Are you hesitant to start your client work with a contract because you’re worried you might seem too aggressive or upset your clients? Creating a contract ensures your projects are well-defined, have boundaries, and establish mutual level integrity. Who wouldn’t want that?
Contracts and agreements are some of the pieces of content that we don’t really think about as content because they’re behind the scenes and only seen by a few people. But today we’re talking about contracts, copyrights, and legal protections in your business.
I’m chatting today with Tania Shah, a small business attorney and co-founder of In The Know Legal. Tania explains all things business protection—how to protect your personal finances, how to protect your time and boundaries, where breakdowns happen most often, and why you don’t need to copyright all your content.
Listen in!
Mentioned in This Episode
- Free Business Checklists
- In The Know Legal Affiliate Program
- Client Journey Ebook
- The Content Mastery Lab
About Tania Shah
Tania Shah is a Co-Founder of In The Know Legal, a new legal product company for women entrepreneurs. A serial entrepreneur and proud mom to her little rescue dog, Toothless Johnny (the Chief Dog Officer of all her endeavors), Tania takes pride in paving her way in the legal world. In addition to being a Co-founder at ITKL, Tania owns LawTutors, LLC (an all-women led education company to help law and bar students), Shah Law, PLLC (a business law firm focusing on mom-owned and women-owned businesses) and is a full-time law professor in California.
To learn more about Tania, check out her website, Instagram, Facebook, or LinkedIn.
Transcription
Abby Herman 0:08
Hey there, and welcome to Episode 140 of the content experiment podcast, a podcast that supports the idea that content and marketing are ever moving targets in any business. And it’s okay if you don’t feel like you’re doing it. All right all of the time, you have permission to experiment with little tweaks and changes in your content, to find what works for you, what increases value for your audience, and what grows your business, and most importantly, what feels good for you. I’m Abby Herman, content strategist and coach for online business owners who are ready to make a bigger impact online. I firmly believe that success isn’t about what big marketing brands and so called gurus think is the right thing. It’s about you and your business, your lifestyle, and frankly, your values and belief systems, you get to do business in a way that works for you. Even if you are running a business your own way, there are certain things that you’re legally required to do, or that you’re going to want to do to protect yourself in your time. When I first started my business in 2007, I found most of my clients on a site called guru.com. Business owners who need specialized support post jobs and project opportunities, and freelancers could have been on projects. The terms of the website protected the freelancers for the most part, from being scammed or from scope creep.
Abby Herman 1:34
After I moved away from that site and moved into being a business owner. Instead of a freelancer, I experienced a lot of scope creep. And I also experienced not getting paid for my work because I hadn’t protected myself with a real client contract. But it wasn’t until years later, when an attorney hired me to do work for her that I finally made the move to via contract template for client work. And let me tell you, friends, it’s been a game changer for my business. contracts and agreements are some of the pieces of content that we don’t really think about as content because they’re behind the scenes and only seen by a few people. But today we’re going to talk about the importance of them and some of the other things that you need to do to protect yourself in business. But first, before we get to that, Are you new to the podcast, if you are welcome here, this podcast is full of no nonsense support to help inspire you to get your message out there and give you the actionable steps you need to make it happen so that you can get on with business your own way. If you like what you hear, please hit the subscribe button so you don’t miss another episode. And if you are a repeat listener, make sure you head over there and give this podcast a rating and review I would be so appreciative of that.
Abby Herman 2:56
This podcast is brought to you by content mastery lab, my membership community where we talk about content creation, idea generation, market research, social media strategies, and all the mindset blogs to get in the way of our own visibility plus a whole lot more. Sometimes it takes some time to be brave enough to share our message. And sometimes it takes some time to get the message right. In the lab, we focus on little tweaks and changes in our content to get the best ROI of our time. Investments. Because big sweeping changes take a lot of time, a lot of money and a lot of effort. And they don’t always pay off like we want them to stop floundering with trying to figure it all out yourself and start creating content with the confidence that you’re on the right path, join us monthly or quarterly or commit to a whole year for extra one on one time with me and quarterly planning parties, or where we work through your content together in an intimate group, head to thecontentexperiment.com/lab for more information. And if you use the coupon podcast to sign up, you get to try out your first month for just $1.
