← This Can't Be That Hard
This Can't Be That Hard
306 - CYA the Legal Way: Protecting Your Photography Business with Braden Drake
00:34:05
Loading summary
Transcript96 lines
- [00:00]
Annemi Tonkin
Hey, friends, if you are listening to this show with little kids in the car, or if you are particularly sensitive to spicy language, then today's podcast might be one that you want to save for another time. I love the fact that the topic of today's conversation is legal and tax law, and that that's the one that I need to give you a content warning for because it's a really interesting conversation and my guest, Braden Drake, does such a great job of making the boring, the painful, the stressful, fun and light and totally manageable. So without further ado, I will cue the intro music and dive straight into my conversation with Braden Drake.
- [00:52]
Braden Drake
Welcome to this Can't Be that Hard. My name is Annemi Tonkin and I help photographers run profitable, sustainable businesses that they love. Each week on the podcast, I cover simple, actionable strategies and systems that photographers at every level of experience can use to earn more money in a more sustainable way. Running a photography business doesn't have to be that hard. You can do it and I can show you how.
- [01:20]
Annemi Tonkin
Braden Drake, welcome to this Can't Be that Hard. I am so, so excited to have you on the show and more than anything, I'm really excited to introduce you to what I am assuming is most of my audience who probably don't know who you are. So first of all, welcome. I hope you're doing well today.
- [01:37]
Braden Drake
I am, after some initial, like, hiccups that we've had this morning, it's been really, really good tech issues on my part, but I'm very excited to be here. I was going to say I love a captive audience, but I guess that's the nice thing about a podcast is they're not really captive. So hopefully I can hold their attention long enough to.
- [01:56]
Annemi Tonkin
That's right, we have to. We have to earn our keep around here. But you have always, in my experience with you, done an amazing job of doing exactly that. So why don't you start out by just kind of introducing yourself? You have such a cool backstory and I'd love to have everybody hear it.
- [02:14]
Braden Drake
Sure. So I tried to give the very, very quick synopsis version. I'm originally from Indiana. That's where I grew up. I went to Indiana University where, interestingly, I studied. I started out in business and then I ended up studying Russian and political science. I thought I would want it to be like a diplomat or a jet setting businessman or like that. And I ended up going to law school after I dabbled in some other things and wasn't totally sure what I wanted to do. But I somehow ended up getting recommended a tax course based on one of my professors. And that really just stemmed from me not loving to read like 80 page court briefs. Like briefs? Yeah. She's like, you like tax? The laws are short. Yeah, like okay, great. So I took a class and I really liked it. And then I ended up getting a master's in tax law. I interned at some big law firms. I really hated that, to be honest. And that all led to me starting my own business. And I had to try to kind of figure out like what does someone that has a little bit of business background, a master's in tax law and a law degree do. I actually was working at West Elm, the furniture store when I took the bar exam. And they used to do pop up shops in there all the time. And one of the it was either a photographer or an artist, I can't remember, told me about Rising Tide Society. This is when RTS was real big. So I went to a meeting, ended up speaking at the next month's meetings. It was a legal topic and I ended up speaking all over Southern California. And that's kind of how I got introduced to the like creatives niche. So I ended up creating my own business where I do law, tax and bookkeeping for creative small businesses. And that's how it kind of all came together.
- [03:58]
Annemi Tonkin
And you know, you could, I mean, I don't know exactly how old you are, but when I was in college, I could not have known. I mean there was no such thing as online education. There was not, you know, there was not this as an available path. So it's one of the things that I love, and I love that you and I actually first crossed paths when we were learning how to create online education five plus years ago. And it is one of those things where we can take very specific sort of weird combinations of knowledge and package them up and help other people get what they need. And it's honestly, it's the thing that I think that you do better than basically any other legal mind out there. Supporting the creative industries is the way that you are able to break down what are unquestionably like complicated, nuanced topics, things that we need to know but we don't necessarily want to know and make them fun, make them digestible. Like all over your website you have your, like your little gremlins that are, you know, stay away from this guy and don't do this. And it just makes the learning fun. And it's stuff that we really, really need. So again, I was not Joking around when I said, I'm excited to have you here on the show.
