Episode 110 – Devin Miller

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Automated Transcription

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Devin Miller 0:00
I guess as I bring people on giving them enough ability to take off – offload those things is one that I’ve struggled with and one that I just had to come to a realization, accepting that 20-80 role of what they do. … if they can’t do that 20% but they get 80% it’s good enough. And that was dovetailing into that. The weakness building on top of that is waiting too long to hire people to get things done. Because I always wanted to do it myself, or thought I could do it myself and had enough hours to get it all done. I didn’t need – the businesses and with the law firm as well with the businesses I’ve run and started up is I never had – I always wait too long to bring people on because I think I can get it done or I could get it done better and all those things. And so I wait too long and so I’ve had to step back and say, Okay, I’ve got only so many hours in the day, only so many things I can do to overcome this weakness I’ve got to be bringing people on so I can focus on what really helped the business most which that I can do which other people can do.

Richard Matthews 1:02
…3-2-1

Richard Matthews 1:27
Hello and welcome back to The Hero Show. My name is Richard Matthews and I’m here live on the line with Devin Miller. Devin are you here?

Devin Miller 1:30
I am here. Good to be on.

Richard Matthews 2:07
Awesome. Glad to have you here. And Devin’s coming in from Utah. And for those of you who are following along, I am still stuck in Central Florida for our travels. So we’re still stuck there for the whole Coronavirus thing. But for those of you who don’t know, Devin. Devin’s actually is interesting. We’ve never had anyone who talks about this stuff on the show before. So Devin Miller is the founder of Miller IP Law. And you are a patent attorney who lives in Utah and you’ve worked for a large law firm helping Fortune 100 clients with their intellectual property and you realize that there was not a good resource out there to help startups and small businesses like me understand intellectual property, including patents, trademarks, and copyrights. And that’s what brings you to what you’re doing now, which is helping people business owners like myself understand that. So, with that very brief introduction, why don’t you tell us what you’re known for. What’s your business like? Who do you serve? What is the primary good or service you offer to the world so to speak?

Devin Miller 3:07
All right. There are 5 or 6 questions in there so I’ll try and hit as many as I can. So yeah, so as you mentioned, kind of an intro. So I’m known for focusing on – so we do primarily patents and trademarks. So helping people to prepare them, file them, and then prosecute them in front of the United States Patent and Trademark Office or USPTO, in order to get protection for your business. And that’s general, a lot of other law firms do that. But where we try and focus – starting on or focusing on a lot of the startups and small businesses is really how we’ve tried to set up more of our model of how we do things, and who we focus on, who our client is, or our perfect client or niches, and that we’ve done a couple of things. One is that we know we did we moved all to flat fee basis so a lot of times a gripe with attorneys is more on – it’s an almost an open check or a never-ending bill. You sign up and then they send you billable hours, and then they send you more billable hours. And then you have a phone call for five minutes and they rounded up to half an hour. And then you send an email and you get charged for an hour. And it’s that open-ended thing. So one of the things we did when we’re looking at small businesses is we get they have a fairly limited budget, they’re not able to add just an open pay – open check – … don’t have unlimited budgets. And to the contrary, startups and small businesses generally have more things to spend money on than they have money to spend. So they’re fairly judicious and so we’re trying to say okay, this is how much it costs, governmental fees, our fees, everything included, makes it easy. And then the one other thing is that I’ll take a break or take a breath and see if you have any questions is, we also set it up. So one of the stumbling blocks is with startups and small businesses are even going into the attorney because they don’t know – hey, I don’t want to go into an attorney to pay him a few hundred dollars for them to tell me that they can’t help me or I don’t need this or anything else. So we also set up that they can come into a free strategy session or typically now with COVID over Zoom, that we can meet with them, we’ll talk through, help them strategize what they need, what their business, whether it’s they need something today, they need something down the road, or they don’t need anything or what they need. And then I know I said the last thing, but I’ll add one more thing is the other thing that I’ve done personally. So I played both sides of the fence, in the sense that I founded and been a patent attorney my whole career. But I’ve also alongside of that founded and grown several startups. So I’ve done several startups that have grown to 7 and 8 figure companies, and started from the ground up. So I also offer the perspective of I’m not just coming at it from the legal perspective, but can also offer the business perspective. So that was a whole bunch of answers to a simple question or a couple of simple questions, but I’ll take a breath there.

Richard Matthews 5:54
So I have a couple of questions that popped into my head immediately, hearing all of that, and this is selfish on my part. But most of the people who either listen to the show and a lot of my clients, myself included, are in the space where we are creating products. So we’re creating online courses, or we’re creating online services or creating physical products that get sold, I actually have a physical product business, and I’ve worked with a couple of clients who have physical product businesses, and they create their own products that are either private labeled, or they’re custom made. And I don’t think anyone that I know, in the space, has trademarks, or anything like that, to protect their products and stuff like that. And I’m curious, how big of a mistake is that? And what are your thresholds you say when you’ve created a product or created a brand or create something where you need to like, Okay, at this point, you should be talking to an intellectual patent attorney?

