Protecting and Monetizing Entrepreneurial Ideas

There are some people that make their work just another thing they have to do, and there are those that make their work something that they want to do. Welcome to Working on Purpose with your host Elise Cortez. In our program, we provide guidance and inspiration from those people who have found deeper meaning and personal connection to their work life. It's beyond nine to five. It's working on purpose. Now. Here is your host, Elise Cortez. I'm your host, Elise Cortez, joining alive from Cancun, Mexico this week. Or I'm enjoying a little rest and relaxation after hosting a wonderful gathering at my favorite holiday, Thanksgiving, and now getting to use my spash of Portuguese here. It's great jobs of fun. This program is all about helping people more create more meaningful and productive personal and work lives than em clipping leaders inside organizations to cultivate meaning and purpose, to elicit passion inspired contribution, innovation, and person ring performance. I converse with my guest to draw on their expertise and share my own experience consulting, speaking and developing workforces across the globe. In these weekly conversations, it is my intention that you derive value you can immediately apply to your personal and work lives. So I'm asking you to listen in from that vantage point. And it is my fervent hope that you come alive with the possibility of living with passion, working on purpose, and seeing just how big and fulfilling your life and work can be. And if you do catch fire, as I like to say, I do not want to leave you without a support line. Your call to action men is to contact me via email at ease at least coortest dot com or use to contact me feature on my website at least coortest dot com to message me tell me how I can help. Whether you want to join the distribution list to stay informed at these radio show topics, you want to learn about joining a cash fire online inspiration, accountability or mastermind community, or you want information on my purpose driven leadership programs for individuals or companies. We'll get you taken care of. Back to the content. If you miss last week's program, we can always catch it live or catch it recorded podcasts. Excuse me, We created a special holiday program with guest Elizabeth Fournier. Get this an undertaker and the owner an operator of Cornerstone Funeral Services, where she is affectionately known as the Green Reaper for her green burial advocacy. And she's from Oregon. By the way, Angela so with the and Purpose. Just before Thanksgiving, we talked about how the inevitable event of death can stoke a tremendous sense of purpose across our lives, how she chose her career as an undertaker and sees it has her true calling and the role of gratitude, and how it shows up in a life well lived. I promise you'll find the content provocative. Elizabeth herself to be the most zesty undertaker you might expect to encounter. Just to delight with us this week is Angela Langlots, an intellectual property owner special excuse me, property attorney specializing in online trademark and copyright issues and entrepreneur herself and having marketed products online for over ten years. Angela is acutely aware of a unique issues that online marketers face with regard to do a main name issues, copyright issues, and cyber squatting. We'll be talking about how entrepreneurs can protect and monetize their ideas. She joined it today from Dallas, Texas. Angela, welcome to working on purpose. Thank you so much, a Lise. It's wonderful to be here, isn't it great? Isn't it amazing what happens when we're out and about in the course of our normal, everyday lives and we meet, like you and I did at a women's gathering, not really a networking event, but gathering and found we have all kinds of things in common, including that we've lived in Brazils be Portuguese speak, Spanish speak Italian. I think you've got French too. It's amazing, it's just crazy, so welcome. It's so great to have you on the show. Thank you. Yeah, it was uncanny all of the similarities between us. I think we met by divine appointment. I love that we were meeting on purpose. Angela, exactly. Yes, it was a very on purpose meeting for sure. Well, we didn't get a chance to talk much about it that evenit because I got so engrossed in the idea of having you on the show. But I want to start with just talking about how you got into the business that you're in. How did you become an attorney, and why this particular space. What's the story? Well, I became an attorney by going to law school. Ha ha. That's usually how it happens. But when I first started my practice, I was practicing business law and a state planning, and while it was really interesting, I really didn't like the whole business of having an office and having to commute to the office, and I really wanted to change what I was doing so that I could have a business where I could work from home. Estate planning is sort of a touchy, feely, hands on kind of practice. People really want to sit across the desk from you when they're talking about their very important, you know, personal matters about you know, what's going to happen when they die. And it's not really a would fit to have a law practice from home and have that sort of practice. And at the time, my husband was a patent attorney, and he said, listen, why don't you come work at home. He had a home office practice, and he said, why don't you come home and you can run the trademark practice. And