Trademark Your Brand Early to Maximise Exit Value: Insights from Andrei Mincov

Andrei Mincov, a seasoned trademark specialist, brings a unique blend of expertise and passion to the realm of intellectual property. With nearly three decades of experience, his journey commenced in Russia, sparked by a pivotal moment involving his father’s music rights. This catalysed Andrei’s unwavering dedication to championing creators’ rights. Having worked with global powerhouses such as Apple, Microsoft, and DreamWorks during his tenure at the world-renowned law firm, Baker McKenzie, Andrei has honed an innate understanding of trademark intricacies. As the visionary behind Trademark Factory, he has redefined trademark registration services, offering a guaranteed result for a fixed budget, thus making brand protection a seamless and assured process for business owners.

In this episode, you will be able to:

• Safeguard your business assets by protecting your intellectual property before planning your exit strategy.
• Ensure guaranteed results with trademark registration to secure your brand’s identity and value before exiting the business.
• Learn the importance of trademarking early in your business journey to maximise brand protection and value for a successful exit.
• Discover effective strategies for building and enhancing your brand value in preparation for a business exit.
• Gain insights into successful trademark application strategies that can elevate your brand’s protection and value.

Importance of Early Trademarking

Andrei Mincov emphasises early trademarking due to its time-consuming process, which can stretch to years in certain countries. The sooner a business sets out to acquire its trademark, the earlier its brand gets protection, preventing potential infringements. More than just a precaution, early trademarking is a strategic move that maximises a brand’s value, thereby increasing the business worth, a crucial consideration when planning an exit.

Watch the episode here:

Welcome to the podcast that’s dedicated to helping business owners to prepare for exit so you can maximise value and exit on your terms. This is the Exit Insights Podcast presented by Succession Plus. I’m Darryl Bates-Brownsword, and today I’m talking to Andrei Mincov.

Andrei is a trademark specialist, and we’re going to explore all things around protecting the IP, how you can protect your IP, and specifically around trademarks, but leading up to an exit, why do you want to get this done? Why do you need to start thinking about it early? Andrei, welcome. Thanks for joining me today.

Thanks for having me. Excited to be here, Darryl.

Excellent. Now, Andrei, look, why don’t you just give, we’re going to dig into. I’m sure you’ve got a case study that you want to share with us, but if you can just give us a quick headline intro. How did you get into trademarks and what’s your background to get into trademarks?

Yeah, so I’ve been in the intellectual property field for close to 30 years now. It all started with my dad back in Russia where I was born. You can see it in my name, you can probably hear it in my accent as well. So I was born in Russia. Lived big chunk of my life there. So he was a famous composer, and one day he caught a radio station stealing his music to turn that song into an ad for Samsung without his permission. And I was attending my first law school back in the day, and he asked me if I could help him. And I knew nothing about copyright, knew nothing about intellectual property but I’ve admired my dad and I’ve always wanted know get his approval. So I said, okay, let’s figure it out. And what also helped is that Russia just switched from the soviet copyright laws to free market copyright laws. So there weren’t really a lot of experienced lawyers who knew this anyway, so I went in and we had to take this case all the way up to one instance below the top court of the nation, right, with all the appeals and all of that. So eventually we won. And I got so passionate about helping people protect that which only exists because they created it that it became my profession. And so he was my first and favorite client, as I like to put it. But besides helping him, and really before I left Russia in seven, there had not been a single federal TV station in Russia that I had not sued successfully for my dad’s music. Every single one of them wanted to give it a shot, but they only did it once, and once they lost. If we caught them the next time around, all I had to do was. Hey, we got you again. Here’s the credit card number. Send the money.

So you had to leave Russia because you ran out of TV stations, is that right?

And so. But also, besides him, I’ve worked for the biggest international law firm in the world, Baker McKenzie. Here’s where I did work for Apple, Microsoft, DreamWorks, JK, Rowling. Like all the big names you can think of, I’ve probably done something for them back in Russia. And so in o seven, I had enough of life in Russia.