Devin Miller 6:54
Yeah, so maybe that would be helpful for your audience. And just to get set as a baseline as to go over what are patents, trademarks, and copyrights because those are – you look at intellectual property those are the 3 things of areas that you typically protect. So patents go towards inventions. Anything that has the functionality that works that can be everything from software to hardware to those types of things. But anything and I does everything from wearables to drones to medical software to medical devices to I’ve done boating cruise to all across the board but – anything that does something that’s going to be under patent. Trademarks are going to be under brands and so anything that’s associated with your brand so if you think of Nike has the name, Nike. They have their Nike so accessory brand. Apple has the logo of the apple as well as the name Apple that’s their brand. Starbucks has the mermaid with the mermaid on the cup, and that’s their brand. Anything to do with a brand that’s under trademarks. Copyrights are gonna be more under creative. So think of books or pictures or videos or sculptures or something, those … or so maybe with that as a baseline each of the different areas is different. So the first thing I’d probably start at is figuring out what you need, you need to figure out where you’re – the value of your business is at. So if you think of Okay, are we a brand type? Meaning do we differentiate ourselves on a product or on an invention or something unique? Do you have the next iPhone that’s better than everything else, and you’re really a product based company, then you’d focus on patents? And these aren’t mutually exclusive, but if you’re saying now, are we a brand company? Do we really have a big following? We provide great customer service or everybody knows that we do a good job or we have a good marketplace or establish yourself, they present Okay, the values and brand and that’s the second and vice versa. Creatives, you write a book, you do a movie, you do photography, something and that is creative. So I think the first thing is to identify which of those are essential – which of those are the main asset of your business or what’s driving the value, and then you look at which ones to protect. As far as when to protect them, I mean, go … walk you through those 3 on patents you’re really going to look at. So you have a couple of different things patents are first to file. So if you were to look at that first person to file on an invention, the government presumed you’re the first one to come up with it. So whoever files on it first is the presumed inventor of it. So one thing you always have to think of is if I’m putting this out in the public if others can see it; if others are using it, or if I’m doing anything else, or it’s a crowded space, and a lot of people are inventing in this area anytime you put it out there, you increase your risk. And if somebody files on it first or someone has a patent on it first you can be boxed out of using your own product. And the other one to think on patents is anytime you put a thing out into the public, there’s a statute that basically says, you have a year time frame from the earliest time you put your invention out in the public, within which you have to file a patent on it. If you don’t, then you’re not able to you’re putting it out as a public product, public domain, anybody can use it. So those are the 2 main things I always look at as far as an invention is risk is. One is if I’m putting this out there, how crowded is it? How quickly will people find out about it? And I’ll probably want to do it before I increase that risk too much or expose it too far. And certainly before that one-year timeframe. Brands are a bit different on trademarks. So trademarks, you’re going to go – that one there isn’t a window. So trademarks are also the first to file system meaning there are some common law rights, some state law rights, so you can keep in your defined small geographic area as soon as you start using it. But if you’re saying, Hey, we want to grow into multiple states, or we want to go across the US or selling online or anything of that, really, whoever files on the trademark versus the one that gets it. So if you’re a small business or a startup and you’re saying, hey, when do I want to go after – when do I want to protect this is really When do I get to the point that my brand is big enough, that it’s creating value that I’m going to need to make sure that somebody else doesn’t get the name. The other hard hard thing is, is that you want to make sure your name is clear. So you don’t put in a year or 2 or 3 of building a business with a rounded brand and a name and a company, only to find out somebody else has already trademarked it. And then you have to try and go and rebrand or go and get a license from them or do something much more expensive. And copyrights are the easiest because those ones and as soon as you create whatever it is your copywriting, whether it takes the photo, you write the book, you do the video or whatever, then you automatically have copyrights. The only reason you register a copyright is to define the date by which you came up with it. So if you could take the notes, or you can otherwise prove it, then copyrights are probably the least amount of urgency because they already have those inherent rights. But if you’re saying hey, what I don’t want to have happened is somebody comes along after copies me or otherwise, and I can’t establish when I actually created this, then you’ll just want to be able to establish that date. So that was a much longer answer than I’m sure that was intended with the question. But that may be –

Richard Matthews 12:10
That’s actually a really good answer. So I have one point of clarification that I’m just curious about, cause I’ve always wondered this, but the whole name thing. So for instance, we’ve been talking about this on the show a little bit, I’ve got a new service that’s coming out called Push Button Podcasts. And we have the logo, and we have the domain name, we have the website up and we have most of the services ready to go on the back end. And we’ve got a custom app that we’re working on developing, and just going through that. So the app, and the custom stuff that we’re doing on the back end, that would be considered some of those is we’ve invented some processes and whatnot in the software that would be patentable. Is that correct?

Devin Miller 12:55
Yeah. So yeah 2 avenues. So copyright exactly the source code. So the source code that you typed up, you actually created it, you get down to that level, the app that pulls on the copyrights. But it’s pretty easy to design around source codes. Somebody can code the same thing a different way. And then they get around your copyright. So really, it does fall on your patent application. And what you really look at is what – with the app or if you’re coming up with some news, what is it new, unique things you’re coming up with? Because patents you basically have 2 standards that they compare you against for patentability, and one is called a novelty. And one is called obviousness. Novelty is has anybody else previously created it? If so, you can’t patent it, somebody else already came up with it. Obviousness is okay. You didn’t – not one person has created this. But if you take two or more things that are out there that have been obvious, and suddenly that industry, they could have combined it, you’re really not adding anything new or unique. You’re just combining 2 things in the … been out there. And then that’s not patentable. So if you can meet those two standards, and yeah, software and apps and I do that on a frequent basis, previous in my career I worked with an Intel I worked with Red Hat, I worked with an Amazon, all of which had those type of products and they were all are very heavy in those fields and so yeah certainly something that would fall under patents.

Richard Matthews 14:14
So so you can you could potentially depending on what the software does patent it and then the trademark would cover things like the brand name and the domain name and your logo and that?

Devin Miller 14:24
Yep. So patents would be on the actual software, how it functions, how it works, the features that it has, and then just to your point, the trademark would be okay. You think of the app and let’s take an Apple and everybody knows Apple. Do you think their phone is going to be patented? All of the features of how it works, its cameras, the screens – a touchscreen, the battery life and all those and then their brand is Apple or iPhone and so that’s what they trademark so they trademark the Apple logo, they may trademark a product name and the business name. So yeah, just to your point those would be the 2 things that would fall under.

Richard Matthews 14:59
Nice and then to continue that example, the copywriting on the page to sell the iPhone that would be under copyright.

Devin Miller 15:07
Yep, exactly.

Richard Matthews 15:09
Any the images from market.

Devin Miller 15:12
Yep. Or their commercials or their stands that you always see that is pretty pictures that will make the iPhone look great and everything else, those are all going to be under copyrights.

Richard Matthews 15:23
Interesting. Yeah. It’s really cool to have an idea of how the hierarchy works. And where it fits in. So my next question for you then actually is more about you personally. we talk on this show all the time about the origin story. So every good comic book hero has an origin story. It’s the thing that made them the hero they are today, and we want to hear that story. Were you a born hero, or bit by a radioactive spider that made you want to get into the business? So how did you get started on your own entrepreneur journey?