so that's what I did, And when we divorced in twenty twelve, I went out on my own. I left him that practice. I went out on my own and started serving entrepreneurs and I love what I do, and I work at home. I don't have a traditional law office and this sort of practice where I'm serving business owners, especially online business owners, they are not at all bothered that I do not have a physical office. I've had very few requests to meet in person, usually people here in town. You know. Sometimes they ask for a meeting, and that's fine. I'm happy to meet with. But most of my clients don't live here in Dallas or even here in Texas, and they are comfortable doing business online and sometimes you know, they've usually met me from my videos. I produce a lot of video content, so you can find me online on Facebook and also on my trademark doctor dot net business website, so people see me, people kind of feel like they know me already, so they're happy to trust me with their important branding and copyright issues. That is a brilliant strategy to get yourself to market, Angel and one that we're already learning from you. Thank you, and before we get into the actual content itself. And because I am a meeting and work researcher myself, and I think it's a nice way for us to help our listeners get better acquainted with you, what do you love about the work that you do. I love the freedom that it affords me. I can run my law practice from anywhere with an Internet connection, and when I was living in Brazil, I ran my practice from Brazil. I'm not sure that any of my clients knew I was outside the country, or would have cared had they known. But the wonderful thing about the practice that I've built is that I'm free to run that from anywhere. And now I'm also creating self help products for people who either don't want to hire an attorney can't afford to hire me. They can take one of my online classes and learn what they need to know about trademark law or copyright law and how it applies to their business. So I love the freedom. I also love being a leader. I love teaching and training and telling people what they need to know in ordinary English instead of the legal eies that some attorneys seem to delight in using. I don't know why they do it, actually I do. I think they like the idea that they know things that other people don't, and it's true I know things that other people don't, but I'd prefer to share it with them so that it can be my knowledge can be of some use to them, and if I'm talking over people or talking down to people, that knowledge transfer doesn't happen. So I like being a leader. I like being a teacher and transmitting the knowledge that I have in a way that people can comprehend. The other thing I love about what I do is I love helping entrepreneurs. I get really excited when I hear about a new business that one of my clients or prospective clients is starting, and I just feel really jazzed about what they're doing and their new product or their new idea or their new brand. I just really get a lot of satisfaction from helping them. It is so powerful when we can connect with what it is that really enlivens us a better work. So thank you for sharing that so crisply. That was great. Okay, Well let's talk shop now. So very very interested in a trade with the work that you do. And there's lots of reasons for that, in part because I'm now starting to situate myself as being somebody that you could actually serve. I am creating content, I'm creating products, etc. So let's talk about protecting intellectual property in general. So first for all of us, my benefit included what kinds of protection are available? Well, there are three general types of intellectual property. There's trademarks, copyrights, and then patents, so I'll some people get them mixed up, so I'll go through each one. So a trademark deals with your brand identity. It helps people associate your goods with your company, so it's a brand name or a slogan or a logo. It can actually be anything that distinguishes your goods and services from other people's goods and services, so that's a trademark. A copyright is used to protect any creative work that's reduced to some kind of tangible medium. For example, it may be used to protect a blog post or a video, or a poem or a short story, an architectural plan or a photograph. So basically, anything creative can be protected by a copyright. And then there are patents which protect useful inventions. And there's also design patents too, but that's a little esoteric. I'm not going to go into that. So that is the difference between the three types of intellectual property. That was great, thank you, Angela. Now where does service marks fit in there? Service marks are basically trademarks that are applied to goods. So there's really no difference functionally between a trademark and a service mark. It's just that, technically speaking, when a mark trademark is applied to a service, it's sometimes called a service mark. I like to use the word trademark for everything, just because it eliminates the confusion around service marks and trademarks. And in fact, it's perfectly fine if you want to use the TM symbol next to a trademark for your services. That's perfectly acceptable. Okay, great, this is great. Okay. Now I'm wondering if there are any certain industries that tend to any more protection than others. Well, online entrepreneurs, their property seems to be particularly susceptible to theft part of the reason. And you know, when you infringe