- [05:19]
Braden Drake
Well, I appreciate it. I do think when I. You should have been. I was gonna say in the room. In the zoom room with my business mastermind, when I was talking to them about the rebrand we were gonna do with Not Average Law. And I told them, I was like, I'm gonna have gremlins. And they were like, what the fuck are you talking about, Brayden? And I was like, they're gonna be like little characters, and we're gonna name them. We're gonna have Litigious Linda and Mansplain, Michael and Uncle Sam. You can, like, picture it, right?
- [05:44]
Annemi Tonkin
Sure, yeah.
- [05:44]
Braden Drake
Because I read storybrand, and I took it way too literally because, you know, the client is the hero. Then you have to have an enemy. And I was like, I'm gonna bring our enemies to life. Right? Yeah, they all. And I was like, picture the little Mucinex guy. Or like, those little sticker characters. But they're gonna be cute. And they're like, brayden, you lost us. But by the time I got done working with my designer, they're like, it's still kind of cheesy, but, like, we get it now.
- [06:08]
Annemi Tonkin
We're on point, you know? And I am like, my children will tell you that I am not afraid of cheesy, but the truth of the matter is, when it comes to the harder stuff in life, whether it's like running your numbers when you don't want to run your numbers, or dealing with taxes, like those kinds of little funny. I mean, they're silly, no question, but they really do drive a point home and make it stick in a way that if you're just trying to read a textbook, like, good luck.
- [06:35]
Braden Drake
Yeah, yeah. The fun thing for me now is I'll have people. People make up their own gremlins, because, I mean, you can really just of.
- [06:41]
Annemi Tonkin
Course, make up whatever you want. Yep.
- [06:43]
Braden Drake
Yeah. So one of our clients is a mutual friend of yours. You mentioned her earlier. She emailed me one time, and she's like, brayden, I need some help. I got a copycat Carla on my hands who'd, like, ripped off all of her stuff. And I was like, I got you. Don't worry about it.
- [06:58]
Annemi Tonkin
Yeah, amazing. So good. Okay, so let's get into it. We are here basically to talk about the layers of protection that we need as creatives. Like, you walk in, you went into photography, not because you wanted to deal with legal things or tax things or insurance things. Like, that was the bottom of the barrel. But know that you need to do it. And even if you have done that to some degree, there's probably. And I can't come up off the fly with a gremlin name for it, but there's like somebody lurking in the back of your head being like, really? Because you hand wrote, you know, you copied that contract off of some random other photographer and then you just modified it a little bit and you don't really know if it would hold up in court and you don't know if the insurance that you signed up for is really going to cover you. So I'd love for you to just kind of dive in, like whether you're a new business owner or you are somebody who's been in business, but you're just not really sure. Like how can you set up kind of a checklist, a punch list of like, let's make sure I've got all my ducks in a row.
- [08:06]
Braden Drake
Yeah. So I like to teach this through this container that I call the layers of protection. And the idea kind of stems from if anyone's taken a Cycle 101 course, the Maslow's hierarchy of needs, where we have the pyramid. I think the bottom. The bottom layer is like food, water, shelter, if I remember correctly.
- [08:23]
Annemi Tonkin
The basics. Yep.
- [08:24]
Braden Drake
Yeah, it goes up. So our basics is actually compliance, which is just a fancy legal way of saying don't break the law. So you have to pay your taxes. That's kind of the most obvious compliance thing. You might need to be registering your business. So some cities require you to have a business license. These are our basic compliance tasks. And there are also emerging legal issues we need to keep up with. So independent contractor classification law, whether someone needs to be an. We have new rules on testimonials. We have this thing called the click to cancel rule, which is very relevant if you sell memberships. So different things relevant to different types of folks that we work with. The next layer is insurance and then we have contracts, business entities, and then intellectual property, which is trademark and copyright. So those are kind of our five core layers.
- [09:13]
Annemi Tonkin
Amazing. And is that something that, I mean, I guess compliance there is certainly like a you know what you know and you don't know what you don't know. But most of us probably don't get into the photography space with any designs on, like, I'm going to cut these major legal corners. Are there any. At that level, Are there any areas where you see direct service providers, like photographers, like, is there anything that we should be aware of that we might not be Aware of.
- [09:46]
Braden Drake
Hang on, guys, I have a quick message for you. Hey, friends. Just a quick interruption. I wanted to take a minute to thank you as always for listening. If you're a new listener, I have a special welcome basket that I've put together just for you that includes three of my most popular actionable resources to help you build a more profitable, sustainable photography business. You can grab that@thiscampethard.com welcome. But if you've been a long time listener, if you've been here for a.