Devin Miller 15:55
Oh, yeah, as most good origin stories, it has lots of twists and turns in it. I’ve always liked – so that almost takes you back to probably undergraduate school. So I’ll start there, but I won’t walk you through all of the details of it. But I was an undergraduate, I did a dual degree in Chinese or Mandarin Chinese and electrical engineering. And I got to – at the end of engineering, and I decided I didn’t want to be an engineer. Not that I didn’t enjoy engineering. But it was more of I didn’t want to be stuck on a project every day all day for a long period of time for months or years on end, and be a very small cog in a big wheel type of a thing. And by all means, there are a lot of great engineers, they absolutely need it, but it’s for me, my personality. I didn’t quite want to do that. So I got to the end of engineering and said, Okay, I still enjoy engineering, working on technology still want to be there. But what do I want to do for my career and so I had a fork in the road of I enjoyed the business, I enjoyed startups and that realm. They also enjoyed more of Engineering and Technology and working on it. And so when I went to it, I split my path I’m going to do I want to do business and I wanted to do what was legal or patent attorney. So with that, I ended up taking both. So I did, I went out to Cleveland, Ohio, and I did Case Western Reserve, I did an MBA or Masters of Business Administration and a law degree the same time. So I ran those in parallel and got both of those degrees with all of that. So all at the same time, as I’m doing both of those degrees, I entered into business competition with a few other people and it’s one of those multidisciplinary business competitions, where they get engineers, they had a designer, they had me as legal, they had a couple of different types of engineers. One was more on the physical side and the other one on the electrical side. We all got together and we entered a business competition, and we took second and it was the first one was more on we’re trying to make gym bags not stink and without going into all of the details. It was using a Sharkskin designed with how it’s manufactured that would reduce them as the smell of gym bags took second. That was the end of it. Next year we came back. And we actually entered the competition. We were trying to come up with the idea of what we wanted to enter in. And we entered in or – we had a few ideas that didn’t really work, or we tried to hone down on but as I was walking home one day from the competition, and at that time, I still do it fairly frequently. I like to jog. I like to run, and I just said my first marathon. I was thinking I said Wouldn’t it be – and my first marathon was horrible. I didn’t drink enough. I didn’t prepare well enough. I finished it. It was fine, but it was much more painful than it had to be. And so I thought I said wouldn’t it have been cool if I would have had a hydration wearable that could help me to monitor my hydration because that’s one of the big things that as you get dehydrated, it makes it a lot more painful and a lot less fun experience. Walking home, I came up with that idea. Long story short, so we entered that in the business competition. Again took second place. And again, that was a little bit bittersweet. But that’s a longer story for another time, but took second. And so with all of that, I bought out my partners, moved back to Utah as I graduated, and I still had that fork in the road, do I want to do business because I bought out my partners and I have this business. I also have my law degree and enjoy doing patents. And so really, I’ve read both of those in parallel. I’ve continued to do startups and small businesses for part of my career, part of my time, and I also do a Miller IP Law and Patent and Trademark so I work in startups and small businesses that also help them. So I don’t know, that was what you’re asking for. That was a long origin story … But that’s the origin story where I got to here.

Richard Matthews 19:42
I’m curious if any of the businesses that you entered in the competition went anywhere further than the competition if you actually went to the market and actually started selling.

Devin Miller 19:51
So so the gym bag that one died on the bite after the first year we put it in, we have fizzled out. We didn’t do anything. On the wearables so I bought out if that’s their ability on this, or I bought out my, all the people that worked on with it. So I had a clear path of ownership. And then with that, we built it. So we got one out there, we built it to a level and we bootstrapped it. And we got to a point that we needed investor dollars to move forward. So we got to a first-round or with a lot of times called a seed round of investor dollars. They came in, we were pushing it forward, as we were getting ready to do the next. So we got a prototype, it was working, it was functional. And we’re getting ready to take the next level, which is now getting it ready to put out in the marketplace. Difference between functioning something that looks horrible, and nobody’s ever gonna … of … it doesn’t have a good appeal versus making it polished or consumer product – we were about at that point. And as we’re getting to that point, looking for investors and that we had an opportunity, some different company came along that was in the wearables, but for diabetes monitoring. So a lot of the technologies we develop or coming up with work very well with what they’re doing. So we actually licensed and got together with them. And so that one’s actually ongoing and currently, they should be releasing product towards the end of this year. But for wearables for diabetes monitoring, so in the iteration that one’s still alive and I’m still actively involved in that business for getting ready to launch that diabetes monitoring, while also doing Miller IP Law and running the law firm.

Richard Matthews 21:28
Interesting. So you’ve got your hands in a law firm, you’ve got your hands in inventions and you’ve got your hands in startups. You got your hands on all sorts of fun things.

Devin Miller 21:37
I enjoy it. I don’t know if it – maybe it doesn’t work for anybody else or split attention, but it certainly makes for a fun time and it’s something that I enjoy.

Richard Matthews 21:47
Awesome, so I want to talk a little about your superpowers then. So every iconic hero has superpower whether that’s a fancy flying suit made by a genius intellect, sounds like you might actually be on that path, or the ability to call down the thunder from the sky, or maybe it’s even super strength. In the real world, we say that heroes have what I call a zone of genius. It’s a skill or a set of skills that you were born with, or developed over time that really energizes all of your other skills. This superpower is what sets you apart and allows you to help people slay their villains, so to speak, and come out on top in their own journeys. So what is your superpower with that framing?

Devin Miller 22:24
That one’s good – I would put it as maybe I have a few superpowers. Superpowers make it sound like I’m way awesome, which I’m hesitant to say I’m way awesome but we’ll take the context of the question. So I’m gonna split it. So one is I think I have the ability to juggle a lot of different things. So I can, as you mentioned, so I got my hands in Miller IP Law, very active work, a lot of clients, help them with their patents and trademarks. But then I can just as readily jump over and then start, when I have or when doing putting time on the startup and small businesses to put time on that and I’ll jump on the bench and do engineering and do that. And then I have to wear another hat of doing marketing and sales. And making sure that that’s all. So it’s the ability to multitask. And I don’t know if that’s intellect or just the sheer ability or learned or ability or whatever. But to be able to multitask is probably one. The other one that I probably say is, or two more. I don’t know how many I have. But another one is the ability to break down things and explain it more easily. So at least when you’re trying to, especially when you get into legal, you get into law, one of the hard things is is you sit down with an attorney, and they don’t necessarily – they know the law very well and you walk in and you walk out and you don’t understand the law any better than you walk in, other than that you’re poor. And they told you to do a couple of things and you hope that it works out. But the ability to actually sit down and teach someone and explain it, break it down on an understandable level is something that I think is oftentimes not done very well but one that I think that I do well, and then the third one is probably more just on the customer service side. I’m able to relate to people, to be responsive. If I were to say within the legal field a superpower. So legal field, in general, has horrible customer service. Generally, if you reach out to an attorney on average throughout the industry it takes – doesn’t matter if it’s a text, a phone call, an email, or whatever, any communication takes them 3 to 5 days to respond back to you and with anything. With give me a call back shoot me an email or anything and if you’re gonna take that that’s a ton of time especially legal matters. You’re sitting there waiting. What am I paying him for? Why am I waiting? What’s going on? And these are things you want now. So my superpower I guess is that you say that I always reach out, same day usually within the same hour, right off the bat if they give me a call or shoot me or email or anything else respond right away but I think without fail and maybe I’m sure there’s some time I failed always respond within the same day so that they’re not waiting for forever. So far to say it I guess its superpowers I put is wearing multiple hats, be able to jump between things, be able to break things down to a simple level, and also having awesome customer service.

