Welcome to Bulletproof Your Business, how to become legally savvy to make sure that your business doesn’t suffer from a fatal legal mistake. I am so excited to be here with you today, and so excited that you’ve taken this first step to protecting your business and protecting your hard work. I wanted to take a minute to tell you how this course works, unlike some courses, this is not a beginning to end course. So you don’t have to start with module number one and work your way through right to the very end.
If you’ve signed up at one of my workshops, you’ll know that I promise a solution on how to overcome 10 most common legal problems. At last count, there were actually 22 modules to this course. Don’t worry about that, it’s not about that, it’s about if you have a particular legal problem that you want to resolve, you can look it up on the course structure. For example if you’ve got a letter of demand from Getty Images, you can look and say “Cathryn’s covered that in her course, I’m gonna click on and do that module today.”
So in part, it’s a pick and mix that you can go through and you can have a look and see what it is that’s going to meet your needs right now. Perhaps you’re creating a course and you’re concerned about maybe infringing somebody’s copyright. You can go down to that particular part of the course, click on that module and work through that module. I’ve tried to keep each of the modules really short, because as a business owner myself I know that time is always in demand.
I wanna give you enough information to be really helpful, but not so much that you feel bogged down. As you work through the course you will learn things, and the materials will be there for you to come back and remind yourself about the information later on. Some of my modules have links to other material. For example with the Getty Images, not everybody’s going to have received a letter of demand from Getty Images. If you’re in that boat, you’ll see I’ve linked you through to another course, that course is actually free, it’s an eight step process on what to do if you’ve got a letter of demand from Getty Images.
This is meant to be really practical, to help you out. Some things like trademarks can be two whole courses in themselves. One can be the theory and another the practical stuff about how you get it done. So, for trademarks, I’ve linked you through to other courses. For a couple of things like how to bulletproof your social media, that’s a separate thing and there is a paid course if you wanna link through to that one, although you don’t have to.
First work through this course and if you’ve got a particular social media burning question, then you can hop onto the social media course. If there’s no particular burning question that you’ve got about the legal side of your business, I’ve ordered them pretty much in the order of problems that arise for people. So the ones that are the most frequent and seem to cost the most and cause the most stress, I’ve put at the top. But that’s not to say the ones at the bottom aren’t important. So if you don’t have a burning question, work through it from the beginning to the end and if you just do one module every couple of days, you’ll soon work through the whole thing.
Right at the end, the very last thing that I’ve got for you is a checklist for you to fill in, then from that I will be able to provide you with the current legal risks that you have and then the legal action plan. This is unique, as far as I’m aware, to this course, no other lawyers out there are:
- Even providing this information, because they wanna be one-to-one with you so they can charge you more.
- Or providing you with this action plan so that you know what you need to work on.
Don’t be afraid of the action plan, the action plan is a guide, think of it like a shopping list. If you go shopping without a list and you’re very hungry, you might buy things you don’t need and you might forget what you really did need. I’ve had clients come to me before, and they say “I just spent $500 going for an interview or a consultation with another lawyer,” who said, “actually I don’t do intellectual property, go and see Cathryn”.
I’ve had that happen to me three times last year, which is lovely that the lawyers are referring their clients on to me, but frustrating that clients are having to pay for things where they’re not actually getting any benefit. I had another client who came to me because she fired her lawyer, she spent $3,000 on a privacy policy with her lawyer. When I went through her legal needs and a legal action plan with her, it turned out she didn’t even need a privacy policy.
Sometimes what you think you need, is not what you need. So, work through this course, do the checklist at the end and you will get your legal action plan. Some of the things on the legal action plan you’ll be able to do yourself, like the copyright notice on your materials. Some I do recommend that you speak to a lawyer for, for those things you could come to me, I’d love to have you as my client, or you could go to somebody else. One of my modules that I talk about in this course is about how to select the correct lawyer for your business.
I might not be the best fit, I am for a lot of small businesses, but there might be somebody better for you out there. I don’t do every type of law, for example, if you sell your property, I don’t do that, I don’t do conveyancing. In fact, when I sell my property, I go to my conveyancing lawyer. So, if you have a legal problem that I don’t deal with, very often I will know somebody that I’ve referred clients to in the past, or who I would use myself if I had that particular problem.
So that’s this course. Well done for taking the first step on becoming legally savvy and bulletproofing your business. Work through it and if you’ve got any questions, please use the question function. Before you ask your question though, I would ask that you read the other questions and answers, because your question might already have been answered. If I get a question quite a lot, then my intention is to update the material so that it becomes clearer.
The whole point of this course is to make your life easier and to stop you from falling into one of those legal mistakes. I don’t want you to be one of the clients who come into my office and say, I’ve made a legal mistake and then I have to tell you the bad news, that it’s gonna cost you tens of thousands of dollars to fix. This course is to help you be legally savvy and avoid those kinds of traumas and heartaches. So all the very best, ask me questions if you’ve got ’em and I’ll see you on the other side.
Now at the end when you’ve finished your checklist and you get the legal action plan, we’ll schedule a quick one-to-one either by Zoom or on the phone, I will record that for you so that you get to keep that for yourself and I’ll work through that legal action plan with you and answer any questions that you have. I only do that legal action plan with you once you have completed all of the modules. The reason for that is, otherwise people ask me questions that have already been answered in the modules. Our one-to-one session is quite a structured session and it’s a sort of a laser focused session, so we don’t have a lot of time in that session and to give you the best value, I don’t want to spend time answering questions that have already been answered in this course. So all the best with it, you’re gonna be the next Erin Brockovich and get the knowledge, have a great one, see you.
