want to market the business and like get the client? and Do we actually want to run the business? Right. That's like the hard part, right? But I'm like, I don't Maybe I'll be a substitute teacher someday. and
Speaker: then the principal is going be like, why are you guys playing rollercoaster tycoon class? I'm like, just if there's a long game. Okay. Trust me. Exactly. i love that so much. um If you ever do that, I'll be your number one supporter. Okay, great. Thanks. I feel like you asked me to talk about my personal life and I just really went off the deep end, but here we are.
Speaker: A little side tangent never hurt anyone. I have ADHD, so side tangent is my entire conversation style. Same. But i really want to talk about law and legal stuff as it comes to small business owners. A lot of small business owners, myself included, come into business and not knowing a lot about business.
Speaker: the legalities, the things that they should be thinking about from a legal perspective. And a lot of people don't prioritize it as like, a I'm going to go get a lawyer and figure out my contracts. And a lot of people are really scared to seek out that help.
Speaker: So what would you say to a business owner who is kind of in that stage where they maybe have some like templates that they pulled from various places on the Internet and isn't sure if they should seek out actual legal support to help them draft their contracts for their business.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, the first thing I would say is it's not really a choice. You kind of have to do it. Unfortunately, if you want to be a business owner, we have to pay our taxes. Otherwise, our bank accounts will eventually be levied. i've got to voice memo about that yesterday from a friend of mine who's currently dealing with that. It's like, we don't want to have to deal with that. And then also contracts. I mean, legal basics protect us in so many ways. The likelihood that anyone's ever going to get sued is like pretty pretty low, realistically. But the contracts can prevent you from a lot more common issues like clients who don't want to pay you on time or clients who want to make unnecessary demands and extra services. The list goes on. We can probably come up with lots of personal examples.
Speaker: But i would say just owning that you have to do it. And then also realizing that there are resources out there that make this like pretty simple. Like I give all the contract templates on my website. They're not all that expensive. I teach you how to use them. And I'm just one person, right? So if you vibe with me, great. I will happily take your money and you can come into my universe and I'll give you all the support. But um I have a lot of other friends slash frenemies out there who offer similar services as well. And they're all like They're all pretty great.
Speaker: Yeah. And I know you have your contract club. Tell us a little bit more about that, because I think that's a really great entry point for people who are like, I know that I should do this, but I don't really know where to start.
Speaker: Yes. So our contract club, our tagline is all the contracts you need, all in one place, all for one price. Just pay the cover and you're in for life. We run it kind of like a membership in that you join and we add new templates every month, usually three templates a month. We have a contract request assessment form in there.
Speaker: Assessment is a silly word. It's just a request form. um If you need a contract that we don't already have, that's pretty rare nowadays because we have like over 150 templates in there already. So the requests now get pretty niche.
Speaker: But we add those and then we also have a community in there where you can ask questions as you're putting your contracts together and I answer those. But the best thing about it is we don't charge people a recurring membership fee for it. It's $200 and it's a one-time fee. Most online template shops...
Speaker: charge anywhere from two to I've seen $500 per template. The most common price point I see is $397 for like a wedding photography client contract. And in the contract club, you get that plus like a ton of other documents you probably did not even know that you needed that you actually probably do need. Tell us about those. If I have any ah listeners, what are the things that people aren't thinking about that you see most often?
Speaker: Well, since we're on a podcast, I'll mention that we have a podcast guest release agreement. So if you wanted your podcast guest to sign that, um that's one of those, I have to be honest with you, Gail, I don't have people who come on my podcast, sign a podcast guest release agreement, but um you're a systems person. So you probably have a much better system and process than I do. And that would be easy to integrate into your system. We also have a testimonial release agreement. So if you want to get testimonials from your clients, it's good to have them sign a release agreement as well. So you can use it in all the bits and pieces of your marketing. We have a release agreement, which is really good. I'll have um a wedding folks, especially they'll have, they'll come to me and they'll be like, I had a lawyer at my contract a long time ago, but now, you know, I'm seven years in, I'm having my first significant client issue and I need to like get them to peacefully go away. So we have a release agreement that basically says like, Hey, we agree not to sue each other. And then we're going to like agree to do whatever. So I'll give you part of this refund back, you know,
Speaker: lots of different things you can do. ah Your website privacy policy, that's super important. We all have to have one of those web terms. And then of course, if you offer anything like anything on the side, so if you decide to create an online course, if you decide to have a group coaching program, if you decide to run a membership, we have all of that stuff. So especially for online educators, because we're doing like so many different things, we have all those templates covered.
