Episode 45 of the “Law & Business” Podcast, presented by Verna Law, features a collaboration with the Nessa Group, focusing on a detailed case study about helping a company rebrand fully. The episode explores a hypothetical scenario, influenced by a real-life trademark infringement lawsuit, and delves into the decision-making process between choosing legal action or rebranding. It highlights the complexities of trademark law, the challenges and strategies in maintaining brand identity during rebranding, and the significance of understanding customer perspectives in such transitions. The discussion provides valuable insights for businesses facing similar situations, emphasizing legal and marketing considerations in rebranding decisions.

Our special mini-series at the “Law & Business” Podcast with the Nessa Group continues.

In this special episode, we take a case in which a company must rebrand. The company’s actual name is changed, but the situation is based from a real case. Quite often, in trademark infringement lawsuits, companies are facing a difficult choice: Rebrand or Fight. Fighting trademark infringement lawsuits are quite expensive with many procedural moves in federal district court. These procedural moves raise legal fees so that smaller companies have issues in fighting these infringement lawsuits.

How can a business consulting group help a company rebrand? Or at least begin to see the benefits of rebranding? This podcast episode starts that discussion.

Anthony Verna:
Welcome to episode three of our special podcast mini-series. I’m Anthony Verna and we’re here with the gang from the NESSA group. Jim, pleasure to see you again.

Jim Huerta:
It’s a pleasure of being here. I find this will be very interesting.

Anthony Verna:
Barry, thanks for being here.

Barry Kolevzon:
Well, thank you for having me here and I think that we have exciting discussion to discuss.

Anthony Verna:
Good. Thank you. Wil, great to see you, sir.

Wil Jacques:
Yeah, I got a ditto that from Barry. But yeah, this is going to be exciting. I like real live case studies.

Anthony Verna:
We like dittos. We don’t like megadittos. Justin, it’s a pleasure.

Justin Tripodi:
I’m not going to hold this up. Let’s get into this.

Jim Huerta:
Good follow up.

Anthony Verna:
All right, so let’s start doing our case study section of our mini-series. So, let me tell you a little story about a client of mine. And the names here are changed to protect not just the innocent but what is private as well. So, we’re going to call this Bronze and Bourbon. And I wish I’d thought of that in real life. But Bronze and Bourbon is a company that was sued for trademark infringement. They’re an apparel company. They make not revolutionary materials, but they make apparel. So fancy, fun tee shirts, fun sweatshirts, caps, a lot of caps, a lot of accessories. And some of them do have sayings. The aesthetic, the Uber of this apparel is very traditionally manly.

Certainly cars, certainly a lot of motoring type of imagery in it. The plaintiff was a Bronze and Coke and so, from that particular standpoint, they’re also an apparel company. Totally different type of apparel though. I would say that they sell a very expensive apparel, very good dress shirts, very good dress, pants, shoes, ties, things that are very much more upscale than the client in this case. So Wil, let’s start with you as to some thoughts here.

Wil Jacques:
You know, again, I’m a novice and certainly don’t understand trademark law as you would. But the first thought that came to mind was you gotta be kidding me.

Anthony Verna:
So let’s talk about that for a second. No, and I understand exactly where you’re coming from because a lot of people don’t understand trademark law and a lot of people don’t understand what the what the reasoning is for a trademark infringement lawsuit like this. So let’s talk about that for a little bit. The plaintiff needs to have one) a trademark that is registered with the United States patent and trademark office. So that trademark has the brand in it. That trademark will have the goods and services listed in it. And obviously the owner is listed in it. So, those are keys. And then when you’re filing a trademark infringement suit, you obviously have to listen to the defendant as to why is there infringement? So you’re going to have to discuss some of those areas. The trademarks are similar. The goods and services are similar in a very simple explanation, similar trademarks, similar goods and services equals trademark infringement.

Now you’re probably saying, you gotta be kidding me because the trademarks do have some differences to them.

Wil Jacques:
It was my first impression.

Anthony Verna:
Okay, great. So, where the issue is, is not on the second section or the third section, but it’s on the dominant portion of the trademark. And that’s where a lot of plaintiffs start with, and they will say a dominant portion of our mark is here. So, bourbon in this particular case, bourbon and bronze, bourbon and Coke. So, bourbon is number one. That’s the dominant portion. That’s where the infringement occurs because consumers look at the dominant portion and not the second. We’ve got court cases from the first time the Lanham Act has been enforced. They talk about the dominant portion of trademarks. So, when we’re looking at a trademark, we need to understand that dominant portion. So, in this particular case, it’s bronze.