And I said to myself, I want to explore what else is there in the world. And so I moved to Canada, had to go back to law school there, did the full three laws, the three years of law school, and then finished top of my class in half of courses, top ten in the remaining ones, and got a grand total of zero interviews for a job in a Canadian law firm. And that was painful. That was really frustrating. That made me doubt a lot of things in my life. But what helped is I discovered Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Rob Kiyosaki. And I said to myself, you know what? I don’t want to go back to Russia. I don’t want to become homeless. So might as well start my own law firm, which I did, knowing absolutely nothing about how to run your own business. And very quickly, I discovered that all of my experience as a lawyer had very little to do with how successful the firm is going to be. That I needed to learn how to market and how to sell, how to do the finances, how to do h. Like, all of those things, right?

Yeah. And so one of the decisions was, we got to stop being everything to everybody and niche, down to something that’s scalable, where Andrei wouldn’t need to do everything on his own. And so Trademark Factory was born, and we’ve been in business for. Well, the firm has been in business since 2011, but under the brand Trademark Factory since 2013, so over ten years now. And the one thing that kept us afloat was the offer, something that I came up with basically on the first day because I was so scared to go to the market with an offer that’s the same as everyone else’s.

And so I came up with the idea of, hey, business owners, they don’t really want to become experts in trademarks. All they want is to pay somebody the money that they know exactly how much the whole thing is going to cost from start to finish, and they’re going to get the result that they’re paying for. And so Trademark Factory’s offer was born, basically, we say trademark factory offers trademark registration services with a guaranteed result for a guaranteed budget. Right.

And I’ve done a ton of mistakes in these ten years trying to build this business. Like a lot of stupid shit that, looking back, I wish I hadn’t done. But the one thing again that kept us afloat is this offer. Because serious business owners who want to protect their brands when they hear about it and they compare it to what they’re going to pay if they go.

Directly to a law firm or to the horrible results they’re going to get if they file the trademarks themselves or through those $69 trademark websites, it just becomes an obvious choice.

Brilliant. So you slipped that in. So just tell us again, what is that offer that’s kept you going at the Trademark Factory? Just say it slowly so that everyone can hear it.

Okay. So it’s trademark registration with a guaranteed result for a guaranteed budget. Guaranteed result means if we can give you the government to say, yes, that’s a great trademark, we’re ready to get it registered. You get all your money back.

So you’ve totally de-risked it for the business owner and said, look, you know exactly what you’re getting and exactly how much you’re paying for it. And that’s the fundamentals of a fair deal, right?

Yeah. There are two parts of this, right? The guarantee of the result and the guarantee of the budget. And over the years we had people who try to copy us, but they only copied one part. And copying only one part doesn’t make any sense because if you only say, well, it’s a flat fee, but you have no incentive to fight as hard as you need to because there’s a refund risk for you, well, you’re not giving the clients what they need. And if you say, well, there’s just a money back guarantee, all you do, again, is you’re not fighting for them as hard as you should. With Trademark Factory, you get the best of both worlds.

And there’s a lesson for business owners there, whenever they’re crafting or drafting a proposition is what do I get specifically and how much is it going to cost? And I need those two elements to determine if it’s value. And the reminder is that it’s always the client that determines value, not the seller. So you tell them what you get and here’s how much it’s going to cost, and they’ll go, yes, that sounds like value to me. Where do I sign? It’s as simple as that, isn’t it?

And one of the things that I realised recently, and everyone talks about it, but for me was like coming to one ear, coming out the other is when they talk about figuring out your ideal.

Yeah.

ideal target audience for marketing. It was because for many years, I was like, well, that’s entrepreneurs in North America who want to protect their brands. And it sort of worked, but I only realised what it actually means probably in the last six months, is that the ideal audience are people inside this segment who, once they hear the offer they’re like, okay, great, here’s my credit card. You don’t need to do any selling to them. You don’t need to do any convincing. Once they hear it, they’re like, I want this. And so then the marketing challenge becomes no longer like, hey, how do we put this in front of everybody? How do we put it in front of entrepreneurs? But how do we put it in front of those entrepreneurs who are ready to buy this right now?

Right, the right people.