Speaker: That's awesome. And so important for people to just know that there are those resources out there of like, there's a place that you can go and see what you don't know without having to, if you're like, I don't know if I want to ask yet too. That's like a helpful place to go and just see like, is this something that I need? and so I love that you offer that. And for one price is so valuable because we are in such a subscription culture. i think we all have subscription fatigue.
Speaker: Something that I hear a lot when it comes to quote unquote legal stuff of it just feels impersonal or I'm assuming the worst. What would you say to somebody to help them reframe how they think about their legal contracts with their clients to kind of humanize it and make them feel more comfortable maybe including things that they're a little bit like nervous to include because they don't want to like ward off their client or scare their client away?
Speaker: Yeah. First of all, I would note that contracts really are as much a preventative tool as they are, you know, like a scary legal thing that means you that you're going a sue people. So I feel like I could give an analogy for this. Right. When before we got married, my husband and I did ah prenup and we used helloprenup.com. I feel like I should be an affiliate for them at this point. I mentioned it a few times. And I actually met them at Wedding MBA because our booths were like pretty close together. Hello, prenup. Get on it. Hey, Brayden. Hey, Brayden.
Speaker: They do this cool thing where basically it's it's a questionnaire. So like I fill out a questionnaire. My partner fills out a questionnaire to determine what's going to go in the document. And then after you each do your questionnaires, it basically flags things. So it says it asks you so many questions. There's like 50 questions. And it will be like you answered 40 of the questions the same. These 10 questions you answer differently. So then you're supposed to sit down together and go through those 10 questions and then discuss them. So there are a lot of questions about things that we had never really discussed before. Lots of hypotheticals about like if you were to have kids, like how would you decide like where they're going to go to school and the event, like even the eventuality that you got divorced. And it's just really stuff that you haven't really considered. Right. So it's like good to talk about.
Speaker: Same thing in your contract. It's a little bit different, however, though, because you're the expert as the service provider. um So really, you're providing to the client all the things that they probably hadn't considered about the process that they're go about to go through, and you're bringing it um to their awareness. So then if you do have an issue down the road, you can say like, hey, we discussed this in the contract. um But also, you're just laying like a really good groundwork for what they can expect from you, what services are provided, what they'll be charged extra for. And some of those things can go in like a policies and procedures document. That's a little but more formal. Usually we just probably call that, i don't know, Gail, like a client guide. Do you have a client guide?
Speaker: Yeah. Or like included in the proposal, like an FAQ section. Yeah. Yeah. So then our kind of question is what goes in a client guide or like FAQs versus what needs to go in a contract. And this all really becomes part of your onboarding process. And I even in the contract club, we have like a little section on client onboarding, which is not all that involved, but how you really like integrate your contract into that process. I think that's so important because it's about sharing your expectations and making those clear.
Speaker: i even think about this from my perspective. I've been in business for like a year and a half, so I'm still like pretty like a baby business owner in the grand scheme of things. But as a business owner, you learn so much all the time. You're constantly kind of like adjusting and tweaking as you learn about how you want to run your services, what programs you want to offer. Like the more clarity you can provide your client, the better off both of you are. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah. Another important aspect like about the humanity behind contracts and the relationships that we establish with people. I can I flip I'm going to flip the script for a second yeah and ask you a couple questions. Is that OK? Absolutely.
Speaker: What's your like typical like service package price? So I offer two main services, a sprint, which is like a week long focus on one workflow that starts at about 1200. And then a system set up for like one service that someone might offer starts at about like 1950.
Speaker: Okay. So if I were going to hire you to like revamp my systems and let's say going to have you like revamp my my trademark system, it's like pretty involved. So you might say, okay, it's actually going more than that. like I'm going to charge you $3,000 because we're going to do a lot of stuff.