Abby Herman 4:07
All right back to our guest. I’m chatting today with Tania Shaw, a small business attorney about all things business protection, how to protect your personal finances, how to protect your time and boundaries where breakdowns happen most and why you don’t need to copyright all of your content. Before we get into the interview. Let me tell you a little more about Tania. Tania is co founder of in the no legal a new legal product company for women entrepreneurs, a serial entrepreneur and proud mom to her little rescue dog toothless Gianni, the chief dog Officer of all of her endeavors Tania takes takes pride in paving her way in the legal world. In addition to being a co founder at in the no legal tiny owns lat tutors, LLC an all women led education company to help law and bar students Shaw law PLLC. A Business Law Firm focusing on mom owned and women owned businesses and is a full time law professor in California. Holy cow. That’s a lot. Tonia was named a top 100, Attorney of 2020 and has her fifth legal book coming out in May of 2021. So it’s just published through her publisher Walters, Cole, Cole, where Tania is excited to be part of in the know legal alongside two fantastic women Lisa Long and Erin Nobles who, in addition to being super smart, and innovative, keep her laughing. Here is our conversation.
Abby Herman 5:37
Hi, Tania, thank you so much for being here today. And joining me.
Tania Shaw 5:41
Hi, Abby. It’s very nice to be here. Thank you for having me.
Abby Herman 5:44
Yeah. So before we dive into our conversation about all things legal, when it comes to business, can you share with listeners what you do and who you do it for?
Tania Shaw 5:55
Sure. So you know, I’m a small business attorney. And I’ve been a small business attorney for 20 years. And mostly, my audience is, you know, all small businesses, all startups, and a lot of times women own mom owned businesses, as well as the my focus. And my two partners. And I, Lisa sigmon. And Aaron nobles, and I started a new company called in the no legal, which is basically empowering the business over with as much legal knowledge and templates and videos and education. So they could do a lot of illegal theirselves themselves with our assistance sort of there in the background.
Abby Herman 6:36
Awesome. And so is that primarily how you work with clients is through templates? Or do you do any one on one work? Do you do custom contracts? and things like that?
Tania Shaw 6:46
Sure. Yes. So both are all three of us, Lisa, Aaron, and myself are all individual attorneys as well. So we have our own practices, right. So you know, I have my own law practice, Lisa does. Lisa and Aaron are partners. So in that way we were custom with our entrepreneurs, in the no legal was created so that we could kind of do a few things for those entrepreneurs, it costs a lot of money, lawyers cost a lot of money, especially if you’ve been doing it for as long as maybe I have. So in the no legal is a sort of a spin off of our practices, which is to, you know, take the price point down by a ton, so that people can or entrepreneurs can have these, quote unquote, templates that they can customize, and all that sort of stuff. So we do both.
Abby Herman 7:32
Okay, fantastic. Now, on this podcast, we spend a lot of time talking about marketing content, and all of that, but there’s a whole nother set. And we’re gonna get to that for sure, yes, but there’s a whole nother type of content that we also need in business. And that’s around the business development and the legal side of our businesses. And with so many businesses starting up right now and growing. Can you share a little bit about why legally protecting your business and your content is so important?
Tania Shaw 8:03
Sure, absolutely. So when we start a business, it’s supposed to be actually like a separate legal person than ourselves. And so we want to treat it as anything a spouse or a baby, if you like your spouse, you know, of course, and we want to treat it, you know, and we want to take care of it, we don’t want to neglect it, and we want to, but at the same time, we want to take care of ourselves, right? So a couple of things, we want to protect the business entity itself, that is what we’ve created, and sort of separate it from ourselves, because it is a different entity, we want to make sure that our personal assets that our lives are protected. And we want to ensure that the relationship that we have with whomever we’re dealing with, whether it’s the client, the vendor, the greater public is secure and well defined, and probably most importantly, for a content creator is to know when I create something, is someone else gonna take it. And I think that’s a big thing for content creators, because there’s so much, you know, there’s such a creative space. This is why they do that, because they have these creative minds. And there’s always this worry, like, I want to share it with the world. I don’t want the world to take my stuff. And so there’s that there’s that balance. And so it was really important. I think that we balanced that I want to share my knowledge, but I don’t want people to take knowledge.