Then you become a lot more selective about who you put this offer in front of very interesting.

Well, I never thought we’d be talking about how to craft and build your proposition, but it’s something that we all need to get right. So who is our audience? What’s the problem we solve for them? Where do we find them? Where does that audience hang around and how much are we going to charge for it? They’re the four elements, I think, of a proposition when we work with our clients and go, you get those four elements right, and then you dig deeper and there’s your marketing strategy, and then you can put your marketing plan about. How you’re going to put all that into play. But Andrei, yes, tell us about we came here to talk about trademarks and a little bit about, hopefully you can help us around IP and specifically around business owners in that SME marketplace who are looking to protect their business and they think they’ve built something a bit special and they want to take that first step towards protecting it. What are our choices of protecting our. If we think we’ve got some intellectual property and we want to protect it. Where do we start?

And really, this is the reason why I wanted. This is why I thought us having this interview for your show made so much sense. Because if you’re an entrepreneur who is considering an exit, at some point you have to have built something of value for it to be acquired by someone else.

Right.

And a big chunk of that value is usually IP, is your ability to. If you watch shark tank.

Right. Dragons den in the UK, for UK listeners.

One of the questions that the sharks, the investors. The dragons always like to ask is what would stop richer company from replicating the exact same thing? And it’s a great question because you’ve built something, you’ve proven the model. What is now stopping company with 100 times more money from just offering the same thing and being able to buy their audience. And usually the one thing that can stop them is IP, whether it’s patent on the product or the method. It could be your copyright if you’re in a content business. But the one thing that they always look at is the brand.

Have you built a brand that’s known to a significant amount of people who would be coming back even if you sold the company? Actually, on YouTube, I used to do debris for every season of Shark Tank, from one to, I think, to eleven, just every time they mentioned something about IP. And the early seasons were extremely interesting because there was a lot of discussion.

But as we have gone to, I think, season twelve or 13, I realised that it just becomes an obvious thing to them. They don’t even talk about it. Everyone is trademarked, everyone has taken care of it, because that’s how you learn. And really going back to the viewers of this, the listeners, the value of your company to a potential investor when you’re out of it, is either the brand with brand recognition or something else that you can allow them to buy from you and benefit from.

So I don’t know if I’m answering your question or not, really if you want to redirect.

You’re giving some context, which is really helpful. So let’s explore this. We’ve got an audience, we’re talking to business owners out there who are starting to think about their business and we’ve just piqued their interest about. Hang on a sec, maybe I’ve got some IP there that I need to protect and make sure that some big player can’t just come in and wipe me out because they can buy the audience. So they’re starting to think now possibly, have I got something that I need to trademark that I can protect? So how do they know if they’ve got something that is worth or should be protected? What will they have in their business that they can protect?

Yeah, so if we talk about brands and talking about trademarks, I have basically a two step process for people to realise whether protecting the brand should even be considered by them. The first question to ask is, will I still, assuming everything works out, if everything goes well, if I’m successful with this business, will I still be using this brand two, three years from now?

Yeah. Okay.

If the answer to that is no, like, if it’s a short term thing, then probably you don’t need a trademark because the trademarking process takes a long time. Right. If we’re talking about us, it’s about a year and a half. If we’re talking Canada, like four plus years. If we’re talking EU or the UK, it’s a little bit under a year, but it’s still a noticeable amount of time.

So let’s say that again, it can take between, in the western world, let’s say between one and four years to get your trademark in place, if you’ve got one.

Yeah.

Okay. So that’s a key point.

I will come back to it when we discuss when you want to file your trademark. But first question you ask yourself is. Hey, is it still going to be around? And the next question you ask yourself is, assuming I’m successful, assuming that the brand is still around, is the brand helping me at all to get more business? Are people finding me because of that brand? Are people buying more from me because of this brand? Am I getting better talent who want to work for me because of the brand? Am I getting all of those things you ask yourself? And if the answer is, well, the brand will help a little bit or help a lot, then the obvious answer is, you got to get it trademarked, because if you don’t own your brand. You don’t really have a brand.

Yeah, exactly. Okay.