So from that standpoint, that’s really what we’re looking at from the goods and services standpoint. A lot of people would say, well you know, one company is making tee shirts and one company is making dress pants, dress shirts, ties and their price points are very different. And this is where the, the yin and yang of law comes in, which is on one hand I understand exactly what you’re talking about and if you’re a defendant, that’s exactly what you hammer. You hammer the differences between the price points you have or the differences in your consumers. You handle the hammer the differences in your channels of trade in your marketing. You know, Justin talked about in earlier episodes, what does it take to get a customer? Well these two companies have very different customers and these two companies are going to get those customers in very different ways and at very different price points.

All of that’s defensible and all of that might mean that there’s no trademark infringement. On the same token, clothing’s clothing. And you can, if you are clothing manufacturer, you can turn off your machines and you can put new patterns in there and you can make underwear and you can turn off those machines and you can put new patterns in and you can make a swimwear and you can turn those patterns off and turn off the machines and you can put in new patterns and then you can make, you know, dress clothing.

Wil Jacques:
So you’re saying they’ve satisfied the apparel side?

Anthony Verna:
I would say they have satisfied the ability to file a lawsuit.

Wil Jacques:
Okay.

Anthony Verna:
And to get something like this early on and filed and dismissed early in a motion to dismiss the case is not going to happen.

And as a matter of fact, previous counsel in this particular case did file a motion to dismiss, which the judge struck down very harshly to be honest with you. And the reason for that is, is it’s not a high bar to be in federal court on a trademark infringement suit as long as you’ve got yes. Apparel, something to that effect. So, apparel is apparel, at least from the very beginning. So, we have to be reasonable about the costs and the costs of putting together a real trademark infringement suit do begin to get high because of all of these market interface points that somebody has to go through as a defendant.

Wil Jacques:
Are we talking about infringement Now or are we talking about damages?

Anthony Verna:
Well, we’re talking about infringement. So, you know, if the price points are different, if the customers are different, if the aesthetic is different, you still have to put together a defense. Right? So for a small company, it’s probably cheaper to rebrand. Right? So Justin, let’s talk about this. So now that we’ve got the practicalities out of the way, Justin, my question is how do I want, how can I keep an aesthetic in a new brand if we’re going to rebrand this company?

Justin Tripodi:
Well, I think I want to first start with what is a brand? I think it might be a small school misnomer to some individuals. And just to oversimplify it the way I think of our brand is the essence of what your business means to its customers, which is kind of ironic because of how you just explained the difference in target customers for the two businesses.

Anthony Verna:
Correct.

Justin Tripodi:
And for a brand it’s obviously a name that people equate with it, but it’s the physical representation of it, which is a logo. It’s where a brand hangs out, which is the marketing channels that it’s on, whether it’s Instagram or Facebook, or traditional marketing, et cetera. It’s who that brand surrounds itself with, with their partners. And people are very careful to align with partners who have a shared vision either for the industry or maybe with some social good components that goes along with it.

So really a brand is the full embodiment and the representation of what that business means to its audience. And in order to successfully rebrand, you have to create that same feeling, whether it’s under a different logo or even a different name, but a brand is much more than just a logo and a name. And that’s what I want you to get across.

Anthony Verna:
So, I think that that’s an excellent point. Like a company like this doesn’t have to change its business focus. If we said in the last episode, the patent is not the business, also the trademark is not the business. The business of the business is still the business as reductive as that might sound. So, in this particular instance, what’s some advice do we have on maybe changing this, this name and still keeping the overall aesthetic?

Justin Tripodi:
So your brand very much is the interface between your business and the audience. So you have to understand what your company means to your audience, but not just one audience. You have different segments of your audience. So for each segment… in your case, more premium apparel could be broken out to either men or women, different ages and mans or cohorts, even different disposable incomes that they’re willing to put forth. And from that, once you understand your customer segments, you could begin to peel the layers off of what your brand or your company means rather to each one of those segments. And then when you begin to look at new names or new logos, you really want to make sure they’re consistent with those customer’s expectations. Now I will say the best thing about a rebrand is that you have an audience you can test with.

Anthony Verna:
Yes. Exactly.