Abby Herman 9:20
Yes, yeah. Can you share a little bit about what you mean by a well defined relationship? What does that look like? And what do we need in place to make sure that our client relationships are well defined short.
Tania Shaw 9:35
So a well defined relationship means, first and foremost, your client services agreement, I call it that they’re calling it a contract. And there is this worry that a contract or an agreement is somehow antagonistic but that’s not doesn’t have to be that way. It actually demonstrates to your client, that you care about the relationship and that you care about your professional integrity. So a well defined relationship. It’s basically number one, just what are the parameters? What are you doing for them? What are you? What are they, you know, contracting you for all that sort of stuff, but also your boundaries, you know, timeline, you know, what you will and won’t do. Expectations are really important. And so if boundaries are it’s like a relationship, any kind of relationship, if boundaries aren’t set in the beginning, then we can get ourselves into trouble. Also, if boundaries aren’t set in the beginning, we can see ourselves perhaps getting lost in the relationship and a little bit blurred, and perhaps we don’t want ourselves to be resentful in any way, or we don’t want to be taken advantage of.
Abby Herman 10:44
I love Yes, the resentment factor when you don’t have boundaries is such It’s huge. I have been in client relationships before where Yeah, I didn’t have a contract or an agreement in place. And so it doesn’t feel good. And when you allow that boundary line to get blurred, and then you and then you decide, I can’t do this. Yeah. You, it’s so difficult to have that conversation with Office almost. Yeah, with the agreement in place, it’s really easy to have that conversation, because it’s all laid out, the client signed it. So funny story, I think it was maybe three, maybe three years ago or so. I don’t remember exactly what I feel like it’s about three, three and a half years ago, I worked with an attorney, well, I should say, an attorney approached me about working together. And I gave her a quote, and, you know, and a scope of work and all of that. And I sent it to her, and she pushed back and she said, I can’t find this because it’s not, it’s not actually a contract. And I because I had been I had been avoiding putting together like an actual contract or something official. And she had templates tonight, and I purchased the templates, and she signed right away. And and, you know, it’s been huge for my business and stuff like that in place and having an official contract that is still signed digitally, through, you know, an online portal type word. But it was so huge to have that in place. And it’s been, it’s felt so much, I have felt so much better about that initial client contact and the like, the signing of the contract since then. And it’s made me so much more confident to have that in place. Because even though I’ve never had to, like push back on the contract, it’s there.
Tania Shaw 12:48
And they’re seeing it’s there. They know it’s there. Yeah. And, and, and, and I think one of the biggest fears from any, any industry, especially the founding of this creative and like, is it I don’t like why am I starting to miss out on a whole legal foot. And and I can’t stress enough that it also shows your client that and I said this before, but that you actually care about the relationship. And you’re saying, Hey, I also This protects you too, right? So you have and it shows your professional integrity, and that you care. And so it’s not there’s this myth that it’s like, oh, she gave me a contract. So anybody who’s like, Oh, no, I don’t work with contracts. I don’t want you to be like, Okay, well, I don’t I don’t work with you. Yeah, you know, because I always tell my client, I’m like, you got to give me a contract. And they’re always nervous because I’m an attorney. And I’m like, give me a contract, not just to protect you. So we know what we’re doing together. You know? Yeah.
Abby Herman 13:44
And then and I think it demonstrates, you know, what I talked about, I’ve talked before about hobbyists versus business owner, yeah, it shows that you own a business, this is a business, it is a legal entity, it is you’re in it to, to stay in it, you know, this is my livelihood. I want it to I want you know, I want my business to continue to grow. And it shows that you’re serious about what you’re doing. I wouldn’t want to work with someone who wasn’t serious about what they were doing in business. So yeah,
Tania Shaw 14:16
Absolutely. It’s the difference between dating around and getting married. Yeah, totally. And it’s sort of like, Okay, well, you know, I like my date, and whatever, and I’ll date this guy, maybe I’ll date this person, I’ll meet this person. And then it’s like, okay, now I’m, you know, I’m serious. And I want this to be taken seriously. And, you know, that’s why you you kind of want to create this whole, you know, it’s sort of this trifold right, you know, this entity, this entity, this actual legal entity, you know, whether it be like an LLC or corporation, some sort of, you know, Professional Liability Insurance of some kind if you can have it and contracts if those are like the trifecta, basically, the best way of having this like established business.
