Who Owns Your Work?

Hey everybody, it's Tara Bryan and you are listening to the Course Building Secrets podcast. Whether you're a coach or a CEO, the success of your team and clients is based on your ability to deliver a consistent experience and guide them on the fastest path to results. This podcast will give you practical real life tips that you can use today to build your online experiences that get results and create raving fans. Why? So you can monetize your expertise and serve more people without adding more time or team to your business. If you're looking to uncover your million dollar framework, package it and use it to scale you're in the right place. Let's dive in.

Hey, everybody, in today's episode, I want to talk about protecting your intellectual capital. What the heck does that mean? So then when we are experts, we go off and do one on one consulting, freelancing or other kinds of work for hire. And most of the time, when we do that, we're actually producing something, we're a customer or a client, right, we're working on one of their projects, we are, you know, involved in doing something that's building something for someone else, that's work for hire, that means that whatever we're producing they, and most of the time, when you're a contractor or a freelancer, or even, you know, a lot of times when you're doing work, you're creating systems or process or tools or training or whatever you're creating, and you're creating it for that company or for that business. And they own whatever it is you're creating. However, when you start to transfer your expertise into something that you're creating, that you own, such as a course, or a program, or a book, or whatever it is, however you package your methodology or framework into a product, that is something that you own. And so you're moving from work to hire, to ownership. And when you do that, you need to think a little bit differently. Because when you package what you're doing into a proprietary framework, or methodology, or whatever you want to call it, it doesn't really matter. That is something now that you own. And so you want to protect and make sure that no one else can take it or no one else can reuse it or do whatever.

So I have somebody who came to me the other day and and she has created this amazing program that she teaches to companies in a classroom setting and wants to transition to move it all online. And one of the challenges that she's having is some of the companies that she wants to sell this to want to put it into their internal system, which most of the time we call learning management system, they want to put it into their ERP system so their employees can access the training. So what she's just been doing is just giving them the workbook, giving them the videos and giving them access to all of it to put in their internal system. The problem with that is that you lose ownership and control over those materials. And so technically, even if it has a copyright symbol on it, even if you have a license agreement, they can take it, whatever they want with it. So if you want to, for example, charge by the number of users that are using your license material, you have no way of telling how many people are using it. And so if you're trying to charge by employee, or by member, you're, you have to rely on what they're telling you versus the data versus, you know, being able to, to control that. And, and that's a really risky place to be especially if this is your lifelong work. If this is your expertise, if this is something like Mike, my client, where you know, she really wants to grow and scale this and turn this into something that she is, you know, continuously producing revenue line. And in so handing off her intellectual capital to somebody else toward party really gives doesn't give her that ability to leverage both from A retrospective, as well as an ownership perspective.

So the key is how do you retain ownership. And that's really where a learning management system and your own learning Messam comes into play, where you put it on your site, you have somebody purchase it from your site, they go through the training the program, whatever you want to call it, on your site, they can put their employees in they contemporaries out, but it's going into your system, it's not going into their system. So that's the base best case scenario. The second way to do this is something that we call dispatching your program to their internal environment, which you easily can do, there's a tool that allows you to do that, again, this is something that we specialize in, if you have questions about it, just reach out to me. But what that does is it basically takes your system and hooks it into their internal system, they're going through their system, meaning an employee logs in, and they can take the courses, but it's actually playing from your, from your learning management so that there's, so you still have the data, you still retain the ownership of the content. And, and so it's a, it's a win win for both, both you and the company, right, because they get what they want in their system. So their employees don't have to login to multiple places. But you also are able to own the material.

If you think about this, just from a practical perspective, whenever you want to update the material, whenever you want to add something new, instead of having to go back to all of your clients and say, here's a new piece, or here's something else that you can download and load. And you actually can just push that out to them, and they have access to it right away. Because that's the other risk rate is, so you have you know, 50 companies that you're working with, and they all you know, want this update, or something break or there's new content, or whatever it is, you'd have to literally give that out to all of them remember all of the different iterations or the different versions that each one of those companies is on and send them one thing that is really time consuming, and really cuts out, to be honest, a lot, a lot of the benefit of automating and building an online program. So you want to streamline it as possible.

So really think about that, not only, of course, in ease of administration for all of this, but also in protecting your intellectual capital because it is reporting that you protect what you have created, you have you protect your room. And the more you hand it out, right, the more you give it out to the the less control you have over that. Because it's different than a book. It's different than training. It's different than you know, other types of sort of modalities that you can send out your expertise him. So that is our spelling tip for the day is really think through that as part of your strategy in in terms of how do you get your message out to the world? How do you help people get the results you want them to get and retain that ownership in your program and your process. Alright, there you go.