Richard Matthews 25:09
It’s interesting I actually think the first two probably fit together they’re probably the same sides of the same skill set where you’re – I call it the ability to put cookies on a lower shelf. You really understand complex systems well, and being able to understand complex systems and put them on the lower shelf for people, people who don’t see the whole system or don’t understand all the complexities that you can make that simple for them, which gives you the ability to pick up new skills, where you can go and you can learn marketing and you can learn engineering and you can learn patent law, you can learn a lot of different skills because you can see the complex systems and understand them. So anyway, I think it’s definitely a potent skill for someone who likes to put their hands in a lot of jars.

Devin Miller 25:52
I like how you explain it much better than I did. So that’s an awesome explanation.

Richard Matthews 25:56
Awesome. So the flip side then, of course, your superpower is your fatal flaw. Every Superman has this Kryptonite. Wonder Woman can’t remove her Bracelets of Victory without going mad. You probably have a flaw that’s held you back in your business. Something that you’ve struggled with, maybe it’s perfectionism like me. It keeps you from shipping or lack of self-care that means you let clients walk all over you or maybe it’s something like being a visionary but lacking the discipline to implement. That’s something I struggled with for a long time. But more important than the flaw is the rectification. How did you fix it? How do you work to overcome those flaws so you can continue to grow and hopefully sharing that will help our listeners who might struggle with the same thing?

Devin Miller 26:38
I’ll give 2 fatal flaws, at least come to mind. They hit the same heads of the same coin, but one is that I like to micromanage. It’s not that I love micromanaging for the sake of micromanaging. But it’s probably something that a lot of people that do startups and small businesses struggle with, is you always think you can do everything the best. So I know how to do it, I’ve done it before. I can do it best. And if I have somebody else do it, it probably won’t get done as well as I can do it. And it’s gonna take me longer to train them and show them how to do it, that I could just do it myself. So you always keep – I always keep pushing it out there of I’ll just get taken care of and I’ll get it done. And then a couple things happen either things never quite get done because they have too many things to get done. Or I work a billion hours and I never see my wife and kids, which is also not a good life either. So I think that that’s one thing that I’ve had to figure out is a little bit I take the – somebody can do it 80% as good as I can, even if I can. I can’t always do it as well, even though I think I can. So realizing that some people are better at things than I am and they can figure it out. But even if I can do it, and if I were to do it better myself, if somebody can do it 80% as good as I can. That’s good enough, meaning that it offloads and it gives me the ability to have time to do the things that they can’t do or that are my strains and that frees up my time to focus on those. One of the things that I’ve struggled – weakness is trying to figure out how to bring people on. I guess as I bring people on giving them enough ability to take offload those things, is one that I struggled with, and one that I had to come to a realization, accepting that 20-80 rule of a thing … They do 20 or, if they can’t do that 20% but they get 80%, it’s good enough. And that was dovetailing into that the weakness building on top of that is waiting too long to hire people to get things done. So because I always wanted to do it myself, or had thought I could do it myself and had enough hours and could get it all done. I didn’t eat or the businesses and with the law firm as well as with the businesses I ran and started up is I never had – I always wait too long to bring people on because I think I can get it done or I can get it done better and all those things. And so I wait too long and so I’ve had to step back and say, hey, I’ve got only so many hours in the day only so many things. I can do to overcome this weakness I’ve got to be bringing people on. So I can focus on what really helps a business most which that I can do, which other people can’t do.

Richard Matthews 29:10
Yeah, that’s a really interesting thing. I actually struggled with the same thing for a long time. Particularly the “I can do it myself either than anyone else can.” And I realized the solution for me was to change the question I was asking myself, so hopefully, this is beneficial for you. But one of the things that I was doing is I would have a task come to my plate, I need to get this thing done. And the question I was asking myself, is, should I hire someone else to do this? Or should I do it myself? And that question is really easy to answer. And it’s always I should do it myself because I can do it better. And I can do it cheaper, and I can do it faster than if I hire someone else. So what I found out was that’s a poor question to ask because it always leads to me doing the work. And so I had to shift the question and so one of the things I did was – I mean, I was encouraged to do this by one of my mentors, he was like, just go out and hire someone. And even if it’s for unspecified things, and hire them full time, or part-time or whatever, and then now your question at the beginning of the day is what do I have on my plate that I can give them? And that changed the conversation completely. And it did a couple of things. One now I was asking that question and working on filling up someone else’s time, I had a lot more free time, then I could start working on things that I was actually really good at. And then I found out that a lot of things that I thought I was great at, other people are better at than me. So it was a double-edged sword, but it also led to, I’ve hired 3 people now, in our company, and it’s been a huge boon for actually just shifting that question.

Devin Miller 30:55
Yeah, and I and I parallel that or I’d be in the same boat. So I mean, hopefully, I don’t know that I’ve ever overcome a weakness completely, but you can at least minimize the effects. I’ve hired a few people. And what I found is sometimes I think, and I still think I could do it better than other people. But I found that as I’ve been able to offload it, that we’ve been able to grow as a business, we were able to bring on more clients, we were able to better service them. And it’s one where it was holding the business back because I thought I could do it myself. So I think to your point, I’ve hired them on and it’s always interesting is I’ve hired them on, there’s always more things that I can have them do. Then they always have time to do and I keep having to replicate bringing them on. But it’s interesting how many things I wasn’t getting to that I thought that I should – things I should have been getting to that I wasn’t because I was doing those other things that now because I’m able to get to those it’s been helpful in growing the business.

Richard Matthews 31:48
Yeah, that’s it’s so true because one of my realizations was now suddenly, instead of having my, for instance, 40 hours that I want to put into work this week. I’ve got 80 hours of work. That’s getting done. And it’s like, that’s crazy. And you hire 3 or 4 more people. And you’re like, especially when you get to a point where I can spend an hour getting assignments put out, and then have 10-20-30 hours of work get accomplished. That’s a crazy cool place to be in business. And it’s funny because startups and other businesses that are big and do a lot of things and have a lot of employees understand that already. But for those of us who start with that whole, bootstrap, do it all ourselves mentality. It’s a huge win to figure out how to hire people and how to actually leverage your time that way.

Devin Miller 32:32
Yep. I completely agree.

Richard Matthews 32:34
Awesome. So my next question then is about your common enemy. So every superhero has an arch-nemesis, so to speak, a thing that they constantly have to fight against in their world. So in the world of business, this takes on a lot of forms, but generally speaking, we put it in the context of your clients. So what is a mindset or a flaw that you’re constantly having to fight to overcome so that you can get your clients better, cheaper, faster, and or a higher degree of results and that you’re banging your head against the wall all the time wishing you you could wave your magic wand and get rid of this when you’re working with clients, what is that thing for you?