All you’ve got, you’ve got a name, you’ve got some logo, you got some tagline that you want to be your brand. But until you can legally stop your competitors from using something very similar to what you think is your brand, it’s Not a brand, it’s a wish. Right. And the only way to own that, the only way to legally own your brand is by getting a trademark. There’s really no way to do.

Yeah. And the thought that’s gone through my head as you were speaking then, Andrei is in the early stages of business owner. The first thing they’ll do is they’ll get a logo and they’ll start to develop in their mind, their brand. And at that point, their first bit of branding work that they do, the brand becomes valuable to them. And at some point, if they keep promoting it, the brand is going to become valuable to others. So outside of their business. And at that point, that’s when you got to start thinking about, I got to trademark this baby and protect it because we’ve created something of value.

Actually, I’ve come up with some sort of a chart. I’m going to try to illustrate this with my hands. Talk us through it. So there’s this moment in time when a business owner, an entrepreneur, comes up with an idea for the brand, whether it’s a name, a logo, something. Right, it’s in their head, right. There’s that moment in time and at this moment, the value of the brand is zero. There’s a potential value that’s probably more than zero, but the actual value is zero because nobody knows about it. You haven’t done anything with that brand. It’s just a thought.

It’s also at that point where the brand is the most trademarkable. I don’t know if it’s trademarkable. It might already not be trademarkable, but it will never be more trademarkable than in that second when you come up with the brand. And so as the time goes by, the value of the brand goes up because more and more people know about it. They’ve touched your product, they’ve touched your service, they’ve read some reviews.

So the brand value goes up, but the registrability goes down with the risk that someone else looks at it and say, oh, that’s a good brand, let me take it from me, or even independently comes up with something similar. So the gap grows and grows and grows and grows, because again, value goes up, registrability goes down. And at some point, that gap is so big that you realize that, oh, my God, I’ve worked all this time. I’ve invested all this time, all this money, all this energy, building someone else’s brand, because I don’t own it. And so you have to go back to the drawing board, you have to inform all of your customers that, you know what? We got this demand letter from those nasty people who took advantage of us. Now, we’re no longer going to be selling our products under this name, we’re going to be selling our products under that name. It’s painful and it costs a lot of money.

So let’s unpack that for example, now, in the UK, vacuum cleaners are known as Hoover.

Yeah

Right. So we know that a brand name Hoover is a brand of vacuum cleaners, but all vacuum cleaners are generically known as Hoovers. So we’ve arrived at that stage. And I guess there’s a similar in the US. I bet if you said something, there’ll be a similar. Like all smartphones may be known generically as iPhones.

Let me google it for you.

Yeah, yeah, well, exactly.

So does that mean.

So the Hoover company, we’re now at this point, if they tried to trademark the word Hoover today, it wouldn’t get through because it’s already generically known as an activity rather than a brand. Is that what you’re saying here? It’s too late for them. Sorry, guys, you’ve missed the boat.

It could be that, but it also could be that someone else takes over. And files their own trademark and goes after them.

Well, that as well.

Yeah. Imagine for 1 second that let’s say Coca Cola didn’t trademark their brand, which they filed in 1892, but let’s pretend they didn’t. Right. And they start building all their factories, they start paying millions for their ads. But they don’t own. Right. I’m sure there’s going to be someone smart enough to go run to the trademark’s office, file for their trademark, and then they would force the company to make a decision. Do we fight this or do we just give them some money or do we change the brand?

And when you’re as big as Coca Cola, yeah, it doesn’t matter anymore because you’ve got all the money in the world to throw on lawsuits and lawyers and all of that. But usually what happens is that someone takes over the brand long before you have all these resources. Right.

And if you’re a small business.

Exactly. When you’re a small business, you don’t have an extra $150,000 to spend on lawyers to prove that hey, I was here first. The world knows us under this brand. You don’t have the luxury of switching your focus from growing your business to going to court, doing all those depositions and worrying every day, am I going to keep the brand or not? That’s the biggest problem.

Yeah, exactly.

