Image Copyright Bredmaker. Courtesy, RGB Stock

I attended a terrific conference recently, produced jointly by Recourses and Win Without Pitching, on the topic of developing new revenue models for expert Firms. About 60 leaders of expert Firms from around the world, primarily marketing and ad firms, gathered to get insight from workshop leaders David Baker and Blair Enns about ways to add new products, profit centers, recharged business models, and other value-enhancing tools, to their businesses.

One of the best parts of the two-day conference was the opportunity to gather into small teams to consider how various business constraints would impact their revenue models. Each team was given a constraint assumption and challenged to “work around” it to deliver new value, profitably. It was fascinating to see creative brainstorming around questions like:

– What would you do if your Agency could only provide consulting offerings, with no implementation services?

– What if your Agency’s value proposition depended on delivering only process-automated offerings (things that any employee with entry level skills could execute)?

– How would you design your Agency’s offerings to target only one client industry segment or area of need?

There were about a dozen teams, each of which presented one of their findings at the end of the exercise to the conference audience. And while I’m admittedly biased on the topic, in almost every presentation I heard a solution or idea that involved the creation or iteration of original intellectual property by the Expert Firm. This was a common theme during the table conversation with my team, and came up often during my conversations with Agency leaders during the conference breaks.

Once a fellow conference-goer learned in conversation that I am both 1) a lawyer, and 2) passionate about intellectual property, some other themes began to emerge, too. I saw definite patterns regarding the legal issues that are top of mind of marketing agency leaders right now.

They Want to Know How to Protect Agency Proprietary IP. The Agency leaders I talked with had a keen intuition about things like patents, trademarks, and copyright. But they wanted insight about the best types of protection for their particular assets. Some of them also wondered about how to properly legal structure their businesses so that their IP assets were both protected, and held in an appropriate legal entity – for example, should they create a separate holding company? Many of them work with strategic alliance firms, or independent contractors, and expressed concern about properly documenting IP ownership in assets that those third parties help to create.

They Want to Know How to Fairly Transfer Original IP. Some Agencies were well past the asset creation stage, and had even vetted a potential market or financial model for their offering. For a few of these Agencies, capitalizing on the asset by selling it outright to a Client or venture Firm was the next step. They had questions about whether an outright asset transfer, or a license, would be best. And, if a license, should it be exclusive or not? What, they wanted to know, was the legal transfer method that made the most sense?

They Want to Know How to Streamline or Manage Agency Legal Processes. Every Agency leader I talked with at the conference struggled with this. Whether they simply avoided implementing proactive legal structure because they had never been sued, or they deferred on legal issues to Clients’ legal teams ( a common scenario with trademark due diligence for brands, for example), or they took a piecemeal approach to addressing legal questions, all implied that they had challenges and lacked a centralized, or streamlined system for managing their Agency legal processes.

If you’re challenged by any of these legal questions, know that you’re in excellent company.

And, if you’re challenged on the issues of revenue creation or revenue modeling for your Agency, I highly recommend the Revenue 2.0 experience. I took a lot away from the conference for my own business and other expert Firms can, too. Find out more here. . A 2015 date for the event has already been scheduled.