Abby Herman 14:59
Yeah, yeah. So you’re talking about contracts, or a client services agreement? What are some of the other important legal protections that we need to have in place? You mentioned a couple others just now. So like, if you pick the top three that I must have in place, what would those be?
Tania Shaw 15:16
Okay, so the first thing is your perfect, you know, segue into this as the hobbyist, right versus the business, you want to have some sort of what we call a legal entity that is not a sole proprietorship, a sole proprietorship is essentially just you, there is no legal separation, even if you get, you know, an AI n number, and you register as a DBA. With the state, you know, it’s still all you. And we want to create some sort of separation and give the business its own life, essentially. And so having some sort of entity, whether it’s an LLC, or a corporation, and this involves talking to two people really the CPA from or the accountant for the tax side, not for the legal side, though, and then the attorney for the legal side, but not for the tax side. And sometimes the lines are blurred, people will go to their accountant and say, Well, my accountant says is the this entity, and then they’ll go to their attorney and the attorneys like, well, they said to be this entity. And it’s sort of like the the, the attorney and the accountant should should work together to do that. That’s the first thing. Because what that so it’s the step is, and then the next step is insurance.
Tania Shaw 16:26
And people don’t always understand why would you need insurance and a legal entity that doesn’t make doesn’t that just like completely, too much. So I think of it as COVID. So nobody says, oh, it doesn’t matter if I get COVID, because I have medical insurance. Nobody, I mean, some people might say that, but most normal people don’t say that, you know, nobody says you know, but what you say is I’m gonna stand six feet apart, and wear a mask. But even if I get COVID doing that, I have insurance. And that is what we’re doing, we are standing six feet apart from our business, we’re creating an entity, that’s the creation of the entity. But if something happens, it’s still a pain to go through anything, you know, whether just legally or even, it’s not, it’s not to be a lawsuit or something. So says something like, Oh, you promised this but my, my website crashed, or you promised this and it was this or someone claims that you stole this from someone or any of those things, you want to be able to be like, call your insurance carrier. So that’s step number two. And then of course, number three is once we have that in place is then your actual relationship with your client, which is your client services agreement. You mentioned within that your scope of work. And then and I don’t know how you do it at your end. But what I always like to tell people in terms of their agreements is you have the scope of work that is interesting, that is changeable. But always keep your agreement completely sort of static, but that doesn’t need to change, the only thing that changes is that scope of work that you attach and incorporate into the agreement.
Abby Herman 18:00
So they always kind of as a as an addendum or something like that, because it does always change.
Tania Shaw 18:07
Exactly. And so we always say, you know, this agreement, including the scope of work here and as attachment a constitutes the entire agreement. So that that sort of thing, because if the scope of work changes, you says it always does. That is what we amend. And, and I would say that along with that agreement, if things change, it would be always nice. And this is all sort of part of the client services agreement. Like I said, you have a client who is different, you have the scope of work, that can change, and then you have like something like an amendment agreement that’s very quick, that so if the scope of work changes, you can change that scope of work. And you can say, Hey, listen, these are the things that are amended in our contract, but everything else is left exactly the same, just to kind of keep it all sort of together.
Abby Herman 18:55
Okay. Okay, interesting. How often do you recommend reviewing that scope of work or that client services agreement? Over the course of you know, of, like, let’s say, somebody has retainer clients, how often would you would you suggest looking at that again, and reviewing it and having it updated? You mean with an attorney or with your client with your clients?
Tania Shaw 19:18
Sure. So it all depends, right? So I think there’s, there’s kind of this marketing aspect to it as well. So number one, if things were kind of going along, and whatever, and you’re happy with that relationship, you’re happy with that scope of work, and nothing is putting outside the bounds of it? No problem. If it seems like that the client is kind of pushing the boundaries every so often, to say, Hey, listen, you know, I noticed that you’re doing this, this is my other package, or this is what else I offer, or and that and this is always a great thing that I kind of remarketing like hey, guess what, now I do this. And so I know you’re on this retainer, but I think it would be if you want to get this this and that a B and C. You can go on this. Right so it has That effect of sort of an eye, then as an attorney will do that, I’ll say, you know, I realized that you’re just kind of paying me for the hour here, there and there, it might be easier if you just, you know, I have this new service. So there’s a few different ways of doing it. Also, when your prices change, you want to make sure are you grandfathering the client in And remember, you don’t have to, or are you up? Are you saying, hey, by the way, you just want to put them on notice at any time that you’re changing? Or if you feel like something about the relationships changing?