Speaker: If I went to hire you and you were just like, well, you read the sales page, like here's my invoice. And the invoice was literally just said 25 what did I say? $3,000 like pay I'm going to be like, well, Gail's going to send me a contract. And like, that's like a little bit sketchy because I want to know, like, when are my deliverables due and what happens? Like if Gail like gets sick and can't like deliver this on time now, it makes me kind of like question my buying decision and really kind of trust your professionalism. Like, I hope you have a contract after I'm doing all of this. But especially like I've hired
Speaker: I'm the type of person like I've gone out on a limb and like hired people who are basically brand new it and in business and like don't have testimonials. And some of them have had contracts and some of them haven't had contracts. I met someone on threads and I paid them, i think, $250 for a very small like design project.
Speaker: They totally ghosted me. They took my money and they ran. That's the first time that's ever happened to me. um But I did question like the validity of the relationship because they didn't give me a contract. If someone else for the same amount of money offered me a contract, and' be like, oh, okay, this person's like taking this business seriously, even if they don't have a lot of other stuff going on for them. So i think it's also a way that we can professionalize ourselves and make the clients feel more secure about the relationship they're entering into as well.
Speaker: I think it's one of a few things for me as a systems expert that you should be thinking about when hiring somebody. Another thing that I see often is if they're a pretty established business owner and they're using like a Gmail address where it's like, do you have a website? Do you have reviews? Do you have testimonials? Like you mentioned, um some of those things are just things that you should like look at and consider when you're trying to determine if someone's legitimate because we're in this space right now where it's really easy to lie about if you have testimonials or if you I mean, we see that everywhere when you're buying products, especially like the bot reviews are rampant. And illegal. And illegal, but that's not stopping anyone.
Speaker: but Yeah. So I think it is just like, that's such a good thing to check out for when you're considering hiring somebody, paying somebody any amount of money, but especially if you're it's like a considerable investment for your business, you want to make sure that you're protected as the client as well. Yeah. I wanted to ask you because I know that you are certified in California. i know all the different states have like different stuff going on What should someone be thinking about if they're like, say they join the contract club? What should they be thinking about to make sure that like my state's laws and and legalities are covered when I'm considering any template online?
Speaker: Yeah, specifically with contracts, um it's kind of industry dependent. and what I mean by that is like our industry, i'm using our industry like pretty broadly here. And that covers like pretty much all the industries that I i work with.
Speaker: we're not We don't really have a lot of state specific laws. And to contextualize that, I'm thinking of like realtors. Like realtors have form contracts from like their state.
Speaker: yeah I don't know what it's called, but you know, like a realtor is like a trademark of the Realty Association or whatever, or whatever. They have all the like state forms, right? It's very, very specific on what they can do and what they have to do and what goes in the documents. um The construction industry is like pretty similar. Some of these like big um industries that have like these lobbying bodies and all that kind of stuff. We don't really have any of that.
Speaker: So there's nothing, like there's no laws state to state that's like, if you're a wedding planner, you have to address this in your contract. If you sell online digital courses, like this has, we don't really have that. So then it just comes down to general contract principles. And for the most part, when it comes to a client contract,
Speaker: Everything is the same, like across the US. And really, i almost want to say across the world because I have a lot of people outside the US ask about our templates as well. And what I mean by that is a contract at its core It's just a written document that expresses like what two parties are agreeing to do. So Gail agrees to provide me XYZ service in exchange. Braden agrees to pay Gail this amount of money and this number of installments. We typically don't have laws that dictate like how the services have to be laid out, what the compensation needs to be. What we do have is some slight nuances state to state with some very specific things like, um,
Speaker: Non-compete clauses and contractor agreements that can be kind of sticky. Some states just don't allow them. Other states will if they're very narrow. And I can give an example for that if you think that people will care. um And then also the only really one we we consider a whole lot in client contracts is non-disparagement clauses. a lot of states don't allow those either because that's like against consumer protection. So they don't want us like writing in a contract that the client can't write negative reviews. Yeah, totally.