somebody else's trademark or copy their work, whether you give them attribution or not doesn't matter. If you're copying somebody else's stuff, it really is a form of theft. Right. So the reason why online aren't entrepreneurs are so susceptible to this is because we put everything out there online and copying is rampant, in part because the well there are a couple of reasons people don't understand that you can't just copy, even if you give attributions. It's not it's not acceptable to copy from a legal standpoint, to copy somebody else's work without a license to do so. And the other thing is the internet makes it really easy to just, you know, scoop up somebody's work with the mouse click and paste it someplace else. So it's really easy to copy things, and people don't realize that they don't have the right to do it. So online entrepreneurs are very susceptible to the theft of their intellectual property. Okay, this Marget's really interesting for me, Angela, because I'm also an academic. I'm a social scientist and a scholar, and I do a lot of research in that community. What we do is we do at tribute. We say according to Angelo langlots x y Z, and we attribute to and we tell what you know and we share it. But we all want to attribute to. Is that different? It is different. That's actually covered under the fair use doctrine of copyright law. So if your use of another person's material is for research purposes or purposes of like say you're doing a book review and you copy a small passage and use it for the purpose of giving a book review, that is considered fair use under the copyright law. Or if you've taken a clip, like on one of my videos. I did a video about parody, and I actually took the whole clip, the whole commercial from Oh What was It? Subway, and I used it in my video, but I used it for a teaching purpose. I wasn't using it to try to steal their idea and use it for my own marketing. I was using their video content, their property as an example for a teaching purpose. So that is also covered under the fair used doctrine. So when we're asking ourselves does the fair used doctrine apply, we look at the use. We look at you know, are we using is it being used for teaching purposes or purposes of critique? And if that's the case, then the copyright owner would have a very hard time alleging or maintaining a lawsuit for copyright infringement when that is that's the fact pattern. So you know, people can sue for copyright infringement, but fair use is an affirmative defense to a claim of copyright infringement. Incredibly helpful. Angela, this is so great. I'm getting all kinds of stuff from this and I'm so glad this is recorded not just from our listeners but also for me. So thank you. Let's grab our first brake. I'm your host, Alice Cortez. We do in the air with Angela langlots and intellectual property attorney specializing in an online trademark and copyright issues. She went to today from Dallas, Texas. We've been talking a bit about the field of protecting intellectual property. After we wreak, we're going to get into how to actually go about it. Stay with us, We'll be right back. Alice Cortez is a speaker and engagement and development catalyst. She designs and delivers professional development, leadership and engagement workshops and can bring her expertise to your organization. She will help ignite meaningful development within your workforce that will increase employee engagement, performance and retention. To learn more or to invite a lease to speak to your organization, please visit her at www dot Elise Cortez dot com. She would welcome the opportunity to help get your employees working on purpose. This is working on purpose with Elise Cortez. To reach our program today, send an email to Elise ali Se at Elise Cortez dot com. Now back to working on purpose if you're just joining us. My guest is Angela Langlots and intellectual property attorney specializing in online trademark and copyright issues. An entrepreneur herself and having marketed products online for over ten years, Angela is acutely aware of the unique issues that online marketers face with regard to domain name issues, copyright issues, and cybersquadding. She rebels and helping her clients develop, protect and market their intellectual property. A sets I'm your host, Elise. It has so before the break, angel we were talking a bit about just the nature of the field, some of the broader aspects of it. Now I want to get more into than any gritty here, and let's start by talking about how business leaders can protect their business identity. People talking, They go to events like you and I met at and they start talking about what they're up to and such, and I always wonder just how smart that is. So what can we do to protect their business identity? Well, you can register your slogans and business name and logos as a trademark that goes a long way to protecting your business identity. A lot of online entrepreneurs make the mistake of thinking, oh, well, you know, I don't have to register anything because I have what are called common law trademark rights. So at common law it is recognized that people have the right to use the exclusive use of their intellectual property, including trademarks. The problem with common law trademark rights, however, is that they're not registered with the patent in Trademark Office. That means if some naughty infringer wants to sneak in and register your name with the Trademark Office, they can do that because you haven't registered