In context of exits, that’s a harder thing to consider because imagine you’re an investor, you’re looking at a company, and not only is their brand not trademarked, they’re actually in a trademark litigation right now trying to fight with someone else, whether they own the brand or not. How much money are you going to give them for valuation? How much will this affect your valuation, knowing that they’re in active fight over the brand name?

Yeah, exactly. That’s really going to devalue the business, isn’t it?

Yeah.

And I guess that’s also links to the importance of if you start a business and you start developing a, you’ve got your business brand and then you might start developing products or processes. If you’re a service company, you might develop a process and you know the process. And we know that if you name a process, then you own the process. I’ll get your inputs on that in a sec. And I guess you want to get the domain names for websites and lock those in even if you don’t have a website fairly quickly as well. So you own that before someone snitches it from you.

Absolutely. Because naming and owning is a great strategy for building unique selling property. It’s the easiest way to build something unique about you. I’ve actually had an example that I came up with. I’m trying to remember what it was. Yeah. So let’s say you’re an accounting firm, right? And what you do is you help people with their taxes. It’s very hard for you to explain to people, hey, we’re better than those other accountants because everyone’s doing pretty much the same thing, and the only way for people to know is to use you. Right. And if there’s this uncertainty, it’s hard. But if you say, hey, we’re the only accounting firm that uses our proprietary IHNC method to minimize your taxes and maximize your returns, this IHNC formula has allowed us to help thousands of clients. We’re the best in the field suddenly it feels more legit. Right.

And if you ask them, what the hell does IHNC stand for? It stands for I have no clue. But it doesn’t really even matter what it means, because if you say, this is, and again, this is a joking example, but your ability to say, we’re the only ones who is extremely important in the marketplace. And if what you do is exactly the same as everyone else, you still want to have the ability to say, we’re the only ones who and you can do that with branding. Going back to Robert Kiyosaki. Remember his cash flow quadrant?

Yeah.

So he knew he couldn’t own the idea. Know four types of entrepreneur or businesses or business streams. Like the entrepreneur, I’m sorry, employee, small business. What is this? Investor and es. Business owner and investor. Right.

So he knew he couldn’t own that, but what he did is he drew the chart with four letters and he trademarked that as a graph, and now he owns that  and that’s beautiful because It allowed him to make a lot of money teaching this to others and being able to prevent someone else from saying, oh, we also teach the exact same thing they can.

Trademarking is going back to this service provider, our accountant, with their process. And they’ve got this process and they’ve named the process. Can they trademark the process or are they trademarking the name of the process? What exactly is it that they’re protecting?

Yeah, they’re trademarking either the name or graphical representation of it.

Okay.

They’re not trademarked. You can’t, through a trademark, protect the actual process. You can’t stop people from copying the process itself. And again, that’s what patents are for. If you can get a patent on your unique process, maybe it’s something you should consider doing problem with patents, they take even longer. Than trademarks to get. They cost a lot more and you have to pay every year to maintain them, unlike trademarks, and they expire pretty quickly. So the patents are the shortest lived type of intellectual property out there. It’s just 20 years. And if you can’t count five or six years that it’s going to take you to get one. You only get 1415 years of life. And then you can’t renew them. Trademarks is the only type of IP that in theory, can live forever. You can renew, renew.

And so I’ve heard it discussed with others in this field about the best way to protect if you’ve got a process and your process is your formula, and you might talk about Gerber’s e myth process. 

I was on trademark for Michael Gerber, by the way.

Well done. So one of the ways to protect your process is to publish it. And if you publish a book and you go, here’s our process. We wrote this process. It’s ours. Aren’t we clever? It’s our process and it’s in a book. And because the book is published, then it’s always going to come back to you. So everyone out there talks about, hey, look, you got to work on your business and not in your business. And most of the population. Hang on a sec, I read that in the e myth book. That’s Gerber’s stuff, isn’t it? Because he published it and got PR and popularity around his book. What’s your thoughts on that?

Yeah, so there’s a big difference between authorship and ownership. So with that, Michael Gerber has the authorship, he wrote this, he explained this, but by putting it out there, he actually relinquished any possibility of ever owning the process itself. Because really, you can’t get anything patented if you’ve disclosed it to the public.