Speaker: Yeah, so our rule of thumb is um anything that's like allowed in some states, but not allowed in other states, we just play it safe and we don't include them in our contract templates. And then they're like pretty much fine.
Speaker: I love that. That's so important and something that's a good thing for people who are listening in the same boat as me of like, I don't know what state to state things. I know Minnesota is a state, for example, that you can't have non-compete clauses. But if someone's just a business owner and like doesn't know, be like, OK, but these are just a general safe base to work from regardless of what state or generally what country you're in.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. Generally, anytime you're thinking about like you're drafting a clause that someone says something someone like can't do something, the law tends to be strict with that because they don't want you necessarily like dictating people's conduct. So yeah saying that someone can't write like a review about something, saying that someone can't work somewhere or work for a specific period of time. And then the delineation of that, well, you can kind of imagine like the blue states typically fall one way and the red states typically fall another way, pro-consumer versus pro-business and what have you. um But there's, of course, there's nuances and you want to be careful with that kind of stuff. so Especially if you're going to be hiring people, i always recommend that you work with like an HR professional because you want to make sure that your onboarding documents, if you're hiring employees, is like very on the up and up for the jurisdiction in which those people work.
Speaker: Yeah. One thing I really want to talk about that I think is going to be top of mind for a lot of my audience specifically, a lot of creative service professionals, they're trying to figure out like, what can I and can't I do or should I and shouldn't I do? And how do I talk about it with my clients as it comes to ai and generative AI in your work? Yeah, the main thing is just having AI disclosures in your contracts and then, you know, anywhere else that's relevant as well. But just being very transparent, I would say that's the main thing. Very transparent and use very plain language as to what you do and don't use ai for.
Speaker: We actually added a whole Google document for full of ai related clauses to the contract club because people were like asking so much about it. I have that pulled up. If you want to go through any of them, we can or I can just like read off the paragraph heading so i can give you some examples. But you want to consider like these are the things that i use AI for in my business. Like I know that I use AI for these things. These are the things that I definitely won't use AI for. So if Usually we would leave that out of the contract um because we don't like to over promise things because you might change your mind. But if it's something you very feel very strongly about and you think it will help you like close sales, then you can put that in there. And then you also want to put in there things that are iffy, right? So an example for that would be,
Speaker: As I talked about this um on another podcast recently, there are so many tech tools now that integrate AI. So if you are putting your client's information into a CRM and that CRM has ai integrations, we don't necessarily know what's happening there.
Speaker: So that might be something that we want to disclose as well. So we use AI in XYZ cases. We won't use AI in the following cases. We do implement the following tools, including but not limited to important legal languages. um And they might integrate AI in you know ways that are like outside of our controller knowledge. That's an important thing to call out. One thing that I talk about a lot with my clients, especially i think wedding photography is such a good example because it's a place where a lot of their tools have AI integration, like AI photo colors that will go through and call the thousands of photos that you take from a wedding or just run kind of like a base level of edits, which is
Speaker: more machine learning in my general opinion than it is like artificial intelligence, which can be kind of a blurry line. But when it comes to those things, it's also an opportunity for you as a service provider to understand where you stand on putting you know your client's image and likeness through an AI tool, but also an opportunity to educate of like, here's how I'm using this, here's how it works. so if you are using those tools, not only including things in your contract, but also educating them. If you think that this is a potential area that might like spook someone and you're just like, no, but I'm running this through like my base set of presets. And then I go through and manually edit everything from there. Like that's going to make someone feel more comfortable than just having a clause in your contract. That's like, I use an AI editor and they're like, I don't want that for my wedding.
Speaker: Yeah, I think it's also important or like it can be helpful, I should say, if you are also explaining how it benefits the client, if it does, because you might say, well, now I'm able, oh I don't think it's going to impact like the number of photos that you're taking and like necessarily on the wedding day, but it could be like. At which they're getting those photos back generally. Right. Like it's going to increase like turnaround time and delivery of the photos. You might also get more photos as a result because we're able to like, you know, edit them more quickly. the cold photos are going to be, you know, potentially better. That's interesting how I wonder how AI does that. Are they able to like it's manually? Are they able to see when someone has like one eye closed or something and they're so they automatically like booted out of there? Like how does the AI know which photos are the best?
