There are a lot of things you should be doing right now and this blog post, “Start Your Business Right,” is Part III of a 3-Part blog series that will focus on the planning stages of starting your business. If you have not read Part I and Part II of this blog series, you can read them here. As mentioned in Part I and Part II, I won’t cover everything in this blog series. However, I wanted to hit on a few small details that are important, long term and easy to overlook.
Trademark Your Brand. I like to trademark my brands for a couple of reasons. First, you DO protect your brand and investment by having a trademark. But, in reality, to enforce the trademark will take monitoring and legal investment. So, depending on your business, that may not be very likely path for you to go down. But, the other reason I like to trademark my brands is because of what I said in Part II of this “Start Your Business Right!” blog series, which is to “Cast a Bigger Shadow.” When you can legally put the TM or ® symbol after your brand names, it just shows customers you are serious about your business, enhances your credibility, and lowers their risk threshold for doing business with you.
You can file a trademark yourself directly with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO.gov) and they give you a lot of instructions at their website on how to do it. The cost is generally $325-$375 per trademark class. There are also online sites that can help you do it for a higher price. This is one where I like to work with a local patent and trademark attorney and pay them to do it. The cost generally is in the $800-$1200 range, so much more expensive, but I like leveraging their expertise on how to put the filing together properly with the right submission articles and also their ability to respond appropriately to feedback from the USPTO when they send back questions or correspondence.
Again, I ‘press the easy button,’ but if the money spent on the trademark attorney was better used in another area of the business, then I would recommend doing it yourself and paying the lower USPTO fees.
What about patents in addition to trademarks? If you’re just starting your business it may be too early to consider a patent, except for maybe a provisional one. But in general, I would recommend holding off on patents until your cash flow is really strong. The patent process is much more costly and complicated and we’ll include some blogs about that in future posts on Jesus Led Business.
Get an Accounting System. Lastly, in this blog post, but definitely not last in terms of what you need to do to start your business right, determine what you want to use for your accounting system and get a chart of accounts configured. Everything we talked about in Part I and Part II of this blog series has triggered a cost. So, you’ve already spent/invested some money into your business. You want to make sure you’re tracking that and taking advantage of all the business write-offs and expenses you can.
Some of the obvious choices when it comes to picking an accounting system is going with some of the small business industry leading systems like QuickBooks or Sage 50 (formerly Peachtree). The benefits of choosing one of these is that they are affordable and they have a lot of financial professionals who are familiar with them, which can make bookkeeping and taxes go a little smoother. However, thanks to the explosion of great web software, I think there are other options you should consider. Of course, a lot of this decision depends on the type of business you are starting. If you are planning to be a Government Contractor, you probably should stick with something more known in the industry like QuickBooks or Sage 50 and eventually, as you grow, you may end up having to invest in an expensive system like GovWin or Microsoft Dynamics NAV. But for most new businesses, I recommend exploring some of these online accounting systems because what they will provide you with is:
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