Devin Miller 33:06
Yeah, so I mean, I’ll give you 2. The solution is one that we’re actively actually working on. So we haven’t fully implemented it yet. So you get a little bit of insight to maybe what we’re working on. But one of the things that the common enemy that we’re looking at, is people want to do DIY and we’ve grown up in a DIY culture especially with videos on YouTube and be able to do things myself and I have the internet and I can figure it out and it’ll be – I can do as good of a job and all those things. And some –

Richard Matthews 33:37
And Legal Zoom now and stuff like that.

Devin Miller 33:41
Legal Zoom is a good example as well and so you fight against why would I hire an attorney? Or why would I hire somebody else when I can just DIY and do it myself? And sometimes they’ll give the answer Yeah, you can DIY it and you can do it and here are the drawbacks. If you do it yourself, you may do it wrong and a lot of times we have people that do it wrong. And then they come in, and we ended up spending more time and money if we can fix it and half the time, sometimes we can’t even fix it. But when we can, then it takes more time and effort, but your common enemy is people thinking that they can do it DIY, do it wrong, do it better, do it themselves. But I get it in the sense that there are also startups and again, we almost go into the back or to the beginning of the podcast is that you only have so much time, money and effort, and money is one of them. And if you don’t have enough money to hire an attorney, you’d rather get it done or have something in place than have nothing. So you could do the DIY. And you didn’t … question. The way that we’ve fought that common enemy is I want to put in that context is we’ve actually we’re in the process of rolling out what would be a DIY course, which I would still recommend that they use our services, that they use an attorney and it gets better done. But if people are going to be doing DIY stuff themselves, if they’re going to be doing what would be a Legal Zoom or anything else out there, why wouldn’t we offer a course at least for that portion the population is going to DIY that we can help them do it better so that they can avoid a lot of the things that people avoid when they have those, when they do it wrong, or when they don’t know what they’re doing and everything else. So we’ve actually been working on and we’ll be rolling out a course in the next few months that helps people to do DIY better. And then it also gives them the option at any point along or at the end. They say, Okay, yeah, this is a lot harder. This is a lot of things I didn’t understand or it doesn’t make sense, or I don’t want to do it anymore. And then they could have us pick it up at any point. So it helps to fight that, allows people to do DIY and aid them as well as if they get into and say okay, DIY is not a good idea then we can help them out to that point.

Richard Matthews 35:39
It’s awesome. So if you don’t mind I put on my course creator hat because that’s the thing that I do a lot with my clients is help them to build and develop courses. And one of the things that we do for that transition at the end where you get to the end of the course here, now you have accomplished this thing. You’ve learned how to DIY your patents, or whatever. I always tell my course creators at the end, the last thing that you want to do is you want to do a call to adventure. And the call to adventure for your course is, it’s two things One of them is is to drive home the idea that they need to take action. So have you do a case study or something like that. And that’s showing someone some details on how it’s done or whatnot. But more importantly, I think, is inviting them to the next stage of their journey. So anytime you educate someone on how to do something, you solve the problem for them, and you introduce a higher level of problem. So for instance, I always tell people, if you win the lottery, before you won the lottery, you might have had money problems after you won the lottery, you have money management problems. So you didn’t get rid of the problems, you just changed their degree. And so you have a higher level of problem. And so before the course, they don’t know how to do patent work, or whatever it is you’re teaching them how to DIY, at the end of the course now they know But now that comes with a new set of problems. So you make the offer, in light of that. Here’s where you are on the journey. You’ve gotten to this point, you’ve solved these problems. Here’s what the rest of your road looks like. The rest of your road looks like okay, now you’re going to do these things, you’re going to file this stuff, you’re going to take these actions, here are the roadblocks you’re going to run into, here’s the shift that’s going to go wrong. Here are all the things like you act like a guide for what their journey is gonna look like. And then you say, good news. We actually offer tour guide services, if you want help along this journey. That’s where we come in, and you can frame it that way works really, really well for taking a course and driving it into either service delivery or masterminds or other things like that. And my encouragement is to build a video like that, where you’re actually doing the education, it’s part of the education because part of the education is Hey, you’re here. And here’s what the rest of your journey looks like. And you actually map it out and show them what the rest their journey looks like. And then the end of that video is your offer to help them do that and make that the last module of your course.

Devin Miller 38:01
Yeah, and you’re hitting on a lot of the things that we’re trying to build in and by all means you give a lot of good knowledge. So I appreciate that. Yeah, I mean, what we what I call it is the inventive journey, which is a release of mine, which is if you’re gonna take a startup, you started the idea stage. Patents are about halfway through or trademarks are about halfway through. What are the things that we can help them along earlier in their journey, and what we can help them along after we do the patents or the trademarks along the journey, and whether that’s providing education, providing information, some of the things we can provide services for? I think it also helps 2 ends. One is that it helps them to – because the problem with, especially when you get to patents and trademarks, is that you get the idea that I do this one sliver and then they go off and you don’t hear that they completed. They’re no longer a repeat customer. They’re no longer repeat business until they need the next patent or trademark. And so that can be 6 months or a year after a period of time. And so now you’re saying Well, yeah, but what would, I think beneficial when we’re trying to morph the company or grow the company into is saying what are the services we can add before this so we can help capture them earlier in their journey to help them both along the way and help them to be loyal to us as clients and make sure that they educate them and one of those points along after the journey that we can also help them win so I’m in complete agreement and then figuring out how to do that so you can capture provide more value and also capture more value.

Richard Matthews 39:24
Absolutely, that’s the way we structure all of our client’s education businesses was looking at the whole customer journey, and how can you fit into the different parts of their journey? So, the flip side, then, of course of your common enemy is your driving force. And just like Spider-Man fights to save New York or Batman fights to save Gotham or Google fights to index and categorize all the world’s information. What is it that you guys fight for at Miller IP? You have a mission, basically, we want to know what it is.

Devin Miller 39:52
Yeah, so I mean, we touched on it before it really is helping the startups and the small businesses so that – what is the common driving forces. I worked for a period of time and during my career at major law firms, the top 100 law firms in the nation, I helped with all the biggest customers, biggest clients. And it was fun. And for a while, I was a very small cog in a very big wheel and things I worked on very incremental, very small. But working with startups and small businesses is really a passion. But what the common causes is that that’s one that we can pull our clients are pointing the same directions they are, they need this, they want this, they need the education, they need the ability to understand what they’re doing, they need the good customer service. And that’s where we set it out to provide is let’s now focus on what would be an underserved community within the business community, startups, and small businesses and too often, once you can make it big, once you have lots of money, everybody wants to be your friend and everybody wants to use your business. But when you’re still small and growing, oftentimes you can feel you’re alone or that there is a … community. So what we’re doing with the common cause and trying to everybody get rally around is to create that community that helps a start-up, that helps a small business that educates them, that brings them up and guides them along that path. And that’s where we focus on a lot of the different ways we structure things.