Speaker: I don't know. i don't know, you know, how that works. AI photo colors are a really hot topic. yeah I'm sure it's able to detect like out of focus images and stuff like that. But yeah, but like also some of that stuff can be considered artistic. And so like, yeah. I think that there's a lot of contention. Some people are really pro it because they might take like thousands of photos ah during like an eight hour wedding day. And culling all of those manually takes a lot of time.
Speaker: But then there are also perspectives of like, but your client is hiring you for your eye and your like artistic vision. And that might be the blurry photo or The one where like the couple is not in focus, but this one thing that you were intending to like kind of capture in the background is or whatever. probably I'm probably going to piss off all the photographers listening for making this suggestion, but I wonder if anyone's ever done this and had asked their client or allowed their client to call the photos because i'm I know.
Speaker: I think you're going to get hard pressed on that one. I know. like But what I think about like when i hire my brand photographer, it's like we're all our own worst critics. So it's like, oh, i I don't like that angle on my face. And I don't like this. I don't like that. It's probably so much faster when I go through and pick the photos that I do like. Because anyone who's had brand photos, I'm sure they can all relate to this. You get 100 photos back and you end up picking like five to 10 that you use over and over and over again. These are the three that I use. I'm sure that's not at all realistic with like wedding photography when you're getting like thousands of images. But yeah um I guess especially people probably do that more with advanced edits where they're like, here's 50 photos, like pick 10 that you want, like more advanced edits on or something. Yeah. Like I see that more with, yes, brand photography, especially if it's like minis. So like some photographers will run like a day where they do like back to back like 20 30 minute
Speaker: shoots with a bunch of different couples or families or whatever and then you get 10 images out of it right but they're taking obviously more than 10 and so they give you like full spread and you're like okay i want these 10 edited and then they'll go and like edit those but yeah i think with weddings the the wedding photography industry would would come ready to fight you Yeah. Yeah. i upset a lot of people. i feel like with my take sometimes because there are certain things that we do in other industries that the wedding industry just really does not like. And then photographers especially like don't even get me started about copyright because oh, we get into all sorts of cans worms. Wait, say more.
Speaker: photographers especially are so precious about their copyright and the IP that they own behind the photos. And maybe I'm just like not destined to be like the photography lawyer. Like they can all go to the law talk, I guess, because...
Speaker: Like, but for okay, for example, if you hire a graphic designer, the industry norm and the industry st standard is that the designer typically um hands over all copyrights to the work product when you hire them, right? So you have full ownership then of the logo, which makes sense because like if I'm paying for that logo, i want to get trademarked.
Speaker: Like I own it now and they might not like it, but like I can put it in Canva and do whatever I want to it. um And then like to do the same thing with photos that you paid for is so triggering to the photography community. And I get it to an extent, but also a lot of the times I'd be like,
Speaker: can we just like calm down a little bit? Like you got paid, they got the photos. Like if they want to put put the most obscene Instagram filter on top of it because like they have no taste, like that's not your problem. Like that's, and I get the that the the issue is that the photographers don't want people associating that terribly edited photo with like their work product. But if they click on the tag and go to your feed and see your beautiful pictures, like they, I think most people are going to get it but... I don't know. That's one of my soapbox moments. I could talk about it all day. but you know, there we are.
Speaker: You brought up trademark in that ah commentary and i well I know you're not exclusively a trademark lawyer, but I'm curious to hear from you What things should you be thinking about? i have like my brand name, Work Simple, trademarked, but beyond that, i just kind of live in the ether. and I think that a lot of business owners just don't know a lot about what they should be trademarking. What would you recommend to business owners as like best practice what they should have trademarked for their business? First, I want to know that you had no response to my copyright tangent. So...
Speaker: Oh, I, you know, you decide besides you sidestep that one because you don't want to you don't want make it. We're good. I think I understand where they're coming from is that like they don't want someone else's like silly edits represented. i do understand a like don't tag me in it. ah yeah If you're going to do the edits, don't tag me in it.