Abby Herman 20:29
Yeah. Okay. I love that. Yeah. So where do you see businesses kind of break down legally? Like, where do you see, you know, aside from maybe not having their legal entity set up? Or the your insurance or a client services agreement? is there other other areas where you’re seeing kind of a breakdown in the back end to legal side of someone’s business?
Tania Shaw 20:52
Yeah. So a couple of things that I see, aside from just the client relationship situation is, perhaps with contractors or employees, there can be issues with maybe like, Are you hiring every state is a little bit different. But are you Hi, is this person truly an independent contractor? Is this person employee? And then of course, the trust factor that comes with creating content? Are these people work for hire? What’s theirs? What’s yours? That’s a huge thing, you know, are they coming in and giving you their stuff, their independent contract of employee is everything they create for you, that has to be very, very clear. I see a lot of I hired this person, I taught them everything that they knew, and then they left and they took myself. So that’s a big one. And then I think the other one is just collaboration. And having making sure that when you’re collaborating with people, if they’re coming in as a partner, or as a vendor, or somebody else, that you have certain things like non disclosure agreements in place, with the collaborators, even with your employees, or contractors, people who are specifically employees or contractors, you know, non solicitation, confidentiality, all of that stuff is so important around content creation, because just having a copyright is not, it’s very specific, right? copyrights do not protect your ideas and your thoughts. However, things like confidentiality and non disclosures, if you have their broader and they will say listen, your know how your processes are things like this. And so I think that’s really important, especially in my content, creative clients to have in place and I see that stuff break down, your client is not never going to go and take your stuff, because they don’t know what they’re doing. Like, it’s like, I don’t know what I’m doing content wise, you know, but it’s the other professionals that you work with. And listen, the missing people are bad, inherently people are good. It’s just that sometimes money changes people, relationships, changes, people, people change people. So you don’t know what’s going to happen. And boundaries can be broken. And things can be not even just out of spite, but just out of ignorance.
Abby Herman 23:04
Yes, yes. And I want to clarify for people listening to when we say copyright, we’re talking about co p YRI. Yay, yay, wr IGA so I get I don’t do copywriting any more content, strategy and creation, but I still get a lot of people who pour and mix that up. So we’re talking about the legal use, not the not like talking about writing the copy that goes under the clarification. Yeah, let’s talk a little bit about that, that content piece. So because you talked about, you know, like your ideas and, and things like that. And a lot of times, you know, we’re taking our thoughts and ideas, and we’re putting them down on quote unquote, paper, which means we’re publishing them on our website, we’re publishing on social media, we are publishing our ideas on podcasts, and on YouTube videos, and all of that. How is that information ours as the business owner, as the content creator? And how do we make sure that that it remains ours? So I know that like you said, people are inherently good. At the same time, there are people out there who will steal your ideas and your content. I think that, you know, there’s kind of there’s copycats out there things like that, how do we protect ourselves from that happening? And maybe what do we do if it does happen?
Tania Shaw 24:33
Or Absolutely, so you know, the first thing is to kind of know what what are your rights? So, you know, your work is copyrighted, the second that you create it, right? So it is it is yours. Um, it’s under copyright. It’s when it’s created in a fixed intangible form. bonds, I mean, fixed in tangible podcast, and the more on, you know, writing podcast video anyway, you know, anything like that, that is memorialized or recalled. word it or anything like that, not just in your head essentially, it doesn’t protect it, I’ll just tell you what it doesn’t protect the copyright that ri ght copyright does not protect, you know, facts, ideas, systems, or methods that are just out there, but they do protect the way that they’re expressed. So let’s say you’ve came out with this fantastic content strategy system. That is like the Abby Herman system, you can if you’ve expressed it in a certain way, or your five step process or anything like that, that is protected, right? You know, the system of you know, logging on the system of doing this the system of having a, an inquiry, call those things that aren’t quote, unquote, yours like, Okay, I’m in. But this process, or whatever this is, this is protectable. So I just want to kind of go with that. Now, the first thing that we do when it’s just out in the public, and all that sort of stuff, is we say, you know, sort of the unauthorized disclosure of this information is against the law, and you throw that copyright signal on everything, right, copyright, Abby, Herman, copyright, tarnish, all copyright, whatever the name of your business entity is, you throw it on there, okay. And you make sure you can on certain things, or register it with the copyright office. Right.