- [10:14]
Annemi Tonkin
While, I would really appreciate it if.
- [10:16]
Braden Drake
You could take a second to leave a review on Spotify or Apple or wherever it is that you're tuning in. Your support helps the show grow, reach more photographers like you, and elevates the industry as a whole, no matter who you are or how long you've been listening. Thank you so much. And now back to the show.
- [10:41]
Yeah, the big one right now. So there are some of these niche issues. Like I mentioned, the testimonial thing, click to cancel is not really so relevant for you all, but we have. Oh boy. One just popped into my head and then I totally lost it.
- [10:56]
Annemi Tonkin
While your brain is circling back to that, talk to me a little bit more about the testimonial law that you're mentioning.
- [11:04]
Braden Drake
Yeah, so there's a few things essentially like you can't really buy testimonials, which sounds obvious, but like, free gift in exchange for testimonial is where people get in trouble. Also, you can't when you there, there are rules around when you share testimonials. It's supposed to be representative of the like, average work that you provide. This is pretty easy for photographers because, you know, ideally all your testimonials should be some version of like, they were great to work with. The photos are awesome. The experience, it's a little bit dicier when you're talking about like educators, $50,000 and. Yeah, right, exactly. You're always going to have like, you're a shining star student, but your testimonials are supposed to encompass everyone so that we have a little, a lot of little sub issues like that. Oh, the other one I was going to mention was website accessibility. So that delay tactic did help me figure that one out. That's an important one. And this isn't something that I'm personally super knowledgeable about. If folks want to go talk to their website designer friends, they can probably tell you more. But you know, don't put like yellow text on neon green backgrounds. All of your clients are creative, so we're probably not like, worried about that so much, but fonts need to be readable. I actually. One thing I see my design friends rant about a lot is people focus on form over function because they want it to look nice but needs to be accessible.
- [12:30]
Annemi Tonkin
Yeah.
- [12:31]
Braden Drake
The real big one, though is independent contractor classification rules. So especially if people are. I work with a lot of wedding people. I know that's not really your niche audience, but they're using second shooters. Or do portrait photographers have, like, second photographers or do they have contractor teams very often?
- [12:49]
Annemi Tonkin
Not at. So not as often when it comes to second photographers. Although, again, I mean, there are certainly wedding photographers listening right now. We do have, you know, there are associates, maybe associate photographers, certainly. And then, you know, VAs and things like that. It just, it depends. Oftentimes photographers are solo shows, but not always.
- [13:09]
Braden Drake
Gotcha. So to give a real clear example, and these were both wedding photographers, but it could apply really, in any circumstance. We've had two different clients, like in the past year and a half who got audited actually by the state of California for their reasonable salary and their S corporation being too low. That's kind of a whole different topic we're not going to talk about today, but it is one that I speak about and write about in my book. You have to pay yourself a reasonable salary. So they got audited because the salary was too low. And then during that, once you get audited, they can look at whatever they want.
- [13:41]
Annemi Tonkin
They open it all up. Yeah, yeah.
- [13:43]
Braden Drake
Just kind of the whole point. And they looked and they were like, all right, well, who have you. 1099. And then, okay, should these people have been 1099? And here in California we use something called the ABC test. Some people know about this, most people don't. But it surprises a lot of people to learn that this is actually the test used in about 30 of our 50 states, so in more than half of them. And part B says that someone can't be a contractor if they provide services within the usual course of the hiring entity's business. So photography is certainly within the usual course. And then part C says that in order to be a contractor, they have to have their own business doing the thing that you've essentially hired them for. So hiring a photographer as a photographer certainly fails that rule. Of course, we have all these different exceptions to the rule, but that's just the baseline guidance. So I know we have a lot of other stuff to talk about, so we don't need to get in the weeds, but people just need to be aware of this law and go look into it. Really?
- [14:42]
Annemi Tonkin
Yeah, that one, that one definitely rings some bells in my own head. So, yeah, I won't go too deep on that.
- [14:49]
Braden Drake
But yeah, we have a very, very juicy blog post on this on our website, so I can give you the link if you want to share it.
- [14:55]
Annemi Tonkin
For sure I will and I will read it. Okay, so that's compliance. Then we get into. You said contracts was number two. Oh, hi.
- [15:03]
Braden Drake
Yes, we've got insurance and then contracts.
