Taking Ownership of the Legal Side of Your Business

Recently, I have had the same conversation come up with different people a few times in the DMs with my clients. They're bringing up the same thing. And if I'm hearing it more than once, then it means that other people are probably thinking about it too. So I wanted to bring it here. And that is a conversation around all of the pieces that go into running your business and having to kind of piece them together from multiple sources. So I have a few thoughts on this and a few solutions too. So that's what we're gonna do.

Hey, I'm Amy Nesheim, licensed attorney for online business owners and founder of my own business, Artful Contracts. You're listening to Legal Made Easy, the show that makes the legal aspects of online business easy to understand and implement so you can grow your business with confidence knowing you've got it all covered. Let's dive in.

I think sometimes there's this idea that if you hire someone to help you with something, they're going to fix it. They're gonna take it all over and they're going to just make it better, whatever you need, and they're gonna be able to tell you exactly what it is you need. This could be a coach, it could be a lawyer, it could be a consultant. But I think as a business owner, the thing that you realize after doing this a few times is that other people can help you in a certain area. They're good at the thing that they're good at, but they're not necessarily gonna be able to help you with everything. They're not good at the whole thing.

And as a business owner, it's your responsibility to integrate multiple sources of information to create a plan that's best for your business. And that's a lot of work. That is a lot of brain power, it's a lot of effort, but it's your job because no one knows your business as well as you do. No one knows your goals as well as you do. And when you look to someone else, you're giving your power away. And you're giving away responsibility for the future of your business to an extent. You're giving away your control over what happens next, which can be comforting because then if something goes wrong, it's not your fault. But that's a comforting lie. It's not the truth. You still are ultimately responsible. You're the only one who cares as much as you do about your business.

So the reason this is coming up is because I've had this conversation a couple of times recently with clients. Specifically, I had a client come to me and say she worked with a local business attorney to get her LLC set up and get some contracts in place, and that's great. But then she found out that the business name that they had talked about was already trademarked. And that was something that was just not on this lawyer's radar. And so I explained that a lot of local lawyers are used to working with local businesses, local small businesses, and they don't think about national trademarks because they're not used to working with businesses that operate on a national scale like we do as online business owners. We don't necessarily have a limited geographic area, which is relevant for trademarks because if you are working in a limited geographic area, it's less important to have trademark protection. So it just wasn't something that this lawyer was used to worrying about, which was, you know, not fun for this client because she had gone to him, relied on him for his advice, but he wasn't thinking in the same scope that she was thinking. And so his advice turned out to be not that great.

Another person came to me and said she had hired a business coach and there was all this coaching. Actually, I've had this conversation a couple of times with a couple of different people, but basically the idea is they hire a business coach who says that they're gonna teach them everything there is to know about running your business, but they don't talk about the legal parts of it. And she, this one person was kind of upset about that because she felt like she had been sold the idea that I'm gonna teach you how to run your business. And this whole big part of it, of the logistics of it, of what you need for your LLCs in your contracts, which is super important, was just totally left out of the conversation. And it was more around offer building and marketing and how to get your clients, but not logistically how to protect yourself while doing it.

And of course, when you look at it from the outside, for me, it makes sense that a coach wouldn't be able to talk about LLCs because they're not a lawyer, they're a coach. So they have their wheelhouse, they talk about offers and marketing and the business side of it. But she's not wrong, that doesn't cover building the entire business from the ground up. It's not everything, it's just the marketing piece of it.

So I guess what I'm getting at is that as the business owner, it's up to you to evaluate the things that you buy. And yes, trust the experts that you're relying on to help you learn. Of course, that is so important, and getting guidance and mentorship from other people who have been where you are is huge. It's huge. But you're the only one who can see the big picture of your business and make sure that you're covering all of the aspects of it. So when you're buying things, it's important to evaluate does this offer everything that I need? Are there any holes that I need to fill? Am I giving my power away? Am I giving my control, my responsibility away to this other person to make the decisions for me? Or am I really treating them as a source of information that can help me make my own decisions?

This is something I think about a lot when I'm working on developing my programs for my students. Because I want, if I am presenting myself as a resource, as an expert in an area, I want to make sure that I am at a minimum teaching my students what the whole picture is so that they can find the gaps. Teaching them what all of the things are that is in my sphere, what all the legal stuff is, so that they can take that and apply it to their business and find the gaps and fill them. I don't want to just say the legal stuff is contracts and here's a contract, that's all you need. Because that's not true. I want to provide well-rounded, fully fleshed out resources so that my students can own their role as the business owner and make those decisions from an informed place.