Justin Tripodi:
So you don’t need to go into this blindly. As, you know, I always like, and I think customers nowadays, especially love transparency between a business and themselves. So, you can say to your audience, “Hey, we’re undergoing a rebrand. We would love to invite your participation to really make sure we deliver the best experience now and in the future for you customers.” but it’s on that business to understand that our customers will understand and appreciate that. So, if you do have an audience, invite them in, let them help you with that rebrand. Don’t be shy from that, own the process.

Anthony Verna:
I think that’s a very important point that you make, Justin. Because in a situation like this, if you’re a defendant in a trademark infringement suit, one of the things you want to say is all right, it’s going to cost me a lot of money to defend this properly and now it’s going to cost me some money to rebrand.

But one of the things that a lot of plaintiffs are willing to do is give you at least six months as a burn off period and as a new brand testing period so that you can still be making money with the old stuff. In a way you’re saying no mas, I give up, but from a practicality standpoint, for a smaller business, sometimes you can’t litigate to win. So, in that time, Jim, can you talk a little bit about engaging customers too to help with the, with the brand. What’s the message that I want to give customers as a business owner?

Jim Huerta:
I shouldn’t say I think. What Justin said about, if I understand that correctly, if you already have a brand and pre being litigated,
you already have some kind of following, whether it’d be big, small or indifferent, you have some kind of a test model. If you need to go to the avenue of doing a rebranding because now you have people who you’ve engaged who you can talk to. So, you have that, that cluster whatever size it is. I think that you need to look at the market, look at the people who you’re speaking to and see how they react to a change. I mean it’s all about sales. It’s all about what kind of revenue you can bring in. If you’re sitting there and you know that a rebrand is going to cost you a fraction of what the litigation’s going to cost you and someone brings to me inside, let’s say I’m the CEO of the company, someone comes to me and says, “Hey Jim, here’s what we’re facing.” And I look at him and he says, “I think I can get that audience.

Jim, I think I can do the test market. I think we can.” I very much would think that I’m going to go to wherever it’s more economical and more possible winning. And I don’t know if litigation is going to be my winning vehicle. So, I would probably be looking at something like a rebrand.

Anthony Verna:
As someone who litigates, I can tell you there are multiple ways of winning. It’s not just winning in court cause sometimes that’s so expensive. It’s a loss. Justin, if I’m a business owner and I’m rebranding, do I want to do surveys with my customers? Do I want to, well, how do I want to frame this potential question? Go ahead, Barry.

Barry Kolevzon:
Yeah, how to connect them? And a lot of companies go out and they have a special, which is kind of rebranding.

Anthony Verna:
So, you mean give a discount for the old merchandise?

Barry Kolevzon:
Yeah, it could be a discount on the current merchandise, but it could be a new intriguing thing that says, Hey, when we’re rebranding, we’re going to go from A to C.

Wil Jacques:
I got one question cause there’s a nuance that’s being lost here. And maybe, you know, I’m going to mention a famous brand in my discussion, but it’s not about them just, you know, just as a caveat to my discussion, but I see this rebranding as some kind of a pivot and there’s a nuance that I’m missing and maybe pieces of the audience is missing as well. So, I’ll use the case of my grandmother. Okay. And so, as a young child, I can remember, you know, my grandmother would send me to the store with the list and on the list was not peas on the list was Del Monte peas. And if I came back with anything other than Del Monte peas, you know, a lot of butts to pay. Okay.

Barry Kolevzon:
Yeah. Goya was one of my problems. Yeah. So, so, yeah, right.

Wil Jacques:
So if it didn’t say that then then it’s an attachment. I can hear the attachment of that customer to that particular brand. Now we’re just talking about peas. In this case you’re talking about some clothing. How easy is it now for a Del Monte to go to their customer base and there’s some hindsight involved here I understand that, but to say we’re no longer going to be called Del Monte, you know, we’re going to be called Xenon vegetable services and you know, how does that go over with customer base?


Anthony Verna:
I would say the first thought there is that I think it’s easier for a smaller company to rebrand. The one that’s entrenched in its particular brand and then needs to have some kind of pivot to it. I think for a smaller company, and Justin did say you might need to have that discussion and conversation and I think Jim and Barry’s said that too. You have to say, here’s what we’re doing. And sometimes you might even want to say, look, we’re being sued. We’ve decided to do the rebrand instead of fighting the suit. And you may not want to play victim in a message like that. So a message like that does have to be worded properly and carefully, but you might have to have that conversation.