Richard Matthews 41:12
Awesome. So this is just – it just popped into my head. But you were talking about community for small businesses. And that’s a lot of the people that I work with on a regular basis. And the 3 that pop up all the time, and I’m not sure if you’re already considering this, but I need recommendations for this is patent and intellectual attorney, like law. And then your legal structure, type stuff like LLC, that kind of stuff. And then accounting – what do I need to do for my accounting? Do I need to have a separate checking account for my thing? Or can I put it into my regular checking account until I get to a certain time and all the basic accounting things that someone who’s getting into the business or getting their business started not knowing those things, those little recommendations that always pop up like hey, do you have someone you can recommend in this place? I mean, those faces that might be if you’re talking about building a community for the small business thing, those are the questions I get asked all the time.

Devin Miller 42:08
I’m in agreement. And those are hard. Some of those, we have people that we have a connection with or refer them out. Because I honestly don’t want to get into accounting. And I don’t, that’s always the guy –

Richard Matthews 42:19
… Makes you want to pull your hair out.

Devin Miller 42:21
Mainly managing payroll and expenses and taxes and accounting and everything else you have to do it as a small business. But yeah, we’ve looked at that and how to partner with that. One of the fourth questions I almost put in, if you get into products more is how do I make a prototype? Or how do I get things going? Or how do I get started, and that’s a little bit early in the journey. And that’s when we’ve also looked at is how we got some, we actually were one of the businesses to have had some 3D printing capabilities. We have a graphic designer, modeler, and other people. So we actually looked at how we can help build that journey. But yeah, I agree that those are things that oftentimes come up that are the pain points that people don’t know that you can add a lot of value along the route.

Richard Matthews 42:59
So Just another random selfish question here because I’ve always wondered how this happens. I’ve never been in the inventor space. But when you have an idea that you want to get done and you don’t have engineering skills, how do you go from idea to prototype if you’re not an engineer? Is that like can you hire people, contracts to do engineering work? Is that a thing?

Devin Miller 43:22
Yes. There’s a lot of snake oil in that business. And so where are you getting – I’m not gonna name names and call people out but you’ll get a lot of businesses that will help you invent this, will help you create this, and you’ll get people that because they don’t know engineering because they don’t know product development, that they’ll come in and they’ll get either a subpar service. They’ll get things that don’t get done or they’ll take their money and not do really anything. And so there are good people out there that absolutely offer those services that you can either go in and they can do it all for you. And they do well, but I’d say there’s a lot more snake oil than good, but I think what you need to do is a lot of times where I find it. Let’s say you have a really good idea; you’re on the sales, you’re on the marketing side or you’re on the product development side or sometimes I call them the big idea person where you come up with it and then you’re looking for an implementer. Oftentimes, what’s better is to find someone else that is either a partner that wants to partner in the business that wants to come in that you can hire but actually has some skin in the game they can help you navigate through that and then they can help you do that. So yes, there are people that do that and I could help – I recommend some that are good a lot of them that are, and that are bad, but I would say generally you’re better to have someone that at least knows – even if they’re not expert in it – knows some of the processes we can help even select that people that do the engineering for hire, they do the contract for hire, and go that route. So I don’t know if that answers your question.

Richard Matthews 44:48
Yeah, it does. I was curious cause I’ve had that question asked to me before. I have this idea. For instance, one of my clients, they want to get a lantern made. And they’re like, do we just go to go to manufacturers and give them drawings and maybe they’ll come back with something and I was like, I actually don’t know how you do that. And I had same questions myself, I’m like, Hey, we got this idea for a product for an RV and it’s a cool idea, but what do you do next?

Devin Miller 45:20
I liken it to is the easiest one. And if you’ve ever been to the home building process, first of all, it’s a pain in the butt. But beyond that, you usually have what would be a general contractor that manages everybody, that even if he doesn’t do all the work, he knows what is the parts and the pieces, how it all goes together, how to build a house, what order Do you do the foundation before you do the framing, you do the framing before you do the sheetrock, those type of things. And that’s the person that you really want needing to either have as a mentor or have as an advisor, having someone on your team or make sure you find someone that you’re going to go outside of that that you can really trust. That is taking that the heart of the teacher is making sure you understand things along the way. That’s letting you know how much things are going to cost, what to expect. And then you can absolutely bring or do a product and bring that forward and make sure it’s successful. But those are the – you need to find who would be that General Manager. And if you’re that person, or you can at least play that role, then you’re great. If you’re not that person, then finding that person to be on your team or a mentor and advisor, or someone that you can hire on is I think the best place to take up.

Richard Matthews 46:31
Absolutely. It sounds a lot like we talked in the app development space, having someone who knows how to speak both human and developer. You have to have that person who can translate what you want done into instructions to someone who can write code. So you have to have that builder person who can speak both languages.

Devin Miller 46:56
And I just laughed because a lot of the businesses and things I do are Working with our app developers or software programmers, and it’s absolutely right, there are almost two different languages and you say, Well, this is what I want. And then it doesn’t translate over well. And you almost need that person that can do that translation, and make it clear. So I just laugh.

Richard Matthews 47:15
And someone who can – my brother is in machining. And he works with engineers all the time. And he says, the funniest thing working with engineers that he has to deal with, is engineers will design things without thinking about how they’re going to get made. And he’s the one who’s doing the making. As, for instance, when you have a CNC machine, they are all spinning tools. So internal corners can’t be 90 degrees, they have to be rounded. So they’ll submit plans with 90-degree internal corners, and he’ll send them back to the engineer and be like, we can’t do that. And they’ll be like, why and he’ll be like, physics. There’s just stuff that we can’t do. And I’m working with the app development for the stuff we’re doing. And there’s the same thing I’m like, I want to do this thing. And you have to have someone on the other side who’s like, Well, here’s what we’re capable of doing. What the capabilities are, and you have to fit your ideas inside of real-world limits.

Devin Miller 48:12
I even think sometimes it’s not even that we can’t do it. It’s gonna be so time, or costs are prohibitive that while you could do it, it does not make sense to spend that much money in that much time and effort to do it, because your return is never going to be as good. Yeah, you could add this little feature on your app, and it’s going to cost you 50 extra thousand dollars and add another 6 months to the project. We could do it but it absolutely doesn’t make sense for that little tiny feature is that I think another thing. Or it’s such a bad idea in the sense of how long it will take that it’s not worthwhile.