- [15:07]
Annemi Tonkin
Excellent. Oh, insurance is next. Sorry, we just had our furry friends join us.
- [15:12]
Braden Drake
Yeah, this is everyone that's listening. My dog Sammy, she's 18 years old, she's deaf and blind and I had to pick her up because she kept actually running, like running headfirst into my chair.
- [15:23]
Annemi Tonkin
So. Sweet girl. All right, so then let's dive in on insurance.
- [15:29]
Braden Drake
Yeah, so insurance just to cover that very broadly. I'm not an insurance agent, so I just always send people to an insurance agent. But generally it's important to think about all the things that you need to be insured for. So property insurance is important for your audience because you have equipment that you need to insure, also general liability. So that's typically going to cover you for any kind of personal injury type of stuff and some other things. And then professional liability, I believe is what you would need if you had. And these are always like your worst case scenario issues. If you like your camp, your all your stuff got stolen and you like lost all your client photos, that kind of thing.
- [16:08]
Annemi Tonkin
Right.
- [16:09]
Braden Drake
There's, you know, emerging issues like cyber insurance. But the most important thing is just to find an insurance agent that really understands your business. They should ask you all of the probing questions they need to ask you to determine your liability and then they're going to tell you what insurance you need. Keep in mind that they are in some degrees like the rest of us salespeople, so they might try to over insure you, but you should be able to ask. Ask thoughtful questions to figure out how much insurance you want and what you need.
- [16:38]
Annemi Tonkin
Yeah, yeah. And insurance in the 15 year span of my photography business has definitely come in real handy a few times, especially when it comes to equipment. So. So it's not something to neglect for sure. Okay. And then we get into the part that I think is probably the. The biggest area of need in my audience, which is contracts.
- [17:00]
Braden Drake
Yes, yes. So contracts are very key, I think, especially anyone that was in business in 2020. I hopefully don't need to tell you about the importance of contract understood it before Then. But that really was an awakening moment for a lot of us on just how they're going to operate in practice. But the main thing, I mean, we can talk about what needs to go in the client contract. But then also important to note that that's not the only contract you typically need. Right. You also need a privacy policy for your website. Sometimes we need web terms. If you are hiring contractors, you need a contractor agreement. If you ever have a client that wants to cancel services, you should send them a cancellation contract. There's all sorts of contracts and documents that are really good for us to have in our back pocket and to be utilizing in our business.
- [17:47]
Annemi Tonkin
Yeah. And just off the top of my head, I mean, there are other things. Like if you're ever invited to speak at a conference, you're probably going to be signing a contract. And if they don't give you a contract, you may want to send them a contract. And, you know, there are all kinds of different things. And this is the piece that I really feel like when I'm talking to photographers and I ask about contracts, they'll say, oh, yeah, yeah, I have a contract. And I'm like, great. You said, you told me you do family photos, newborn photos. You do some in home, you do some in studio, you're working with. You know, there's like a whole handful of things and they're using one contract period. And I'm like, I'm not sure that's gonna dot all the I's and cross all the T's.
- [18:30]
Braden Drake
Yeah, that's like seven contracts right there. Right. I actually. So I just had this conversation with the owner of my gym the other day. So I go to a CrossFit and weightlifting gym. So it's very different than like a large commercial gym because, you know, we have like a hundred members, but we all know each other and we do like events all the time. And I'm friends with the owner and she wanted me to review the contracts. And we have, you know, different payment plans and there's like 24 hour versus the general contract. And I was like, well, these all need to be different contracts. And she's like, well, what do you mean? And I was like, well, you have your. Your con. The way it read was like, if you are this kind of member, then. But if you're this kind of member, then. And I'm like, no, you need to cut all these irrelevant paragraphs for the particular person who's reading it. And she's like, well, that sounds like a huge pain in the ass. And I said, not really. You want to create your main contract for like your number one service and then you duplicate it and you're going to change like two to three paragraphs and then you're going to have different versions. And then when you're sending it to your client, it's going to take you like an hour or two more work on the front end. But then when you go to send these to your clients, you have all the templates that are very specific to that service in your back pocket. And it makes it way easier and more relevant and more enforce forceful down the road.