Justin Tripodi:
Yeah. It’s not impossible for larger brands to rebrand, I mean about.com rebranded to dot-dash to reflect a new business focus going forward. And I think just for sake of clarity at this podcast, the case study we’re looking at was more of a obligation to rebrand to avoid litigation if they felt it’s in their best interest. There are plenty of times, and I would say this is probably more often the case that you’re rebranding to demonstrate a pivot of your business into possibly a different audience or a different pivot. I’m actually a part of a company right now in the healthcare beauty aid space where we teamed up with a world class product developer, one of the first individuals to utilize ingredients from the Dead Sea and cosmetics. He’s been doing it for over 35 years. He was running not only one brand, but several brands out of Toronto.

And from a product standpoint, they were very successful from a marketing and branding standpoint. They were not. And when we first met with him, he said the words we always love to hear, I don’t know what I don’t know and I don’t know marketing and branding. So, we saw that as a perfect opportunity to team up with him and rebrand, out of our choice, his entire product line and his company. That also included looking at different opportunities within the market. So that rebranding took into account new market positioning, took into account a higher end customer that we wanted to go forward with. And then from that we worked backwards into creating a name and a logo and a brand identity with our brand values, et cetera.

Jim Huerta:
And your targeted markets do need that. I mean, I can give you the one we all have laughed about in the past when they came out with a great idea of the car Nova and they try to send that down into Latin American countries.

We know what happened there. Someone should have said but you can’t call that Nova in Latin American countries. That’s not going to work. So they should’ve done, they should’ve saw that and did the rebrand, knew the renaming of the car. That was a disaster as we all know.

Justin Tripodi:
So branding is not easy. There’s a reason why  brand new campaigns, especially within large, large companies take a while to perform and conduct and they’re rather expensive. Let alone for new products being brought to market. Companies are sinking a lot of money to make sure they’re delivering upon the expectations of their existing consumers. And they don’t want to make any assumptions. Anthony, you asked before, how do you do a rebrand? How do you, how do you begin to engage your consumer? I think a lot of that just comes down to where a company is in their life cycle and what their financial resources are.
On the low end, you could do surveys or pulse surveys, which is just one question at a time. You can put social media posts on inviting commentary and people love sharing in their opinions. They really do, just like advisees love talking about themselves.

Anthony Verna:
I like the idea of a smaller business that needs to rebrand just saying, sending an email to all of its email users and saying, here’s a survey. Please click here. Please click your favorite of five and then doing the same thing on social media here. Please click this survey and give your input and say, pick which one you liked the best and at least have five.

Wil Jacques:
What about your other channels are they is, I guess if you’re making the sales they probably don’t care. I don’t want to answer my own question, but what about your channel partners, distributors and other people who have embraced this brand, aren’t they as brand conscious as the end user.

Justin Tripodi:
I’m sure there are, but I think their tolerance is much more because from a B to B perspective, let’s face it, they care about their bottom line. Is the economics of my relationship with this business is going to continue if not grow? And as long as the answer is yes to that, I think they would follow along or rebrand would rebrand without much friction. Really a rebrand is consumer focused because typically, most businesses are in a very competitive marketplace where they need to stand out and the way they stand out. A lot of things come into account, but their branding above most of those.

Wil Jacques:
The messaging of what you’re talking to your client about then, is it being lost in the fact that they have fallen emotionally in love with a brand versus the business side, which drives them to probably just go ahead and rebrand them.

Anthony Verna:
Anthony’s number one rule of trademark law: Don’t fall in love. And every one of my clients, every entrepreneur that I have ever met says, “Oh my God, I love this brand.” Whether or not they want protected. Yes, yes it is. And my number one rule is don’t fall in love because this might happen where you might need to do a, if you haven’t done a trademark search, and we could talk about that as well because it was, we talked about patent searches in the previous episode. If you haven’t done a trademark search and this is floating out there and you want to be conservative and cautious about your business, then you have a rebrand. So, that energy burst for your brand, just like that energy burst for your actual product does create that attachment. But my first rule is don’t fall in love.

