This week: from Bulletproof to Futureproof

In this edition, having fixed your legal things right now, lets now make sure you don’t have fix legal things in the future. And we also issue a wake-up call about names:

This week's driver: Bolster & Flag – the two other suits in the plan-landing deck

So you've predicted your legal stuff by auditing the relationships right across your business.  And you've resolved that legal stuff by focussing on repairing the mismatches and shortfalls in those relationships. 

Job done, right? Plan landing guaranteed?

Well, not quite.

Predicting and resolving your legal stuff will have set your business up for success right now. But things in your business will change from how you stand right now. Your plan will contain goals you've yet to hit. So, at time charges by, your business will do things, change things, and agree things to try to get to those goals.

All that doing, changing and agreeing opens the door to new legal issues that could knock your plan sideways.

So predicting and resolving your current legal issues isn't enough. Having bulletproofed your plan, you now need to futureproof it.  And futureproofing your plan requires you to do two more things.

First, you'll need to Bolster. As your business does all those other things, you'll need them to be done in the right way so you don’t inadvertently create new legal stuff that you then have to deal with. You will need your business to get more robust while staying fast. Which sounds like a contradiction in terms but, trust me, is entirely do-able, as we’ll show.

Second, you'll need to Flag. You'll need an early warning system to promptly spot & raise any changes in the environment surrounding your business, so you can respond to those changes quickly, appropriately and effectively. There’s no point having the right ‘relationship first’ tools and approaches if you miss when and where you need to deploy them.

It's only by putting all four of those approaches together - predicting, responding, bolstering and flagging - that you really futureproof your business plan against legal issues and that you really set yourself up to land your long-term plan. 

Miss even one of those four out, and you'll leave your business and your long-term plan vulnerable and exposed.

Over the next few weeks, we'll first go through how to bolster your business so it doesn't create new legal stuff as it goes about its day-to-day. Handily enough, the thing that is crucial to that bolstering is the same thing that lies at the heart of predicting and responding: relationships.

This week's Sleeper: Don't sleep on silence about your name

Names matter. They're how you communicate who you are to people. They're how people differentiate you from others. So a lot of thought quite rightly goes into names. Much googling gets done. Many different options get kicked around. Lots of brainpower and effort gets expended. Much excitement gets unleashed once one is chosen.

But all that thought can create some complacency further down the line. Because having spent all that time, effort and brainpower and having got so excited about the one you pick, it's all too easy to assume that all will be fine, that you covered everything when it comes to your name. And that assumption will only strengthen as more and more time goes by without anyone complaining about your name. 

Don't be fooled by that silence. Don't get lulled into a false sense of security. For one key reason.

When it comes to names, who was there first, wins.

IP technicians will almost certainly tell you its more nuanced than that. And its certainly easy enough to come up with arguments why the first one there shouldn't win, with a ‘newbie’ winning every now and then. But each of those arguments is most likely a siren’s call.

As a general rule, if someone else in your territory and market has been using that name before you, pretty much every IP regime around the world will be on their side (or at least start on there).

That gives anyone who was there first a pretty good reason to come at you. And once you're in one of these fights, they're blooming hard (and expensive) to get out of.

So don't sleep on silence about your name. Stay on your guard over anyone who's unhappy with your name. As CEO, make sure any contact from anyone complaining about your name hits your desk quickly. 

And when you start to read that complaint, don't look for reasons why you're right and they're wrong. Find out who was there first. And if it was them, start from the perspective that they're right and that the onus is on to be 100% positive that its OK for you to use your name. Remember, you want to win the war, not just one battle.

Till next time

Andrew

PS: there is one other thing you can do to further reassure yourself that your business will land its plan. You can get someone who's been there, seen it and done it to help you keep a sure, steady, guiding hand on the tiller, as you move forwards. If you're interested in one of those, let's have a chat.