it. People don't realize that the trademark examiner when they evaluate your trademark application to see if it conflicts with any other any other brands, any other trademarks, the trademark examiner does not go out into the world to see what other people are using. Their search as far as conflicts go, is confined to the Trademark Office database. So if your mark is not in the Trademark Office database for the trademark examiner to find, he or she will issue potentially a trademark to the naughty infringer, and then you are in the unenviable position of having to go out and prove that you are the legitimate owner of the trademark. And anytime I say you have to go prove, just think dollar signs, right, Just think about standing on the front porch and lighting hundred dollar bills on fire every time I say you have to prove so of. One of the benefits of a trademark registration is that there are a lot of presumptions in your favor. For example, there is the presumption it's rebuttable, but there's the presumption that you were the first user of the trademark. It's you get the presumption that you are the true owner of the trademark. So there's a lot of presumptions that you get the benefit of. And any time you have a presumption, it's something that you don't have to affirmatively prove. And that means you're not standing on the front porch and lighting hundred dollar bills on fire because you don't have to prove those things. We like that, Thank you very much. That's so interesting to hear that. So what I heard you say is first and foremost, we is the entrepreneur wants. We need to be able to control this whole, boss, if you will, and that whole notion of getting the name on file. What you say to copyright office, is that what you said, Trademark office? If I said the copyright Office, I misspoke. I meant the trademark Office. I think that's what I said. I'm sure you did. I just have got to get it straight in my own mind. Okay, so that's really interesting, just that you know itself, the filing of it claiming it basically yes, yes, So what you need to do is you need to register your trademark with the US Patent and Trademark Office. If you're doing business in multiple states, some people will say, oh, you know, I'll just register a state trademark. And if you're only doing business in your state, that's fine, but just be aware that if somebody else gets a registered trademark for something similar to yours or the exact mark, you will not be able to expand your business beyond your geographic area. So people get really confused. They think, oh, well, you know, I've I've been using it in my state, so no one else can use it. But that's not true at all and a lot of Another thing that people don't realize is that other people's trademark rights extend beyond their exact mark and beyond their exact goods into anything that would be confusingly similar. So if you're trying to register something and you go and you do a quick search and you say, oh, yay, nobody's using that mark, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's registrable. When you go in and do what's called an exact match search, which basically just means that you know you've searched on your exact mark and you didn't find anything. That's not a good way to do a search, but that's the way these cheapy filing services like legal rhymes with boom, that's what they will do. They'll go in and do an exact match search, and then you know, the client thinks they're okay. But then four months later, which is about the time it takes for us to hear back from the trademark examiner, you'll get a rejection in the mail. You'll get an office action, and the office action will say, we are rejecting your mark because it's confusingly similar with these other marks that are on file. And yes you can argue against that, but in many cases it's fatal. You've not done the proper search to begin with. So whatever you've filed a lot of time should have never been filed in the first place because of another mark that was already in the record. So I see people making a lot of mistakes about this. There are a lot of benefits to federal registration, but not everything is registrable, perhaps because it's not servable. It's not servable, that's not even a word. It's not usable as a trademark. Maybe because it's generic, or because it's very descriptive so it's not registrable, or because someone else is already using some things similar. It doesn't have to be exactly the same. Okay, got it? Okay, Well I know I only have you for sure amount of time. Anything else about protecting business identity before we move on to authors and creative projects? Well, people always ask me what angelo can I use X Y Z as a trademark? You know, what can I use for a trademark? And I'll say anything can serve as a trademark. You can use designs, you can use words, you can use sounds, you can use color as a trademark. You know, there are people who have, like the big Green egg barbecue people, they have actually registered the color green for barbecues. Nobody else can make a green barbecue because they have a registered trademark for the color green for barbecues. Tiffany and Company has their Robin's Egg blue. It's pantone, you know, Pantone eighteen seventy four or something like that. I forget exactly what it is, but they have a Pantone color that is their registered trademark. So just about anything can serve as a trademark, so long as it distinguishes your goods and services from other people's goods and services. Okay, that helps