- [19:43]
Annemi Tonkin
Yeah. And this is the sort of thing where if you don't currently have this and you hear, okay, you need to go get all the, you know, you need to go get six more contracts in your business. Most people are like weighing, well, what are the chances that this, I'm going to end up in court or somebody's going to send me like a strongly worded letter versus how much is this going to cost me to go out and have this done? And I, I mean that's a real thing because obviously every time that I even call and have a 15 minute phone call with my lawyer, I am writing a check that is, you know, at least into the three figures for that short period of time.
- [20:26]
Braden Drake
So let's see, 15 minutes, this is the way they bill it. That's one fourth of an hour. So if your hourly rate is $400, that's, that's a hundred, that's a hundred bucks.
- [20:36]
Annemi Tonkin
Yeah. So it, it gets eaten up really fast. So when I am talking to photographers, I feel like, you know, that is the, that's kind of the, the math that they're working on. And it's really why I love the contract club of yours, which I only found, I don't know, six months ago because I actually needed a couple of additional contracts in my own business. And that mutual friend that you and I were talking about before mentioned your name to me and I was like, oh yeah, I knew him back in the day. And so I dove in and it was like, this is a godsend. Like I have a big contract that I paid somebody a lot of money to put together. But then, you know, if I need to take this piece out and add a different piece in, I don't really want to go spend $700 to have that one PA paragraph drafted and fixed up. And even if the contract club was just sort of the way that you got to the point that you then went and had your local lawyer look at it and, you know, double check everything. It would. It was like, save so much money just right off the bat. So I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about how. How that product came to be and kind of who's using it most.
- [21:52]
Braden Drake
Yeah. Well, first of all, my question, what contracts did you need that you joined the contract again?
- [21:58]
Annemi Tonkin
Oh, what was it? I think it was when I was updating my membership contract stuff.
- [22:05]
Braden Drake
Okay, gotcha. Your membership terms. Nice. Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, to give a little bit of a rundown, this is like such a meandering journey. That'll give you all the short version. We met in Amy Porterfield's course digital course Academy in 2019. And through that program, I ended up creating my signature program that I still run called unfuck your biz. So missed the swear warning for you all, but there it is. I'll probably say it a couple more times. So, uib, we call it for short. And as one of the kind of like bonus programs, I created a separate program called uyc. You can figure out what that one is.
- [22:45]
Annemi Tonkin
So contracts, really?
- [22:46]
Braden Drake
Right. And then I tried for a while. So before that, I actually was doing like the template shop thing and trying to sell contracts template by template. I kind of hated it. They were. There was a lot of competition for that. And then you're managing essentially a Shopify esque kind of business with all these different templates. It's like a lot of rigamarole on the back end. So I put them all inside of UIC and it was just a bonus for a while. And then I tried to sell it as a course. Newsflash, no one wants to take a course on contracts.
- [23:13]
Annemi Tonkin
Right.
- [23:14]
Braden Drake
But really I was selling the same thing that I'm selling now. It was just a messaging shift. So this is an important note for really your audience and for everyone just on marketing. Sometimes it really does matter what we call things.
- [23:26]
Annemi Tonkin
Yeah, yeah, totally.
- [23:28]
Braden Drake
So then I got this wild idea. Do you. Were you familiar with Boss project? Okay, so this is my friends Abby and Emily. And now Abby Abigail runs it. But they had this course called Trello for business that was $30. And they talked about how it basically just sold like wildfire. And that's where they got all their leads from. They'd sold like a couple thousand of them. And I was like, you know what? I want that. But for a long time I didn't know what that thing would be.
- [23:55]
Annemi Tonkin
Right.
- [23:56]
Braden Drake
And then I was like, you know what? I'm sitting on all these contracts. Why don't I just, like, make it $30? And then I launched it in January 2022. We sold 200 that first month. And for me, that was like a ton because my email list was at the time, and I called it. Called it the Contract Vault at first. It now is called the Contract Club. And then it just kind of spiraled from there. We have affiliates now. I have Contract Club trademarked, and we've since raised the price. It's $200 now, but it really became a really good legion for us. But also, I always say one of my missions is to rid the creative space of terrible contracts. So it's working in that respect because finally people at least have a lower cost alternative to getting really terrible free on Internet.