Justin Tripodi:
Let’s talk about falling in love for a second. Okay. And we’ll keep this PG, Wil. I think any entrepreneur and small business owner needs to be loaded with passion because you’re going to have a lot of ups and downs throughout your journey. And those downs can definitely make you second guess what you’re looking to accomplish and you need to have that passion. I think with passion comes a lot of emotion. So, it is easy to get emotionally attached to aspects of your company, whether it’s a brand name or business model, et cetera. That’s fine. But you need to be able to make business decisions outside of your emotions and your passions and what you love that are in the best interest of the business. And that’s why it’s important sometimes to have advisors and key relationships with people that you trust that have more of an objective view of your business than you. It’s very hard to see the outer edge of a circle when you’re standing right in the middle of it. And for a lot of founders, that’s exactly where they are. They’re at the middle of their business and a lot of what they see is obviously biased because of their passion. And the granular details that they look at from a day to day basis.

Wil Jacques:
Maybe it’s not quite
that. Maybe I just don’t understand how I built a following that recognizes me and it’s kinda like walking into the bar, they know my name and then all of a sudden I walk in and my name’s changed. I think it’s the fear of thinking that they won’t know me anymore. But there is something you do as a professional to mitigate that or to eliminate this stress.

Justin Tripodi:
I think if I can say one thing, I think this is an ongoing evolution of marketing nowadays and it’s causing a lot of disruption within market research and the metrics behind marketing, which is, if you look at Google and people pay so much money to ad words, well that’s based on really cost per click and cost per action. But the real factor or metric to how successful a company can be is engagement. How are you engaging your consumers? Not only are they liking your page or your post, but are they commenting, is there a two-way street of engagement? And that’s also where our path forward lies with potentially rebranding. If you do have a good conversation with your audience, you work that into your conversation. I don’t think the hard part is issuing a survey or an email. The hard part is knowing what questions to ask. You don’t want to be too leading. You need to know, well, I need to ask questions about the values and trust in my brand. What their expectations of me are and really show a very subtle question set that is maybe only three to five. No one wants to answer 15 question surveys anymore. The average attention span right now is less than eight seconds. So yeah, good luck with all your marketing. With that said…

Jim Huerta:
I just want to go back. I don’t want to interrupt you, but I, Wil mentioned the word and I’m to bring it up again. We’ll mention the word messaging. We all know the messaging at any level of any corporation we know that’s an expensive ordeal. I mean you look at a marketing plan, the top, the sitting in the most expensive thing is the messaging that you’re putting out there. If you rebrand, are we talking also re-messaging?

Justin Tripodi:
Not necessarily.

Anthony Verna:
I think that’s what we’re looking to avoid is messaging. I think we want to keep the same brand aesthetic with a new trademark/name.

Justin Tripodi:
Yes. Well, under this case done under this case study, it was a choice to rebrand out of a pivot necessary for business success. You might want to change your messaging and when it comes to messaging, it’s not one size fits all for your entire company. There is messaging that goes to your brand identity and the essence of your brand and then there could be, excuse me, siloed messaging for each targeted audience. There needs to be a connection between your brand and the customer segmentation messaging, but not all customers are created equal. You need to speak very specifically to each one of your customer sets. Because if people don’t feel like you’re speaking to them and personalizing it to them, they’re onto the next product.

Anthony Verna:
So the next step in thinking about a company like this is that the products do have to be I don’t want no one to necessarily say recreated, but they have to be updated for the new name/mark. And, Barry, can we talk about some of the management issues involved? Because now I have to get new artwork. I have to have the same people create different items.

Barry Kolevzon:
Yeah. But what you’re doing is you’re starting a new company in the old company. Now you don’t propagandize it. Okay. But you take it and you kind of go into it say, Hey, we got something new and exciting. We thought that it might be of interest to you. So we’ve put it in our for sale file.

Anthony Verna:
So in order to keep the same supply chain going, what is a business owner looking at in terms of management? Because we’re hopefully creating similar products just with slight changes. So, I hope there isn’t much change, but am I wrong about that assumption?

Barry Kolevzon:
Well, it varies up and down on the scale.

Anthony Verna:
Okay,  so talk to me about some of that variation.

Barry Kolevzon:
Well, what you can do is you can take the printing that you put on the package if it’s a package, if it’s food stuff or whatever it is, and put a little thing on there maybe without even changing anything else and say, Hey, this is new enriched and see if that gets some traction.

Anthony Verna:
I like that. Jim in some of the messaging that we’ve been been talking about, how should the owner, that top level handle that messaging in terms of going down the company.

Wil Jacques:
Within the company?

Anthony Verna:
Yes.