so much, That helps so much. Okay, Well let's talk about now author is another creator and how they protect their work. What about them? Well, the good news is that the minute that you create something that is tangible, so anything you have something excuse me, creative that is reduced to a tangible medium of expression. That's the phrase that we use in the copyright world. It is protected by copyright. Now, the bad news is that unless you register your work with the copyright office, you will not be able to get statutory damages for infringement, you will have to prove remember what proving means. Proving means standing on the front porch lighting hundred dollar bills on fire. You will have to prove of damages in order to recover for the copyright infringement. So people make the mistake of thinking, oh, it's covered by copyright law, and they're right, But you cannot maintain a lawsuit for copyright infringement without a federal registration, at least not in federal court without the federal registration. And you can't get statutory damages unless you have registered your mark before the infringement took place or within four months of the fixation. We call it the fixation when you fixed it in a tangible medium, the fixation of the work. Right, So you've got a limited time to register that if you want to maintain a lawsuit for damages, for statutory damages for infringement of your work. Wow, okay, I'm still I'm still here. I'm still hanging. This is fascinating, a lot to take in, and all of this applies to me so far. So this is great. Okay, anything else for author than other creatives that we need to know, well, I do actually have a course coming out, if I can plug that a little bit. It's called Copyright for Creatives, and it's going to be out within two weeks. So if people are interested in that, they can, you know, go sign up for my newsletter and I'll give them a special launch price. They can just go opt in at trademark doctor dot net and they can sign up for that, and you know, I'll be sending that out to my email list. So if they get on the email list, they can they can get a special lance price on that. Okay, great, Well that's great to know, and you know, I think it's important especially I'm sure that a fair number of people that are listening this particular episode are doing so because they are creating something they're in the process of creating. So it's great to be able to talk about your your course. Okay, So the next thing I want to talk about it I frequently, you know, I love to talk to people. I'm a curious person, as you know. Yes, people are too, right, Yeah, people are always talking about their ideas and they're great ins and what's coming next, and so then I start thinking about what kind of ideas need protecting. Well, Just about any kind of idea can be protected. It depends on, you know, how susceptible is it to theft and people. People sometimes want before they talk to me a non disclosure agreement, even though whatever they say to me is protected. You know, I am duty bound to keep people's secrets as an attorney. But the issue sometimes is people get all wrapped up in not wanting to tell anybody else about their idea. But I like to say ideas are a diamond dozen it's the execution that really matters. And people have all kinds of ideas, but unless you execute upon it, it is not going to do anything for anybody. So I say, just be first to market, right, So you can actually protect your idea for a brand with a trademark. You can protect your creative works with a copyright a registered copyright. And patents can be used to protect inventions, so they have to be useful inventions that are novel meaning new and non obvious meaning that it wouldn't occur to somebody else to you know, put A and B together. But the good news is for patents. No, patents are kind of expensive, but you can get what's called a provisional patent. And that is very inexpensive to file. It's sort of a you know, if if the patent application is the mona Lisa, this is just the sketch, right, So the provisional patent is kind of a sketch of what you're claiming patent rights in, and then you have one year from the filing of that provisional patent to actually file the more formal full patent application. So you've got a year to maybe do market research or you know, find funding or whatever you need to do during that year. So the provisional patent process is really good for people who don't have a lot of money but have a good idea. And I encourage people who have these sorts of ideas to you know, to go ahead and file a provisional patent in order to protect their idea during during the period when they're getting maybe you know, funding, or doing more research or fleshing out the whole the whole idea. Okay, great, got it. Okay, well let's do this. Let's grab our last recurrential because I want to devote the last segment of this episode to the actual money part, the monetization piece. So let's do that. Now, I'm your host, Alice Cortez. Who are I'm here with Angela Langelott. She's an intellectual property attorney specializing in online trademark and copyright issues. She joins it today from Dallas, Texas. After the right, We're going to talk money. Stay with us, will be right back. Elise Cortez is a speaker and engagement and development catalyst. She designs and delivers professional development, leadership and engagement workshops and can bring her expertise to your organization. She will help ignite meaningful development within your workforce that