Tania Shaw 26:13
And one of the things I, I think that you don’t want to do that with everything, right, that’s just a lot of registering. And so it doesn’t make sense to do with everything. Um, but is there a certain work that is, you know, significant enough that this is, this is really, you know, part of your brand and part of your process, it can make you eligible for what we call statutory damages and things like that. So that’s for when you register, if you don’t register your work, you’re still able to stop someone from continuing it. And I’ll tell you, the good old fashioned cease and desist letter is certainly the best thing in your arsenal. If you do see somebody taking your stuff or anything like that, you can certainly write one. Or you can get an attorney, sometimes it is a lot more powerful to have an attorney throw it on their letterhead that I am all for first, first dealing with it, right, if you want depends on what you know, what kind of business owner you are, let’s just be like, Listen, I like to deal with it first. Or if you’re like, No, I want to give it to an attorney. But let’s say to the business owner, I was like, I want to first and say hey, listen, you know, this is mine, blah, blah, blah. person can either be like, okay, we’re going to take it down, or they’re going to be like, no. And so they’re going to that’s sort of the first step. If you want to reach out yourself feel like I don’t even want to, then that’s when you would want to just, you know, chat with the lawyer. And remember, I think this is the biggest fear is that the fear is that if you get an attorney involved litigation, but there are 5000 steps, and trust me, none of us want to go to court. I mean, yes, there was a time when I was young and loved court. But I never wanted to always go to court didn’t want my clients to end up in the litigation. Once I was there. I was like, This is my time to perform. But you don’t want your client ever ending up in court, you know, and so there’s a 5000 steps in between. So remember, that you can take steps don’t automatically think they stole my stuff that said, we’re going to be embroiled in a lawsuit. It’s really important to say I have rights, and I’m going to protect them, I might first try to like do it myself. If that doesn’t work, I’ll get an attorney. And they can write a cease and desist letter. Yeah.
Abby Herman 28:23
Yes. Luckily, I’ve never I’ve never been there. And that’d be that’d be a little scary. But on both sides on both sides of it.
Tania Shaw 28:33
Absolutely. Yeah. Great. I’ve written them for clients, and I have clients receive them, you know, and and Absolutely. And sometimes there’s issues with you know, and I’ll tell you, copyright and Content Protection, I do want to, you know, tell that it is not black and white, because our laws are not I feel like are not evolving fast enough with the way that the way that content is expressed. And I’m sure lawyers might get mad at me for saying that a lot of creators, but it’s just, you know, we have to evolve. So not everything has been, is there a precedent for? So it is confusing? It is confusing, and I just have to let everyone kind of know that it’s okay. And it is confusing. And I always encourage seeking clarification.
Abby Herman 29:20
Yeah, yeah, definitely, with the way that the internet has evolved, and the different platforms that are coming out, like it leaves a lot of I agree, it leaves a lot of gray area for not knowing the right way to do something.
Tania Shaw 29:34
So yeah, absolutely. So when you get judges who are like, I don’t want to email, you know, if a judge is listening to this, I’m totally in trouble. But like, you know, you’re kind of like, also, we’re kind of going with the times as the person who’s in charge of sort of enforcing your rights and all this sort of stuff of like, okay, we also as the attorneys and as the people in this legal field, have to also make sure that we’re on top of all of this sort of stuff.
Abby Herman 30:00
Yes, yeah. Well, and just look at the idiotic questions and comments that had that came from the hearings that they had with Facebook and Microsoft. I mean, come on, like they Yeah, they had no way. Yeah, people making the decisions and and upholding the law and making the law don’t necessarily understand, like what we’re doing in the weeds and all of that.