Jim Huerta:
Oh, you sit like we’re sitting right here. Then that’s the group when you bring your head of operations, your head of marketing, your head of sales, and we have a conversation that says, here’s the situation we’re in. You take consideration was what Barry just said about how much do we have to spend to rebrand because I’m going to be looking at that because someone’s got to sign that check. If I don’t bring it up, it’s the chief financial officer’s going to say you’re joking with this.

Anthony Verna:
But also on something like that, there are some costs for the past three or four years that this company’s been advertising and building what they could have some costs.

Jim Huerta:
What’s going to happen to them, and I can tell you this from knowledge firsthand is that’s all sunk costs. They are going to be, you’re going, the company’s going to take a ride off, hit and work their tax structure any way they want, but that’s a different subject for a different thing. But the whole idea of those costs of the rebranding is going to come up and what is needed to be done to get it out there with some kind of fiduciary responsibility and savings. I would look at it that way. Actually. I think Barry’s comment, maybe it is keep it simple, stupid. Maybe it’s taking your all labeling and saying didn’t you and improved or something that says, Oh, it’s new and improved. I like the old one. I might like this one too with all the new names.

Wil Jacques:

Isn’t it a broad product name change versus your company name change, your
brand name change or am I misunderstanding?

Justin Tripodi:

I would actually break that down into three parts. I think if you’re gonna
consider a rebranding, there’s the strategy aspect of it. Why am I doing this?
What happens if I don’t do this? What could happen if I do do this? What
happens if I do it well, what happens if I don’t do it well? And then there’s
the tactical component, which is I know I want to do it. How exactly am I going
to do it? And those are team discussions. You need a devil’s advocate
personality in the room to kind of challenge you that. If you haven’t gotten
this yet from our podcast, we always debate each other. And after you have the
tactical plan on what you want to do, this is the support aspect and that’s
when you share with your team what the journey is going to be ahead, have them
support those initial efforts so that there’s a united front going forward.

Jim Huerta:

Yeah, that’s a good, but I agree with you there. What I want to go back to the
basis of this conversation, we’re on the verge of being sued because our name
so happens to be close to someone else’s name. So my message to my team is, I
hate to put this on you, but we’re not here because of the fact that we did
clever constant new messaging. We’re in the verge of being sued and we’re going
to have to shut this business down. So I think the approach would be different
if I’m looking at it from that level of desperation.

Anthony Verna:

I would think so.

Justin Tripodi:

So, yes, it’s hard to create a black and
white answer to these questions. The biggest takeaway you want is
entrepreneurship. Small businesses, they live in the gray area all the time.
And that’s not a bad thing. It’s just that there’s a number of valuables that
always need to be taken into account when you’re making business decisions. In
this case, the strategy behind it is yes, we need to rebrand. All the risk is
too high. The tactical is how we’re going to rebrand it is what the core focus
would be on.

Anthony Verna:

I would say, look, if you’re going to rebrand, the other thing that you need to
do, and I’ll leave you with this thought before we end this episode and move to
our next is that just like you did a patent search, you need to do a trademark
search as well. And if you haven’t done that, sadly this is the end result is
that three years in building your brand, you have a trademark infringement suit
staring you down and forcing you to make changes. So therefore, you’ve got to
find a way to be preventative about this. And hopefully you do the trademark
search, you find what brands are out there. You get that high level view of the
universe of this potential name or this potential mark for this potential brand
and you just like Wil said with patents, you do the white space. Where does our
brand fit in here? You do the green space. You kind of figure out where our
competitors are. You need to make sure that you understand the universe of this
mark before you move on and I think that’s just as important in trademarks as
it is in patents because this is the end result. If you’re sloppy about it or
you don’t at least look back to understand, gee, what competitors do I have?
What potential plaintiffs do we have?

Jim Huerta:

We keep on going back to the same thing and I’m glad you phrased it the way you
did. Again, I would say do your homework. Understand what you’re getting into.
Do your research, do your due diligence, do your patent search, do your
trademark search. Although it seems laborious and costly and you hate it, and
most people are going to hate it because they’re so excited about this thing
that they’re doing that they rather take a shortcut, take the road less
traveled and do your homework is my model.

Anthony Verna:

Thank you for that, Jim. Thank you everyone for listening. Uh, this is our
special mini-podcast series with the NESSA group. And Jim, back to you. How do
you find the NESSA group

online?

Jim Huerta:

Oh, go to http://thenessagroup.net or
you go to LinkedIn or you go to Facebook, you’ll find us. We’re out there and
just let us know what you need and we’ll be there.

Anthony Verna:

Thank you very much for listening.