will increase employee engagement, performance and retention. To learn more or to invite Elise to speak to your organization, please visit her at www dot Elise Cortez dot com. She would welcome the opportunity to help get your employees working on purpose. This is working on purpose with Elise Cortez. To reach our program today, send an email to Elise ali Se at Elise Cortez dot com. Now back to working on purpose. If you're just tuning in, my guess is Angela Lang laws and intellectual property attorney specializing in online trademark and copyright issues. An entrepreneur herself and having marketed products online for over ten years. Angela is acutely aware of the unique issues that online marketers face with regard to domain name issues, copyright issues, and cybersquatting. She rebels and helping her clients develop the protect and market their intellectual property assets. I'm your host, Alice Cortez. So now for this last segment here Angela, I want to talk dollars. You know, we all have this idea of wow, we've got this idea, Now what do we do with it? And as you said before, it's one thing to have an idea, it's quite another to get that idea into the hands or the use of the marketplace. So first things first, you know, if we talk about what needs to be considered to even start monetizing, we can start aware with that. So what would you consider to be the steps or the major things people needed to consider even start that process. Well, first, you really need to make sure that you've properly protected your IP because if you don't, you're just opening the door for everybody else to steal your idea. Protect it, and then your left sort of you know outside knocking going hey, hey that was my idea, Let me in, you know, it's always disheartening when that happens. But there are a lot of you know, people out there who don't respect other people's ideas or intellectual property rights, and they will just steal stuff right out from under your nose. When you have a registration via a copyright registration or a trademark registration or provisional patent on file, it discourages that sort of theft because people know that you've proven that you were the first one to use it or think of it, or use it as a brand, So it discourages that. So that's the first thing that you want to do, is you want to ensure that it's properly protected. The second thing that you would like to do is make sure that you have some sort of non disclosure agreement or an agreement that says, you know, I'm sharing this with you, you agree not to poach my idea, and you know I'm I am busily creating courses for creatives so that they know all these things. Because it's a wild West out there, at least people will just steal your stuff and they won't think twice about it. Well, thank you for the work you're doing, because I know how much it takes to create something, So thank you for that. Well, then let's talk next about what gets in the way. Then we know that we need to protect this stuff. Now, what gets in the way or what do people encounter as problems trying to monetize an idea? Well, sometimes it's just about knowledge, you know, they don't know what people will pay for right And sometimes it's cost they don't have the money to you know, get a trademark registration, or you know, they don't know how Sometimes it's a combination of both. They don't know that they're supposed to register their copyright, they don't know that there's supposed to register their trademark. They don't know that there is such a thing as a provisional patent, so they think they have to come up with a bunch of money to get a you know, an official, full size patent. And a lot of the problem too is that they don't know who to hire. So a lot of people will go to a general attorney. And general attorneys, you know, they're fine for some things, but when you get into a specialized area like intellectual property, when you go to a generalist attorney. And I see this all the time with trademark applications. They really don't know what they're doing, and they just think, oh, you know, I'll do an exact match search on the trademark. I will file it. How hard can it be? And then they get the rejection back four months later, and then the client comes to me and says, hey, can you help me with this? And I have to give them the bad news that, you know, it never should have been filed in the first place because there was this other mark out there. So a lot of it is, you know, knowledge about what to do, who to hire, how much it's going to cost, how to save money on this sort of stuff, etc. Okay, great, Okay. My next question here thinking about this, and I'm in the same spot too oftentimes, is we get these great ideas and we think, okay, well, what do we do with them? How can we get them to market? How can we monetize them? So how are creatives monetizing their ideas? For example, Well, there's lots of ways to do it. One of the best ways is just to create an online course. People will pay you for what you know, and they should pay you for what they know what you know, and you can protect those via copyright Now you can load the files onto a disk at computer disc and submit them to the Copyright Office for protection. It's a pretty inexpensive process you can do that you can protect, for example, your blog content. Although blog content is kind of weird because you're adding to it all the time and the copyright law kind of didn't contemplate the sort of material that gets added to maybe on a daily basis, So that's kind of