- [24:43]
Annemi Tonkin
Exactly. And that, I mean, that really is the difference because there are plenty of contract templates floating around out there. What I love about the Contract Club, and I kind of bought it because I was like, I need this one thing. And then as I started to go through kind of point by point, like, oh, then you need this, and then you need this. I was like, oh, perfect. But they were all there. Like, I didn't have to buy anything more. And, you know, you could charge 10 times what you're currently charging, and it would still be a massive savings compared to, you know, even like, a couple hours of a lawyer's time. So it is amazing to me. Here you are, you're like a lawyer and a tax professional, and you've got all this stuff put together. It's just. It's like, I just want to shout it from the rooftops because I feel like if you. If money is the thing holding you back, and honestly, if, like, the boredom factor is the thing holding you back, Braden's got you covered.
- [25:38]
Braden Drake
Yeah, we got you covered for sure. We also call it. We call it like, the membership with no monthly fee because you join.
- [25:45]
Annemi Tonkin
It's just a one.
- [25:46]
Braden Drake
And then we have a circle community. I actually, it's funny, while you were talking, you may have seen me get my notebook out, because I was like, oh, I should mention the circle community. And then I thought, oh, I need to go in there and respond to people's questions today, because I haven't done that in a couple days. So I put it on my to do list. But you can post questions in there. And then we also have a contract request feature. So we add three new contracts every month. And at this point, like, we've been running it so long, so many. Well, and the new contracts we add are getting, like, super niche yeah, yeah. Like we just, I think last month added one for people who make tabletop game figurines. So people who. Because that's. Yeah, that's, I guess like Dungeons and Dragons or whatever. They make like the. They make them and then like people hand carve them from wood. I don't know how they do it, but they make them sell them. That's like a whole separate side business. And some months we'll have a slow month and we don't get very many requests because we always say we prioritize members first and then contracts we think will be most relevant to our general audience.
- [26:44]
Annemi Tonkin
Sure.
- [26:44]
Braden Drake
And then we kind of trickle down from there and we didn't have that many requests that month, so we made that one. But every once in a while we'll get a request for something I'm super surprised we don't have. So my friend Kira is throwing her first. Throwing her, I'm saying like a party. She's hosting her first in person event. And I was kind of surprised we didn't already have a template for that. So we wrote that for her and added it last month as well.
- [27:08]
Annemi Tonkin
Yeah. Okay. Well, I didn't actually mean for this to turn into a massive advertisement for the contract club, but I kind of went, yeah, I know I went there, but it was me. I dragged it there because I am a believer. So let's quickly move through those top two layers of protection because I think those are a little less perhaps relevant to everyone, but they're good to be aware of in case they are.
- [27:34]
Braden Drake
Yes. Well, the next layer is business entities, so that's where we talk about LLCs. And I've done like entire podcasts on just the topic of llc, so we could really get into it. But that is your basics. I always tell people like to think about your business entities like Pokemon Evolution, if people are familiar. I always think of Charmander, Charmeleon and Charizard because Charmander is the cutest and he's your sole prop. Right. So basically you start as a sole prop. You can evolve into an llc, which gives you a liability protection, which is a really great thing to do. And then once you're profiting enough money, you can evolve into your final form for most people, which ends up being an S corporation. And you do that for the tax benefits. So that's the very basics of our business entity conversation.
- [28:22]
Annemi Tonkin
And that just to jump in, I guess I shouldn't have said that's not relevant. It's just usually a more stable thing. You don't kind of jump back and forth between, like this year I'm a sole prop and next year I'm an S corp and.
- [28:33]
Braden Drake
Right.
- [28:34]
Annemi Tonkin
So that would be something that you would want to talk to your tax professional about and sort of think about, you know, am I making enough money to justify moving up or.
- [28:45]
Braden Drake
Yeah, yeah. I mean it can. So this is where people get a little stuck on this one because it can be a tax professional thing, but it's also a legal thing. Right. Because LLCs are actually a legal liability issue. The point of them is to protect your personal assets from any kind of business liability. So the I like to give the example of like imagine you're Bill Gates and you want to start a base jumping company. Right. Like imagine you're Bill. So what, what's going on in this scenario? Okay. We have a ton of money, we have a ton of assets and we're starting a very, very high risk business. Like does he want to be a sole prop out of the gate even if he doesn't plan on making any money? Right. So the profit and the money is kind of irrelevant to the question of whether he wants to have an llc.
- [29:30]
Annemi Tonkin
Yep.