Richard Matthews 48:44
Yeah, it’s the same thing. My brother was saying with that internal 90-degree corner. He’s like, we could do that. But we have to pull it off the machine and someone has to do it by hand. And if you want to do that for 2 million pieces, you’re going to be paying a high dollar employee to build 2 million of these things are gonna take you for years and eventually we’ll get it done. Or you could just redesign that corner for us.

Devin Miller 49:00
Exactly, yep.

Richard Matthews 49:04
So so my next question for you then is more practical. We call this the Hero’s Toolbelt. And just like every superhero has a toolbelt of awesome gadgets like batarangs and web slingers, we want to talk about top one or two tools that you couldn’t live without in your business. It can be anything from your notepad, your calendar, your marketing tools, to your product delivery, anything that you think is essential to getting your job done that you use every day, top one or two things, what would you say are some of your favorite tools to accomplish your work?

Devin Miller 49:33
One is maybe, I mean, it’s intuitive and counterintuitive, I guess at the same time, which I don’t know how that works, but is a tool that we use frequently that I didn’t realize how critical or how well it would help our business was a simple CRM or customer relationship management system. And we don’t necessarily – we use it for someone to … but we really use it for that has a built-in is on a lot of automation, meaning one thing that we’re always running out of time, and the ability to do things in the day. And we’re also doing a lot of repetitive tasks. And whether it’s letting clients know about something or giving them an update or sending out an invoice and following up with a payment. And one of the biggest tools that we found out is while there are places that we absolutely want to keep touch points on and do the human touch, when we keep those for the things that we don’t have to – … to have that relayer, that automation software in order to get those tasks done, get them done, probably better, more timely manner, and also may have a consistent answer is something that I think has been a very good tool in the toolbox that I ended up adding on later into the businesses and then they’ve been made a huge difference. The other one, I’m trying to think that would probably be the number one that comes I mean, the other one is I think just the – it’s probably not as much of a tool is, I guess the easy answers is it’s certainly been Zoom. I was doing Zoom before Zoom was cool in the sense that –

Richard Matthews 50:58
Us too.

Devin Miller 51:00
Much before COVID, in the sense of being able to be available to a much wider audience is one that’s really helped us as well, so that you’re not having to come into our office. So the patents and trademarks, as opposed to other types of law that are state law, and you have to be at the – barred with it – you have to pass the bar within those states for patents and trademarks. It’s on the federal level. So you really can practice and help anybody within the 58 states of the US. And so and so one step is to find tools and Zoom is one and we have a couple of others that really allow us to reach that audience. It’s across all 50 States and across everybody, and it opens up a lot greater audience and ability for them to meet with us. Last one, though, and I guess I said 2, I guess the third one is, it’s an easy service, it’s called and there’s a lot of them out we use the one that’s called BombBomb. But there’s a lot of ones out and it’s really just a video clip that makes it into a GIF in an email. But then they can click on it and they can then see a look, you can leave them a little video. And so on that vein of me reaching people. People aren’t coming into the office. Emails are oftentimes a lot too sterile, you never really establish a relationship, you never really talk with the person and face to face. And so it makes it hard to create that loyalty or that customer service. And so one thing we did is by using that service, or the video integrated into the email allows us to create that closeness or that outreach and get them to get to know us to have something that’s not just a sterile email that everybody doesn’t read, or they breeze through everything else that creates that something they’ll actually get the information quicker and in a format that works for them.

Richard Matthews 52:42
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Richard Matthews 54:21
One of the apps I like for that is a Bonjoro. And so it’s a little app that goes on your phone and same kind of thing. When someone does something, sends you an email or sends you a text or subscribes to your list or buy something from you, you can have it pop into your Bonjoro that’s a task and you can create a video and click a button, and it’ll send it to them. So it’s a neat little – you can just turn a little turn it into automation for your thing. And it’s really effective. And I totally get the CRM thing for our business it wasn’t as much the CRM because of what we do. It was project management, and figuring out how can we break out our projects and keep track of everything, because we have fewer clients and more long term projects, so it was less managing the clients and more managing their projects. And once they had a system in place that really allowed us to keep track of our projects that changed our business model to grow a lot.

Devin Miller 55:16
I agree lots of great tools in the toolbelt that you can use and those are some of the good ones.

Richard Matthews 55:22
And it’s funny too because nowadays – I started 12 years ago, 12 or 15 years ago in business and none of these things existed. And nowadays it’s crazy what you can accomplish for a couple of hundred bucks worth of tools, talk everyone in the world and manage projects like Fortune 500 companies.

Devin Miller 55:43
Yep, and it puts everybody I think if you utilize the tools right it puts you on an even playing field or a better playing field. You’re not handicapped by the size of your business as much, or by the location, or by those things and it makes it so you can compete on a better level.

Richard Matthews 56:00
And then the other thing that’s happening that helps with that is the market is more interested in interacting with individuals now than corporations like individual faces. So the bigger companies are having to pivot to bring more person to person communication into their business where the smaller businesses are already in that spot. And tools are – they’re having to use the same tools as the big businesses to do the same thing. So I actually think there’s probably more advantage towards the small businesses nowadays because of that shift in the marketplace.

Devin Miller 56:29
I completely agree.

Richard Matthews 56:30
Yeah. So almost the last question here. Your own personal heroes. Every hero has their mentors. Frodo had Gandalf, Luke had Obi-Wan, Robert Kiyosaki had his Rich Dad, and Spider-Man had his Uncle Ben. Who were some of your heroes, were they real-life mentors, speakers or authors, peers who were a couple of years ahead of you and how important were they to what you’ve accomplished so far in your entrepreneurial journey?

Devin Miller 56:51
A few of them. One of them that’s probably cliche but is an honest answer is my dad has been my hero. He has been an entrepreneur since when I was growing up, set a good example on a lot of things I ended up doing. And he still is one that I work with him side by side on a lot of projects. He’s an engineer, we’re working hand in hand on a lot of things. And so he has certainly been a big mentor and a big hero and a big someone that looked up to on that. One that I guess – I don’t know if it’s controversial – is Rockefeller. And Rockefeller, if you look back was the founder of Standard Oil. So you go back several generations, when oil was just getting refined, was just getting made, John Rockefeller and he was also in Cleveland, which is where he went to school, which is all the better. But he’s one that he created probably one of the first monopolies in the US. Not that monopolies are good, but he was just one that he just grinded and built and outmaneuvered and outlawed everybody, and is one of the mentors that I think it provides a lot of good ideas as to how you can do business and how you can now compete and how you can grow and how you can not take no for an answer type of a thing. The last one I probably put is more on the financial side, which is, and probably one of the people more recognize is Dave Ramsey, and it’s not he does a lot of personal finance. But I’ve also taken a lot of those as to how we can run our business financially, using a lot of the same models and the same characteristics is what you do on a lot of times personal finance. And we talked about COVID and weathering the storms and how to do that and how you have an emergency fund how you’re able to have a budget, how you have money set aside for a rainy day, and a lot of those things, and that’s been another one. So, personal mentor, if you’re taking somebody that I know personally, it would be, my dad, somebody from history probably John Rockefeller, and then someone that’s more out there today would probably be Dave Ramsey.