Tania Shaw 30:26
Yeah, Abby, it’s so funny, I didn’t post once and I was just doing it cuz I was, you know, tired. And I was talking about I’m like, I’m like, there’s actually four branches of government. And like, there’s the executive and the judicial, the, you know, congressional legislative branch and the social media branch. That basically I just said that and there was like, Oh, my God, this is true, because the social media branch is its own form. And then we have these three other branches who are like, What’s this? What’s this? It’s like its own form. And these three branches have been dealing with each other for how many hundreds of years with the Constitution. And then this, we have sort of this new branch, and they’ve got to kind of figure out how to work together. But you’re right, those hearings, you’re just like, yes, yes.
Abby Herman 31:07
They, you know, and it’s it’s an old dude, honestly. like, Dude, don’t understand. They don’t understand. Yeah, they don’t understand. And, and, you know, and it’s okay, that they don’t understand as long as you’re willing to be educated and to learn. Yeah, it didn’t. That way to me, so.
Tania Shaw 31:35
Yeah, it’s a two way street. This is why I love being in business training. But I learned so much from my clients about things that I never would have sat down, right. I wrote a book about, but then I learned so much.
Abby Herman 31:48
Yes, yes. So you have you and your partners have templates that you sell to business owners to help them, you know, make sure that they have these legal protections in place, can you share a little bit about, first of all, where to find them? And what kind of templates will we be able to find?
Tania Shaw 32:09
Absolutely. So what we’re doing Abby is we, it’s, it’s sort of your template, you know, next level 2.0. So what it is, you know, first of all, it’s, it’s it in the no legal, it’s in the no legal.com that you can go, and what is your first sort of figure out what industry that you’re in. And our first iteration is, you know, the coating industry. But what we’ve done is you can use them for whatever anything, but we are doing them out into sort of industries coaching, and then of course, all the digital services, industries, content industries, things like that are there. And what happens is you sort of figured out what it is that you need, you know, are you starting your business? are you growing your business, are you taking it next level, and then we have every single kind of agreement, you can imagine non disclosure, Client Services, media rights, you know, all that sort of stuff, amendments, cancellations, people who have our membership groups, you know, create all this content, where they have this fantastic, you know, membership groups, those are all there. And then what, what happens is, you don’t just sort of buy a template and really buy, you get a whole series of exactly what the template means as a separate, you know, video look in plain English, then how you can customize it to fit your needs, and then sort of your next steps. And so it’s sort of, it’s not like, okay, here’s a template, let’s send you on your way. It’s an entire system. And then so we give you all the ways to customize it and things like that. So we have everything there are it actually launches may 1, and, and so we have everything for coaches right now. And then we also have all of our agreements that have been customized to all other industries. But our content creators or digital services industries is sort of our next iteration in the next few weeks.
Abby Herman 33:56
Who I love it. I love it. So by the time this airs, yeah, I have a feeling it will be out there. Yeah. Awesome, very excited about that. So you shared a ton of fantastic information. And, and I know that it’s all valuable. However, sometimes it’s hard to implement everything. If we only took, like, let’s say two things away from the conversation. What do you think? What do you what would you say, are the two most important things to take away and take action on?
Tania Shaw 34:25
There are two two biggest things to take action on is number one, if this is not just a hobby, and this is a business, establish yourself as some sort of a legal entity, right for people like us who are small businesses and startups LLC is give you the best absolute protection with none of the crazy formalities. And then number two, have your client services agreement. Those are the two things you’re going to do ever in your business. do those two things.
Abby Herman 34:53
Thank you so much Tania for being here. I so appreciated. This was a great conversation and so much So my notebook is full. I can’t agree more with Tania’s recommendation of establishing your business entity. Having the right entity can not only save you a ton of money, but it can also help you protect yourself and your sanity. We didn’t talk about Tanya’s social media links on the interview, but they’re all in the show notes. And you can get access to her planning checklist at intheknowlegal.com/checklists. And remember, if you want to start experimenting with content and marketing in your own business without having to do all of the guesswork yourself, be sure to join us inside of content mastery lab at the content experiment comm slash lab and use the coupon code podcast to get your first month for $1 Pricing starts at just $97 A month after that. If you found value in what you learned here today, be sure to share it on social media. Take a screenshot of the episode on your phone and share it over on Instagram stories. tag me at @AbbyHerman and @thecontentexperiment. And you can tag Tania @intheknowlegal The more you share, the more we can get the podcast into the hands of more business owners just like you who need to hear the message that they are not alone. Until next time. Take care
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