- [29:31]
Braden Drake
So that's a very extreme example. But in a lot of states, LLCs are super cheap to form and they're actually a real big pain in the ass to do down the road because once you get an llc, you have to open a new bank account and all your business licenses have to change. So most of the time I recommend people do it before they even launch their business, just out of ease. But yeah, you can do that. And then the S Corp question is more of a tax question for your tax professional once you get rolling.
- [29:58]
Annemi Tonkin
Great. Okay, thank you for that clarification.
- [30:01]
Braden Drake
Yeah, no problem.
- [30:01]
Annemi Tonkin
And then at the very tippy top, we've got trademark copyright.
- [30:06]
Braden Drake
Yeah. So intellectual property. And I just, I honestly kind of threw that one at the top because that's the one that's really, is going to be like case specific. So if you have like a pretty generic business name that you don't really care about and it's just a placeholder that we're not super worried about trademarks. If you have something that's like very unique that you really love, you don't want someone to take, or if you have something like, we'll use my contract club as an example. People like googling it. People know the name. Some people. It's gotten to the point now where some people know the contract club but they don't know me, which is kind of a Nice place to be in. That's where a trademark can become really valuable. And obviously, if your goal is to get your business to that point or something that you offer or your business name, then we want to look into that for sure.
- [30:52]
Annemi Tonkin
Love that. And remind me, when you, you know, end up getting a trademark, what's the. Is it five years in the US for the renewal?
- [31:03]
Braden Drake
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Five years. I believe it's five years. I'll have to double check that. That's. I started. We started filing trademarks, like, a year and a half ago.
- [31:11]
Annemi Tonkin
So I'm like, oh, and so you're not there yet?
- [31:14]
Braden Drake
I was like, yeah. So in one or two years, we're gonna have to get a really good system down.
- [31:18]
Annemi Tonkin
You'll know all about it. Good.
- [31:20]
Braden Drake
Yeah, we filed. I think we've had, like, 25 approved so far for our clients, considering it takes, like, a year to, like, 15 months, you know?
- [31:30]
Annemi Tonkin
Yeah. I got a few a couple years ago, and it was kind of a big deal. But it is nice to. To have them like, it feels like, okay, I've got my bases covered there.
- [31:39]
Braden Drake
Yes, for sure.
- [31:41]
Annemi Tonkin
Amazing. So much good information in this. And I hope that if you are listening and you. I hope you feel one way or the other either, like, great, I am well covered where I am or motivated and have some sense of, like, here are the next steps that I need to take. Because, guys, this stuff is super important. I know it's boring. People like Braden make it less boring. But it is. Is not boring. If you end up on the other side of an audit or a lawsuit and you don't have those things taken care of, that gets boring, unboring in the wrong way.
- [32:15]
Braden Drake
Right?
- [32:16]
Annemi Tonkin
Yeah. Oh, so good. Well, anyway, this was lovely. I cannot wait to chat again sometime soon and let everybody know, other than the contract club where they can find you.
- [32:27]
Braden Drake
Yeah. So our business is not average law. Avg for short. So not avg law. You can find us @not avg law on Instagram and threads. That's where I tend to be most active. And then not avglaw.com if you're interested in learning more about all the things. I usually recommend that people start with my book, unfuck your biz, where I share all these analogies and case studies and stories in there. But you can get a lot of free blog posts, great content on the website as well.
- [32:57]
Annemi Tonkin
Now, do you have an audio version of your book yet?
- [33:00]
Braden Drake
I do, yeah. And my book is not sold on Amazon and it's not on audible. You have to go to my website. Someone told me that there's a copy on Amazon for, like, 300. I don't know what that's about. I have no idea. We order it, like, directly from the printer, and we ship them to everyone who buys them from our website because it's pretty low volume, so unfuckyourbizbook.com will redirect you to the sales page.
- [33:24]
Annemi Tonkin
Good. I'm gonna get your audiobook. I. I listen to all my books these days, but.
- [33:28]
Braden Drake
Nice. It's. The audiobook is in private. Like, private podcast form, if people are familiar with.
- [33:33]
Annemi Tonkin
Love that. So good. All right, well, have a great day, Braden.
- [33:37]
Braden Drake
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
- [33:39]
That's it for this week's episode of this Can't Be that Hard. I'll be back same time, same place next week. If you like the show, be sure to check out thiscantbethard.com to explore all the resources we have for photographers. And, of course, it would mean the world to me if you would leave a review of the show on itunes or Spotify. As always, thanks so much for joining me. I hope you have a fantastic week.