Because when it comes down to it, that's what taking care of legal is. It's about finding the risks, evaluating them, and then controlling them. And that doesn't mean just contracts or just LLCs. There's a bigger picture to it. And there's the different areas. There's risks in a lot of different areas in your business, and controlling them requires being able to identify them, right?

So that's why I created the system that I use inside of my course, Cover Your Assets. I created the Asset Protection Method so that we can walk through what all those areas of risk are in business, instead of just here's a contract, there's one little piece of it. It's here's something you might not have thought about that involves a risk, you can make the decision to address it or not.

So in my system, in the Asset Protection Method, that starts with getting the baseline in place, creating a stable foundation to grow on. So that involves creating your LLC and putting the systems in place to maintain it because that protects the structure of your business. It protects the interior, the systems of your business. It separates your money from yourself personally so that your business exists on its own. It's its own person, its own entity, and then we build from there.

The first risk we identify is your personal money, potentially being able to lose your personal money. So we safeguard your personal money, we make your business separate, and that's the foundation, that's the baseline. If you do nothing else, that is a great thing to do.

The next step in the Asset Protection Method is building profitable relationships because our businesses as service providers, as coaches, rely on our relationships. That's how we make money, right? Clients, that's how we make money. So the next step is to find the risks in your relationships and guard against them. And we do that with contracts and putting strong boundaries in place using contracts, making sure that you're not facing refund requests, that people are actually paying you, that you know what to do if something goes wrong in your relationships.

So that's the big two. We create the structure for your business and then we create the systems for managing your relationships and controlling the risks in your relationships. That's LLCs and contracts. It's what most of the lawyers in the online space talk about exclusively, but it's not everything. If you stop there, you're not getting the whole picture. And so that's why there's a third phase to the Asset Protection Method that kind of allows you to take a look from the outside and capture everything else depending on what you're doing in your business.

So we look at everything that the public sees that you present out to the public and evaluate the risks that come with each of those actions. So that's things like trademarks, protecting your branding, things like copyrights, protecting your content. It's things like getting your website policy set up, putting disclaimers on your social media pages. It's things like making sure that you understand the requirements for marketing, because there are laws around that, around what you can say in your marketing, how you use testimonials, how you do contests, all of that.

And these three phases work together to make sure you're getting a full picture of all the risks you're taking on just by hanging out your virtual shingle, just by being in business, you are taking risks, and here's what they are, and here's how you manage them. And so there is a lot of if you do this, then here's your potential risk. If you do this, then here's how you manage it. And that allows you to make informed choices from the beginning to say, okay, I'm not gonna go down that road, or all right, I do really want to go down that road, and here's how I'm gonna manage it.

Because again, it is ultimately up to you to be the person who takes control of the risks in your business, who makes sure that all the legal stuff is covered in your business as a business owner. You're the person who's ultimately responsible for the growth and the path, and you're the only person who knows the vision. So you're the only one who can really have a good understanding of everything that you need. But you can only do that if you understand what the potentials are, if you have resources that show you the whole picture.

And honestly, I think that's what makes my program different. That's what makes Cover Your Assets such a unique and valuable resource is the Asset Protection Method, the fact that I give you the tools to see everything that you potentially would need to know, and then manage it.

If you want to make sure that your business is covered on all sides, if you want to make sure you're making informed decisions about the risks that you're taking on in business, if you want to get all the legal stuff in place and run a legally legit business, I'm hosting a free training on Thursday, September 7th, that's gonna walk through the three steps to get all the legal stuff in place to get your business legally legit without having to hire a lawyer. We're going over the Asset Protection Method in a lot more detail, and we're gonna go over some very common mistakes that business owners make that get in the way of getting legally legit.

At the end of that training, I'm providing an opportunity to join my signature program, my annual membership, Cover Your Assets, where we walk through that three-step Asset Protection Method to get everything in place. You have support from me to help you do that with monthly coaching calls and a private community, as well as a whole library of templates to help you implement in every stage of the program. And there are going to be some extra bonuses just for a week from that training.

So if it is before September 7th, I would love to see you there live. And if it's after September 7th, the replay is up on the podcast and it's up on video as well, just until September 15th. So head on over to artfulcontracts.com/live-class to sign up for the live class or to catch the replay.

If you have any questions about the class, if you want me to send you the link directly, or if you have questions about Cover Your Assets and whether it's a good fit for you, feel free to send me a DM over on Instagram. My handle is @artfulcontracts. It's also down in the show notes.

One last reminder: you're the boss, you get to make the decisions, you're in control of the future of your business. And I'm here to empower you to take that control, to take control of the risks of your business by making informed intentional decisions. So, you in?