“So what are you?” one of my earliest prospective clients asked me.

“What is it that you do? Your niche. Are you into patents or business development?”

Reader, given that you are on my About page I am guessing you might also like to know just what it is I do, and why.

So I am going to tell you.

But to do it I feel compelled to recount at least a little of the history of a small family of traders who lived in Baghdad, Iraq. This was many years ago now.

Under the British Mandate in Iraq, their life (though not mine, I was not yet born!) was cushioned and happy.

Then in 1941 two things happened that caused my family to flee to Israel. The Germans began their bombing campaign in Britain, and their ideology inspired violence against the Jewish community in Baghdad.

Trading gave way to the business of real estate. But while Israel proved to be a good place to build a home, my family decided the UK was an even better place to study.

This is how I ended up spending 7 years in the UK, where I thought I was destined to become a musician.

My dream was to study at The Royal College Of Music.

But then reality set in, and the looming prospect of becoming a starving artist made me fill out an application to study law instead of music.

It was through law that I discovered the concept of intellectual property.

Almost from the first day I fell in love with the idea of protecting creations of the mind. I could see how this connected my love of music to what happens in real life.

Intellectual property law became my thing.

I found myself fascinated by the subject, and it eventually became the basis of my career.

Over the years I have worked with companies to protect their innovation, their secret sauce.

I have helped them secure funding so that they could develop their products.

I have also helped investors in need of investment support.

And very occasionally I got the chance to work with companies that actually made it all the way to the “exit” stage of their journey and needed someone to represent them.

The upshot of all my work with startups was that I developed a great deal of insight into the role of patents in the life of a company.

I saw how in some instances they could be used to add a lot of value to a company, but at other times they also proved to be an expensive distraction, if not a hindrance to progress.

Because of this, I often warned young companies against the practice of jumping in and filing patents too early in the process (at least before proper proof of concept).

I would tell them to wait until the time was right – and then I would feel strange for doing so because they would go ahead and file their patents anyway, with a rival firm!

But it didn’t feel better.

I had discovered that trying to run a patent practice in a sustainably ethical way can be a bit of a challenge!

Around that time, I was invited by several companies to  help them with the internal management of their intellectual property.

Especially companies that were producing a lot of code and methodologies. When you are taking an enormous amount of know-how and translating it into SAAS or PAAS it is easy to lose organizational control of your processes and know-how .

So for many of these companies, to keep them on track, my team and I produced IP protection processes and awareness training for employees.

We showed those companies where their IP was located.

We helped their employees understand what it means to work in a company that has all kinds of trade secrets.

And we educated them about the difference between what belongs to them personally, and what belongs to the company.

During this time I received an education myself – I discovered quickly how many companies are very keen to connect their trade secrets to their valuation.

The CEOs often expressed an interest in seeing us develop more than an internal process for documenting, managing, and extending the company’s IP. They wanted to involve the process in the context of their valuation.

Repeatedly I would hear variants of the same question: “Can we take this work and tie it to our valuation? Can we somehow pull it into our conversation with investors?”

Now, if there’s a part of this story where the light bulb is about to go off, well this is probably it.

Because these needling company leaders forced me to start thinking about the question of value.

How should a company connect its IP assets to its valuation?

How should you do it?

I loved this question!

And boy, did it ever get me wondering what the answer might be…

I read about different valuation models of patents and trade secrets. I prepared assessments for people who had the patience to answer them. And when I finally thought I had some inkling of what was what I went on zoom calls with founders.

I put aside everything I thought I knew about my market and just asked people in startups what their biggest obstacles were when it came to using their IP to increase their valuation.  

And the answers were amazing. 

Everything clicked.

I understood why it is that some companies know how to use their intellectual property to maximize their valuation while others struggle to explain the nature of their competitive advantage.

I also understood that this insight is critical to being able to successfully identify opportunities that exist in the market but which may remain hidden because the company has not yet fully developed its understanding of these opportunities

Helping companies bridge this divide is what our team does today.

Today my team and I work with companies that need stronger company valuation. Our essential building blocks are your IP (even if you think you have none), your business plan and what you think is your go to market plan (even if you don’t have one).   l look forward to sharing their expertise with you when the time is right.

If you would like to know more about how we might be able to help you leverage your IP assets to create a stronger company valuation, so that you can better articulate your competitive advantage to your partners and market, be more successful with your fund-raising efforts, and close strategic contracts that will help you win your market, please get in touch with me through the contact page.

Let’s boost your value!