Right.

But by putting it in the book. What copyright does, which is what content is for. All right. Copyright is to protect content. So he can prevent anyone from taking like two pages from the book and slapping it on their website and say, well, I came up with this. Right? So it’s the copying from the book that copyright protects. And he owns it, of course, or saying that someone else came up with it, because he did. And he can prove it in the book, but by publishing. So here’s actually a strategy that I’ve seen used quite a lot, is if you can’t afford a patent. If you can’t get something out there, if you want to be sure that it’s safe for you to use it, that no one else goes and patents something like this, then, yes, you disclose it to the world, and by doing that, you make the idea, the process, the invention, unpatentable. Right. And this might not give you the ownership, this will not allow you to go after others, but it will protect you from them going after you.

And then it becomes a commercial decision, I guess, especially if it’s a small business owner and how cheap it is to publish nowadays to go. Look, if I get the word out there and people see and read the book, then they’re going to come to me to get access to that process, because I designed the process, or my business designed the process. Therefore, by extension, our business should be the best people at providing that. And it just becomes a PR strategy. Is that what you’re suggesting there?

Yeah. Look, intellectual property is a tool, right? It’s not the end goal. So every business owner should consider it like.

Good point.

How do we use it to our benefit? Why do we need this? What are we trying to accomplish with this? Are we trying to create a monopoly on the process? Or are we trying to protect ourselves? Are we trying to grow? What’s the goal? And you’re absolutely right. The first question you should be asking yourself is, how does this help us become a stronger business? And then you find which of the tools works for you. Some of them could be trademarks, some of them could be other types of intellectual property, some of them could be license agreements, like all of those things. Again, they don’t have any value unless they serve the purpose for your business.

Yeah. So, Andrei, I’m thinking this has been really helpful. You’ve planted the seed in many business owners minds today around. Hang on a sec. I’ve probably got something here that I can trademark. If I trademark it, it’s that little bit of extra protection for my business. It’s going to make it de-risk my business when it comes time to exit and just add that little bit of extra value, which means I might increase my valuation, or at the very least, my valuation might won’t be decreased because I haven’t got it. I need to be thinking about it in advance. Because it can take, depending where I’m based, it can take up to four years to get in place. Have I captured the key messages? What’s the key message? The take home message that you want business owners to hear from us today?

Yeah. The key message is if you are thinking of maybe at some point exiting and getting some money for the business that you’re building, you really got to consider taking care of owning your brand. And it’s going to take a lot of time. So if you think that, hey, we might want to exit six months from now, it means you’re already a year too late at least, right? Because it’s going to take time. So this is the question you should be asking yourself early on. Two questions, right? One, is this business exitable? There’s this great book, John Warrillow, build to sell about how you build a business so that can be sold, not necessarily that you are going to want to sell it, but that is sellable if you did want to. And owning the assets to that business is extremely important. So that’s one thing. And so. If you think that the brand is going to be valuable in that equation for the investor, get it trademarked as early as you can. However much money you’re going to spend on this is going to pay back tenfold, 100 fold. Thousand fold again, Coca Cola’s brand right now is worth over $80 billion. Just the brand itself. Not their factories, not the bottles, not their employers, not their trucks, just the brand. Right. Does it matter how much they paid their lawyers to trademark their brand back in 1892? It doesn’t. It’s probably the best return they’ve ever gotten on anything. Right? And if you realise that, hey, the brand that we’re building is going to be of no use to the investors, they’re probably going to change it to something else anyway, then maybe it’s a good idea for you to. Yeah, of course you don’t need to trademark that, but it’s a good idea for you to go back to your drawing board and say, maybe we can come up with a better brand, something that is sellable, something that is going to add something to that valuation when we are ready to exit. And that’s kind of my biggest message to you. Have a brand that you think is going to be worth something and make sure you own it early on.

Brilliant. Andrei Mincov of thanks for sharing your exit insights with us about trademarking and protecting your business today.

Trademark factory. If you are interested in protecting your brand, we’re happy to help you with that.

Awesome.

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