Richard Matthews 58:48
So just a further question on that. Do you have any recommendations for learning a bit about John Rockefeller?

Devin Miller 58:56
I’ve read a lot of books and I’d point you – honestly, a lot of the books on him are apparently dry. So I don’t know that I point that. But one of the best ones I actually like there’s a series or mini-series on the History Channel that men who built America and they go through a few of the different ones, they go through Carnegie, they go through John Rockefeller, they hit into a little bit of Edison and those other ones, but it really gives a pretty good insight for somebody that doesn’t want to go through a long slog or very thick books and oftentimes aren’t as interesting. I think that one’s a pretty good introduction to them and a good mini-series to find out more about him.

Richard Matthews 59:33
Awesome. So that’s on the History Channel, it might be something I’d check out. So the last question, your guiding principles. One of the things that make heroes heroic is that they live by a code for instance, Batman never kills his enemies, he just brings them to Arkham Asylum. So as we wrap up the interview, talk about the top one or two principles that you use regularly in your life, maybe a principle you wish you knew when you first started out on your own hero’s journey.

Devin Miller 59:59
Probably The I don’t know, the one that I would do is probably make or give people the advice that I would want them to give me or it’s the same thing as a golden rule but where it really is is putting myself in their shoes so that I’m rather than making it based on what is the best decision for the business. How can I make the most money? And so that would often be telling people to do a patent and trademark every time and sometimes it’s good for them and sometimes it’s not. And so one of the guiding principles I always said rather than answer what will make the most money or what will be best for the business, in short term is saying what will be best for the clients. If I were to put myself in their shoes, what would they want to know? And so that would be the principle that I was looking and say if I was in their shoes, what would I want to know, what would be helpful for me if I was trying to make the decision like they are, and that one if you do that, it helps a business or helps the client helps them to grow and then, in turn, makes them – as you help them even if it’s not the thing that creates the most value or the most money, income and cash flow …, it creates in the long term so that’s probably I guess a principle that I would say.

Richard Matthews 1:01:03
That’s definitely taking the long game in your business and understanding that the short term gains at the cost of client trust is not nearly as profitable over the long term. So I love that. And that’s basically a wrap on our interview. I do finish every interview with a simple challenge called the Hero’s Challenge. We do this to help us gain access to new stories basically. But the question is simple. Do you have someone in your life or in your network that you think has a cool entrepreneurial story? Who are they, first names are fine, and why do you think they should come share their story with us here on The Hero Show?

Devin Miller 1:01:37
Other than myself?

Richard Matthews 1:01:39
Other than yourself cause you’re already here, you shared your story.

Devin Miller 1:01:44
So there’s a lot of cool people – I work with a lot of inventors so I’m trying to think one would be the one and the one that I don’t know if they’re available to even do a – put that aside for just a second – was really cool was the people that I find that … there’s a person in particular that I worked with are the people that reinvent themselves a lot. And that they’re saying, I’ve got something in my life, that’s a business. So one that comes to mind is I have a client and her name is Karen. And without getting into full name, or disclosing everything she does, and she was at a point that she was 55 or 60. And she gone through a career. She’s gone through a fairly mundane – but in a financial career, just doing number crunching and all that. And she got tired of it and was saying, Okay, I’m going to just completely slip and so she came up with an invention for using a dryer in order to remove pet hair that cleans your clothes by just simply putting a little sticky pad thing in your dryer in order to help remove it. But regardless of the invention, what was cool is that just as you’re saying, Okay, I’m even I’m towards the end of my career, I could do this, I really don’t want to. Let’s chase the dream, do the thing that I want to do, and that’ll make me happy and it will make things productive. And then the story have actually seen switching completely to something new was one that I think makes for a cool journey.

Richard Matthews 1:03:04
That’s really cool. Yeah, we’ll see if we can reach out separately and maybe get Karen interested in coming on the show. And that’s basically a wrap on the interview so in comic books there’s always the crowd who says thank you for their acts of heroism and claps and cheers and thanks them for their work. So as we close we’ll do something similar and basically where can people find you if they want to work with you or want to hire you, go through the course that we talked about on here, where can they find you? And then more importantly, who are the right types of people to actually reach out and say, Hey, you know what, Devin I’d really love to get your help on this kind of thing, who are the right types of people to reach out?

Devin Miller 1:03:37
Easiest is always to go to the website you can always find out more and that’s at https://milleripl.com/ so Miller my last name, I as in intellectual, P as in property, L as in law. The other way if they want to – so two more ways and then I’ll give it – one way is if they ever wanting to have any specific questions on patent and trademarks, I mentioned we do free strategy sessions or pre strategy meetings. So they can just go to https://milleripl.com/blogs/milleriplaw/schedule-a-free-strategy-session you can grab a half an hour of my time. We’ll sit down, answer any of your questions, make sure you go through it, understand it. It’s totally free of charge and as a service to that and then the last one is if you want to just grab some of my time periods just want to talk throw ideas off have anything else you don’t necessarily need a strategy session then you can go to https://milleripl.com/blogs/milleriplaw/meet-with-devin-miller and that one’s one you can just grab some time on my calendar. So https://milleripl.com/ for the website. To find out more https://milleripl.com/blogs/milleriplaw/schedule-a-free-strategy-session if you want to talk more about patent and trademarks and get questions answered. And for me personally, it’s https://milleripl.com/blogs/milleriplaw/meet-with-devin-miller

Richard Matthews 1:04:38
Awesome. We’ll make sure we get those links into the thing below and I said, we have a lot of people in the audience who are in this space. If you are creating products specifically I think a lot of our particular brands that I work with would be served really well by getting their product names and their product courses probably trademarked and the brands and stuff trademarked so I would encourage them to reach out and find out from Devin if it makes sense. For that, and Devin again, thank you so much for coming on to the show. Do you have any final words of wisdom for our audience before I hit this stop record button?

Devin Miller 1:05:07
I think that be persistent. I think within all businesses. I work a lot of startups and small business, I’d say the common thing, the difference between failure and success is persistence. And whatever that realm or whatever you’re doing is to be persistent. That’s about all I have.

Richard Matthews 1:05:22
Never ever give up. I always tell people, the thing that causes failure more than anything else is giving up. So I agree. Thank you very much for coming on Devin.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai