Okay, new business owners, we need to talk.

I talk with new or recently new business owners everyday regarding their new company, their new product, their new service, etc. These people recognize a potential issue, have a specific question or face a real issue that needs attention now. The last possibility is the most common and always the most expensive to fix. However, there is one issue that business people need to be aware of upfront: protect your name before you start conducting business.

I completely understand why this can be a difficult undertaking. You don’t know if your business going to succeed when you are first establishing you name. You have a limited budget and that needs to go into marketing, advertising, product development, office space, furniture, inventory, insurance, employees, technology, and much more. Those dollars have to stretch. But they don’t go very far when you have to duplicate your efforts because your name is already in use, or it’s too common, or it’s offensive, or it’s can’t be protected for some other reason.

Here are a few steps you can take when initially naming your company and before calling a business attorney:
1) Check the appropriate Secretary of State for any registered names like yours. For Colorado: http://www.sos.state.co.us/biz/BusinessEntityCriteriaExt.do
2) Check the Trademark Electronic Search System.
http://www.uspto.gov/ebc/tess/index.html
3) Check the United States Copyright Office’s records: http://www.copyright.gov/records/
4) Use your favorite internet search tool and perform a search on your intended name.

Will you be guaranteed that your name is available and exclusive if you do the above? Nope. There are scores of unregistered companies in business and that have been in business for years. There’s no economically feasible way to uncover all of these companies. However, you should have a good idea of if you will encounter any problems, what those problems may be and if they are going to be an issue.

Now that you’ve done the heavy lifting, finish the job. File your formation documents, or statement of tradename with the appropriate state. Register your copyright(s). File for your trademark or servicemark. Register your domain name. This puts others on notice that you are claiming this name and they need to head back to the drawing board.

You can avoid some business lawyer fees if you’re comfortable with the process and the instructions for doing the above. That said, you’ll still want to bring in a business attorney to complete the remaining formalities, explain or answer specifics for you and to double check what you are doing. It is also a lot more expensive to fix a problem after it becomes a real issue.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 30th, 2010 at 3:39 pm and is filed under Business consulting, Copyright, Document preparation, Lawsuits, Trademark. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.