an interesting thing to register with the copyright Office. For your physical products, you can get a design trademark, you can get a design patent, you can get a copyright on your design. So there's a number of ways to protect physical products, depending on what aspect or the product you want to protect. So you would get a patent if you wanted to protect the useful aspect of the product, and you can also get a design patent if you want to protect a certain way the product is styled or looks. You can also get a trademark for designs and you can license the IP to others. Now, this is a great way to exploit, and I say exploit in a good way your intellectual property. So say, for example that you have a patent on a useful invention, but you don't have the capital to bring that to market and you kind of don't want to get involved with the production aspect of it. You can strike a licensing deal with a manufacturer to manufacture the product and perhaps market the product. So if you have an idea, you have for a patent twenty years from the date of filing to earn money in licensing deals or what you know, what have you from that idea? And there are people out there that will pay you for those ideas and actually bring your product to market. So you sit back and collect your royalties and the manufacturer manufactures it and markets it. It's a great way to monetize your intellectual property. What a great idea. I certainly know people who have done that, but I didn't realize we'll always behind it and the benefits of it. So that's that's fantastic. The other thing that I think about because I've got a couple of things that I do. I do my my consulting, my speaking, and I have a nonprofit as well. And sometimes people would ask, or how do you decide when to charge in this case, whether to monetize? How do we decide that? Well, you can ask there's a lot of ways to survey your potential market and ask them about what they might like. You know, I do a lot of marketing on Facebook, and I love Facebook in part because everybody's there. It seems like, I know a lot of people are ditching Facebook or privacy issues, but it's still a great way to market something or find out what a potential audience is looking for. You can also go to qua where people you know, ask questions or read it, read it. They ask a lot of questions. You can see what are the questions that people are asking, and you can ask people, hey, you know, would you be interested in X? You know, what do you think about this product? Or what kinds of problems are you having? So ask people what problems are they experiencing? What problems can you solve for them? That can be the genesis of a bunch of ideas because people will pay to have their problems solved, and that's what we as entrepreneurs are set up to do. That's what we love to do. That is incredibly helpful Angela for me, that makes so much sense. What a concept to ask people what they want and what they pay for it? Okay, okay, Well, I'm interested and I want to help. Now that we've been talking a lot about how to go about this and the mechanics of what's involved, the legalities of it, etc. Now let's go back to the world that I end up so well, and that's inspiration and also example. So can you give us a couple of examples of people who you know of who monetized an idea well and why do you think they're so successful? Well? One of my favorite examples is Marie for Leo. She runs B School, which is basically an online course for women who want to start their own online businesses. And what Marie does really well is she's an attractive personality. I'm not just physically attractive, but although she is very, very pretty, she has an energy and people like to watch her on camera and like to learn from her. So she's a great example. She's monetized the heck out of B School. It earns, you know, probably a million dollars or more a year. Another great example of someone who's really monetized his personality and his content is Brendan Burchard. He's done a lot of courses that have really helped people change their life, think about life in a new way. He's done courses about how to shoot video. So basically he's taken his whole business and broken it down into products. So he's productized his whole business. So he shoots video, he creates a course that teaches people how he shoots his video. So there's a lot of ways to monetize what we all do. And I think the most important thing is to just put out there whatever it is that you like to do. For example, I love to do video marketing and I'm really good at it and people like to watch me on camera, so I do a lot of video marketing. It's been very successful and very helpful from my law practice. And you know, I do video almost every day on Facebook about my law practice. And there is a never ending stream of subjects upon which I can, you know, expound in trademark law and copyright law and patents. So you know, those are examples of people who are very successful at monetizing their ideas. I love Murray for Leo and Brendan Burchard both. I think they're both doing a great job. Let's talk a little bit more about about them. I do know of Brendan's work. I picked up one of his books years ago and thought it was quite good. I didn't realize that he had created this whole set of offerings. That makes a lot of sense to me if everything is hanging together. So I guess the first question I would ask of him or either of them is do you know do they have help? Are they doing this pretty much themselves or do they