Speaker: But as that's, I mean, I get it It's like, it's hard to tell people like, um you have bad taste and I have good taste. And so if you're sharing photos that um you are editing, please don't tag me because i don't want to be associated with your like terrible, you know.
Speaker: I know I do understand it from that perspective. I also think that i mean, you could say something about like, like if you're sharing the like photos that you received unedited, like feel free to tag me whatever.
Speaker: i don't know. i don't know how it works out. And it's not for me to decide. i will I will disclose to everyone that we do fully cover all of that in our contract templates. So don't you worry.
Speaker: We have it all covered. The clients can't edit that. Yeah. we Okay. So let's get to your trademark question. i was kind of just teasing you with that one. um Letting me be out there on the limb with my hot takes. um Okay. So trademark, you said you have your business name trademarked? Yeah.
Speaker: Okay. And the question was basically like, why should people get trademarks? Or like what business things should you have trademarked to? Yeah. Yeah. So the main thing obviously is going to be the business name. So whatever your business name is, we probably want to get that trademarked.
Speaker: Beyond that, um any um for for most service providers, it's just going to be the business name. I work with a lot of course creators as well. So for them, like every course that they launch might be trademarked as well. So my business name is not your average law firm, not ABG law for short, not average law. So I have that trademarked. The aisle advisory is my other website for the wedding industry. So the aisle advisory just got officially trademarked last week. So that was very exciting. And then I have but my programs. Unfuck Your Biz is trademarked. The Contract Club is trademarked. I also have the compliance club trademarked and I have a new one that's like rolling out soon. So these are all things that like I have a certain amount of brand equity in a lot of people. Like I've had people often tell me like, Oh, I just like whenever I need to like find the contract club, I just Google contract club. So that name's like very valuable to me. Right. So I want to get that trademarked.
Speaker: Um, Yeah, I feel like I have so much more to say on that, but I don't want to go like go off the rails too much out of your question. No, that's OK. Should people get their logos trademarked?
Speaker: Probably not. Yeah. So at this point, we have filed probably a little over 150 trademarks. Only a couple of those have been for logos. And the reason why is because your logo is really only as valuable as it is recognizable.
Speaker: And ah so to give you ah an example of this, we wrote an email about this, which I thought was kind of fun, um trying to explain the importance of a logo mark. and the example we gave was like, would your kid be offended if you bought them the knockoff version when they ask for the name brand on their list. Right. So like the off brand Stanley, the like not real Nike shoes, they want the swoosh. They want the Stanley logo. They want the whatever, whatever, because that's like the brand cache, right?
Speaker: Most of us don't have that in our businesses, right? Like our logo doesn't have an identity of its own. So it's not really that important. um Not to offend anyone, but obviously you don't want people copying your logo necessarily, but it's typically your name that's the important thing. And then a lot of the times our logos are really just a stylized version of our name. So if we've trademarked the name, we don't need to trademark the logo. um I do have like the A and not AVG law is a little bit stylized. It's instead of just like the one dash in the middle, it's like two so that it makes a not equal sign. So it's like does not equal average. If I were going to try to create like a huge like national brand and like put that logo on things so that it was recognizable, then I would want to trademark that sub mark.
Speaker: um But no one's paying attention to that. No one really cares. It's not that big of a deal. Does that make sense? Yeah, no, it does. And I will i will add, um the whole thing about trademarks is to prevent consumer confusion. So if you have a logo, and let's say that you have a competitor down the road that decides to open a similar business and put that same logo on their website, is that going to create consumer confusion? Mm-hmm.
Speaker: If you have a very similar business name and a very similar logo, it probably would. If they just decided to name their business something different, but then copy the stylization of your logo, are consumers going to pick up on that? ne It's probably going to piss you off, but are the consumers going to pick up on that? Maybe not, um but but it it could.
Speaker: but It's very context specific. Yeah. What protections does a business owner have if, let's say, they don't have any trademarks for their business name, their logo, any of their business assets? Let's say they've been in business five years. Someone else starts a business with a similar name in their same industry. Do they have any legal protections like that they can you know argue against? Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, it's tough. um If you have not registered your trademark, it's very difficult to actually enforce your trademark. So technically in the US, we have like first use rights, meaning the first person to use that name has the like legal presumption of ownership. They can boot the other person from using it. That's only if there would be consumer confusion, right? So if you're a wedding planner using a name and someone else starts a crm that's like for the construction industry pretty unrelated people aren't going to confuse those things so i get people who want to send cease and desist a lot for things that don't really warrant cease and desist so like keep that in mind um but if you do have a situation where you're a wedding planner
Speaker: And you've been using a name for a while. And then someone else comes on the scene and they've been a corporate baddie for the past 10 years. So they like got all this stuff locked down. They're like, I got friends who are lawyers. I got my contract. I filed my trademark. I did everything for the identical name. They get the trademark registered. Now you're over here thinking, I've been doing this for 10 years with the same name. i should own it Yes, you legally have a better claim than them. But since they registered the trademark, you you now have an uphill battle where you're going to have to shell out a lot of money in order to get them to not be able to have that trademark.
Speaker: So even though you have the legal claim, um it might not actually be worth the cost for you to fight them because they beat you to the registration. I feel like they're um influencers that have like the name thing, like Sierra Mist, like adult content creator. And then i think it was Haley Page Bridal who had like a trademark filed against her name a person something. thing i don't know. I Yeah, the Sierra Mist one was wild. That's like why Pepsi had a rebrand Sierra Mist. Yeah. sorry
Speaker: Interesting. i did a podcast episode when the very demure, very mindful trend was happening like a couple years ago because everyone swooped in to try to trademark that. Yeah. And it was like Jules of lebron LeBron who made it like obviously blow up.
Speaker: um So yeah, that kind of stuff is always, is always real interesting. One thing to note with that though is unlike domains, are you familiar with domain domain squatters? That's what we call them in the legal industry. Yeah, that's why I'm worksimple.io and not worksimple.com. Yeah, yeah. That happens all the time. people will And when AI got big, people just started buying like every variation of like AI because then when people start businesses for things, they can – I like to store them for all the money with trademarks. You can't really do that. Like you can't think like there are all kinds of names. I'm shocked sometimes when clients will potential clients will book searches and I'm like, there's no way you're going to be able to trademark this like work simple. I'm kind of surprised you got that because that sounds I was surprised too. Yeah, it's a really good name. There are actually expired trademarks oh under work simple, but I'm the only active one. Love it. Yeah, they get abandoned and then you can swoop in there and get it. So they'll book them.
Speaker: They'll book the searches and I'll be pretty surprised that it's open. So for a trademark, you have to actually be using the name in commerce, meaning like you have to be using the name in connection with the good or service that you're selling, which prevents people from just filing the trade trademarks for things that they aren't actively using.
Speaker: That was like connecting back to something we were talking about a second ago. But um Yeah, the whole like jewel Jules LeBron thing. That's what a lot of people were trying to do. But what if they're not? This is a personal question. So for like my podcast, for example, where is your humanity not trademarked, which blows my mind? Honestly, not my podcast, but just like the phrase in general. I don't make money from the podcast. I spend money on the podcast because it brings me joy. Then is that something that's like not trademarkable because it's not associated with money is not changing hands. You could still trademark because you're trademarking it um depending on what we're trademarking under. But there is a trademark description just for podcast. So your trademark ID would read something like production of podcasts in the field podcasting.
Speaker: systems, whatever, whatever. um And yeah, as long as you're so the use in commerce for that would just be that the podcast is like live. It's available to be listened to. Interesting.
Speaker: So as we come to the end of our episode, I like to give all my guests the opportunity to stand on their soapbox and talk about their humanity hot take, whatever that means for you.
Speaker: I'll give a couple. So the one of them is going to be kind of self serving because when's this podcast dropping? Probably in three weeks. Okay. Oh, perfect timing. So October 1st, I am launching my first ever mastermind. It is the first program I will be offering through my business that has really nothing to do with like law nor tax.
Speaker: But my soapbox with regard to that is that like we all need to have more community. I think it's so important. Yeah. I remember like early on in my business, I got so upset and like kind like personally hurt because it seemed like no one in my family like understood what I did.
Speaker: but neither did they really care to ask, right? Like including my first husband. um And it was more so, and there's a lot more that goes into that, that I could talk to a therapist about. So i don't want to like de demonize him because he was like doing fine, you know? um But I've realized that it was like unfair to have those expectations of people, right? Like we can't expect people to care. We can't expect people to like ask that many questions. And when I say care, I mean like care about the details. Obviously we want people to like care about us. But with that, we need to surround ourselves with people who do get it, who do understand our businesses.
Speaker: And most of us operate in this kind of like weird world where people who have like normal jobs, quote unquote, normal jobs, like aren't going to get it And we don't have a lot of people in our lives that we know personally who do get it So we need to find those people, right? If you've been lucky enough to do that, like organically, that's great. For a while, I had um just kind of through like Facebook groups and Instagram DMs, but I kind of like craved a deeper connection than that. Like people who I could regularly hop on Zoom with and ask like business questions. And I ended up joining a mastermind myself that I've now been in for like six years. Same group of people we meet every month. So that's my kind of soapbox moment um is that you need to like find community and pour into people. And I think it's really important. My second one, um I'm really, let me get out my second soapbox, um is kind of like transparency around numbers. And I want to tell everyone that they have to do this, but this is really fresh in my brain because right before we hit record, I recorded the monthly profit report for my podcast where I share all the money I make, what I'm spending my money on, all that kind of stuff.
Speaker: um And I don't expect other people to do the same, like just share their profit and loss statement publicly on Instagram. That might be a little wild for some people. But at least like with your core circle of friends, like being more transparent about what you're charging, how things are converting, what you're spending your money on, like what profitability actually looks like.
Speaker: Like when you go to networking events, having those conversations, because most of us operate in silos and we have no idea like what's normal, like what's good, what we should be striving for. So just being like a little bit more open.
Speaker: Yeah, like the money, basically. i think that's so important. And actually, when your episode is released, the last episode that will have come out, we talked about this as well. And she's a content creator and actually knitting pattern designer. and In the obviously the content creation space is like people are so siloed from each other because they have more or less like parallel social relationships. um And it's kind of the Wild West and like all the brand deals numbers and stuff are really hidden. Yeah. um But it's totally applies to the service industry, online business space as well, because i do some work for other systems folks like white labeling marketing.
Speaker: I benefit from learning about how they price and structure their business in the same way that like we all kind of help each other because it allows it's just more information to work with. And we help each other grow when we share that stuff, too. It's not just one sided.
Speaker: Yeah. one One of my things is like most if you work on a big company like. Apple and Microsoft might not be sharing like the intimate details of their businesses with one another, but yeah each of those companies have hundreds of people in that business and they can all talk to each other. We don't really have that. So we have to talk to our like quote unquote competitors, right? If we want to like rising tide lifts all boats kind of a thing.
Speaker: Exactly. i love that. Well, Brayden, I know we talked about some of the ways that people can engage with your work and sign up for all of the contracts and all the things. um But where can people find you to learn more about what you do and all the amazing things that you offer?
Speaker: Braden Drake.com. So that's my name. B-R-A-D-E-N Drake, like the rapper that will redirect you to my main website. And then Braden Adam Drake is my business Instagram. Same on threads. If you want to DM me, message me on Instagram. But if you want to see all the stuff I'm talking about, I'm most active personally on threads.
Speaker: Amazing. Well, thanks so much for being here and spilling all of your great legal advice for everyone listening. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Thank you so much for listening. You can find this episode and more wherever you listen to podcasts. And you can follow us on Instagram at whereisyourhumanitypod.
Speaker: Our lovely theme music is created by Emily Bjorki. And you can listen to her new single, No Angel, out now. And her upcoming album, Are You Going to Heaven or Hell, out on October fifteenth For more information about me, Gail, and the work that I do, you can go to worksimple.io, my website, or you can follow me on all the platforms, Instagram, TikTok, threads, also at worksimple.io. See you next time.
