patents, trademarks, and copyrights can become a invaluable asset in the portfolio of your small business or corporation and ought to be managed temperately and judiciously.
one of the most intimidating questions a small business owner faces when he or she decides to sell their business is “what do i have to sell? ” apart from the phone number, presence and address, and equipment, the main asset that is marketable is goodwill most of the time. Yet the concept of goodwill is subtle and elusive, amorphous, and unmanageable to quantify and monetize.
how do you measure goodwill? How unmanageable would it be for another business to amass the goodwill your business has accrued in the marketplace from scratch? How quickly could they build their own good will specially after the approaching vacuum your exit will inexorably develop? Sure, accountants have artful modes and methods of ginning up the numbers in assist of your goodwill appraisal, yet all the silver tongue number crunching will hushed and still leave you apologetic and uneasy and leave your potential bidders unconvinced.
one surefire way of providing flesh, structure, and a skeleton to assist your goodwill appraisal is the intellectual property portfolio of your business. Specially, if you claim to a potential bidder for your business that your goodwill is worth $x, you can bolster your argument with a united states patent and trademark (uspto) registration and/or a state registration of your trademark. Leastwise now your asserted appraisal of your goodwill has assist in the form of a nice seal and ribbon which can release worries your potential purchaser can have regarding how they can be able to monetize your goodwill.
in addition, if you are in the fabricating industry, a potential bidder can feel more at ease if you can point to a heap of patents you have on the merchandise you make, or the proprietary modes and methods and processes you use in order to manner and conduct your business. Your potential bidder can take ease in the fact that he or she can be given a heap of leverage to claim in the marketplace with patent protection.
now, on the flip side it’s genuine that a portfolio of patents, trademarks, and copyrights can get a bidder to sit up straight and get their eyebrows creasing can likewise be unmanageable to appraise and monetize in their own right. Not all patents, trademarks, and copyrights are enforceable or even invaluable. A heap of patents are not worth the paper they are printed on. A heap of trademarks upon which there is a registration are genuinely enforceable because of their inherent weaknesses. As such, if you are in the perspective of purchasing a business with an intellectual property portfolio, you can want to enlist a patent attorney to take a consider what’s beneath the hood and do some diagnostics on the genuine force and validity and value of the validity and value of the intellectual property portfolio.
as such, business owners who propensity and desire to sell their business sometime in the unfamiliar and distant future would be well advised to immediately commence building up a strong intellectual property portfolio consisting of patents, trademark registrations with the uspto and their secretary of state, and copyright registrations. And on the other side of the transaction, a business purchaser ought to be advised to enlist the services of an able and experienced intellectual property attorney to valuate the force of every intellectual property asset to arrive at a fair validity and value of the business.
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