have any any help at all? Any staff? Oh? Yeah, everybody does. I mean there becomes a time when in your business you just need to get help. And they both have huge teams of people to help them and to do social media for them. It looks like they're a one man show, but you peek behind the curtain and they're not doing all this alone. So what we should do as entrepreneurs is do what we love and what we're uniquely qualified to do. I'm uniquely qualified to talk about trademark law and to write about trademark law. I can't. I can't offload that to another member of my team. I have to do that. But you know, members of my team can do things like set up my social media posting, and you know, handle customer service issues when people have returns, questions or can't access the website. You know, there's all kinds of things that go on, so it's important to have a team. And I think people assume that they're doing this all on their own. They're not. They're just the front facing so they're the hostess, you know, the back of the house, the kitchen, there's all kinds of people working in the kitchen, but there's the forward facing public public image of the company, and that's them. They're monetizing that they've branded themselves, right, So that's what people see. They don't see the wizardry and the technology that goes into running the show behind the scenes. I appreciated how you explicated that, Angela, because it does look like these people, or at least in Brendan is running his own one man show and making it look like he's got it all covered. And I think that's brilliant. He's got a brand, he's put it out there and it's recognizing them will it works. So it's just good to know that they do have help and that they're not doing it at all about himself. Otherwise I was really going to wonder what am I doing with my day? Well, you know, I think I think entrepreneurs, I think they sort of idealize these public figures who are very successful and they wonder, you know, how do they do it all? And I think sometimes the public figures themselves perpetrate this notion that, oh, I'm just doing everything myself. And Gary V. I love Gary V. I'm not criticizing him at all, but he makes it look like he's doing all this stuff. And he does do a lot of stuff, but I can guarantee you he's got a whole team behind the scenes doing all this stuff. Right. He's not posting to his social media accounts. He's got a team for that. So he may be walking down the street with the camera phone in his face, you know, recording whatever is his message for the day, and that's fine, but he's not the one doing the work behind the scenes of uploading it to social media or editing it or putting in the intro or anything else. So I think people need to be aware that just because you only see the front of the house doesn't mean there's not a whole bunch of other stuff going on behind the scenes. I don't think you have to do it all alone. So great, so great, All right, we're all most to the end of this already. Here Angela goes so fast, and I like to give my guests the last word, if you will, so you know that this is a show, this being listened to across the globe, and it's about helping them create more meaningful and productive work lives, more meaning and fulfillment in their lives. And so to that end, what would you like to leave them with? And say about one minute, I want everybody to understand that we all get to choose what sort of work we do. And you can say, oh, I have you know, obligations, and I can't just quit, and I can't just do that, and it can't just do that. Well, those are just excuses, and I know I'm going to employ a little tough love here. You get to choose what kind of life you have, and you get to choose what kind of work experience you have. And if you're not finding meaning in your work right now, then think about some ways that you could change that. Ask yourself, how could I not I wish I could? How could I make a change. Could I spend a little time after work, a couple hours a day working on a business that I feel fulfilled about so that I can quit my crappy job that I don't like, but everybody needs to take responsibility for how they're living their life because we only get one here here, sister, here, here, Oh my goodness on a million levels, Mukoba Gandem, which is gonna ask us thank you and for being on the show today and sharing your passion and your intellect. Thank you for having me at least. I've really enjoyed our our talk today. Me too, so glad our paths across and that's why getting out there in the world works. I'm telling you absolutely. If you want to learn more about Angela Langletz and the work she is doing to help entrepreneurs protect a monetize their ideas, so visit her website. It's trademark doctor dot net. One more time trademark doctor dot net and join us next week when we talk with j Bochella about his movement and the work he is doing. He is the author of Bring Your Strengths, The imitation men have been waiting for now. This is a new leadership paradigm that supports women leaders and the hidden demographic of men and leadership positions who are ready to actively support these women in their leadership roles should finished in conversation. See you there. Remember that works at least one point of alive. So let's work on Purpose. We hope you've enjoyed this week's program. Be sure to tune in to Working on Purpose, featuring your host, Alice Cortez, each week on the Voice America Empowerment Channel. This week, find your life's purpose at work