Hi, everyone. Im j. J. Ramberg, and welcome to your business. Your company cannot gain traction if you dont know who your rear customers are. That was the problem one new orleansbased entrepreneur had with his Childrens Party space. While catering to kids he found out the hard way it was the parents he should be making happy. Bouncy castles, gigantic slides, pizza. It looks like heaven to your average kid, and thats exactly what gene sauce was banking on in 2008 when he opened new orleansbased bookoo bounce, an indied party place. After attending party after party where children were the priority, gene saw that he could do Something Different with his company. So often the partys experiences were not geared around the parent so it was hot, uncomfortable, unclean bathrooms, or for that matter safety. It really didnt seem to be an important element often times with offpremise childrens birthday parties. The kids may have been having fun but he knew when it came down to it, the decision wasnt on the kids. They could decide what kind of party they want, the theme, but the ultimate decision comes from the parents and what kind of budget they might have. With a background in the Hotel Industry business, he knew what he needed. We wanted to have the cleanliness of a ritzcarlton, the hospitality of it. Amenities were included in both the design and Business Model to make bookoo bounce not just a fun place for kids but also a haven for adults looking for a little downtime as well. He has why five so you can get your work done. He has televisions around so you can watch fable or television game, comfortable seating and coffee for the parents. Its not what keeps them coming back again and again. It takes the guesswork out of planning. Theyve set and planned when you hold a party at bookoo bounce, everything is taken care of. I love that i didnt have to get my house ready for people to come over. I brought cake and pizza and the kids got to go play. I got to chat with the other parents and the kids had great time. Genes not the only one. Every team member is trained to look out for what the adults want. The goal carries over into the interviewing process. When hiring staff gene thinks about who will interact with the adu adults. Theyre a life fward out there making sure the kids are safe but at the same time theyre servicing the parents experience making sure they enjoy the experience. Attention to the details has also opened up a new rev stree people. Jason horn owns nearby martial arts school. During its summer camp a visit to bookoo bounce is always on the calendar. Being a priority in his business, you get that feeling and sense as a parent myself and also as a Business Owner im in the care of other peoples kids. So im bringing them somewhere where i dont have to worry about them because its a safe environment. It also brings new foot traffic to the business all the time. Word of mouth is huge. Reputation in a small city like new orleans, people talk. As gene looks to launch a second location in the near future, theres one thing he knows hell be keeping the same. As we move forward, as we branch out and try to expand the business, parents are definitely going to be our primary focus, making sure that were able to deliver to them what weve been delivering here for the past six years, and that is a full service turnkey birthday experience for their child an for them. Its really not much more important than that. This is a question we get all the time in our email and social media and when we attend Small Business conferences. Do i need to copyright or trademark my product or service. So lets try and shed some more light on this topic. Expert after expert on the program tell us protect your intellectual property. A while back we met designer lolita healy who showed others why you need to copyright and the steps you need to take to accomplish that. I was elated. I think i jumped on my bed. And i didnt know what i knew it was, you know, protecting my design and my art, but i just felt so special. It still feels special when i get. She applied for a trademark when she was just 12 years old for developing doodle bug. I come from a long line of tinkers and investors. Probably the most famous is sigh rick mccormick. He was the inventor of the reaper. I grew up hearing these stories that its very important to protect your idea because if you dont, someone will steal it. 20 years after filing her first copyright, lolita was inspired to paint on a martina glass after sex and the city made martinis famous. She copied the design for that famous glass as well as every one shes created since. Almost 700 copyrights later she knows better than anyone how simple the process is. You can do it online. 30 for copyrights. All you have to do is attach an image, written work, its just a matter of filling out your name and address and sending in a foetd with whatever it is youre trying to copyright and usually within one to four weeks you get a certificate back in the mail. Its very simple. And if someone does try to copy you, you can file suit and get up to 30,000 if someone is copying you. Copyrights are ones that i use. Trademarks is different. Lolita, my brand, is different, its trademarked. Its protects brand names, slogans, love my martini. Thats my slogan. She realized it wasnt possible for her to hand paint all of the glasses herself anymore. In order to scale her business she would have to find someone interested in licensing her designs, removing lolita from the tedious task of mving and distributing the product herself. The fact that her artwork was protected by artwork and her brand was trademark was added value to lolitas fast growing brand. I wouldnt be a protected licence sore to a protected licensee if i wasnt protected because it would put them at risk out there selling my product if i didnt have the copyrights on my designs. Lolita has had this whole host of imitators that have come along. I know there have been major retailers shut down overnight because they didnt realize they were buying an absolutely Copyright Infringement and her legal action has stopped that. With a product line from stationery and pajamas to jewelry and towels, lolitas designs have been more popular thanner. Thanks to macys and hall mark, lolita now more than ever is digitally branding the copy kates. I sleep better at night knowing i have that protection. Its wonderful. We hear the term trademark quite a bit but what exactly is a trademark . Its a word, symbol, name as identified as being from a particular company. I think of the apple logo or nike swoosh. Those are trademarks. Now our guests are going to tell you things you need to do before applying for a trademark for your company. Mary is with track light. Its so great to see you. Nice to see you, too, j. J. Youre going to talk to us about what to thing about before you think of the process so you can save money and time so youre not going in all different directions. Or youre just Getting Started and using an Online Service or doing it yourself that could end up wasting your time or more importantly, your money. You need to decide where you live first of all. Is this online or are you in a certain state. Yeah. Because what people dont understand is that the trademarks that you get from the united states, patent and trademark office, those are for federal activity. If youre going to operate something offline in your town, you dont necessarily need to get a federal trademark. How do you get a local one . Do you go to the same one, the local you would go to your state or local authorities and then you get a business name application and it differs state by state. Is there any reason not to get a federal one. You cant unless youre operating across state lines. Got it. Check with the ustpo website. So if youre launching a website and youre going to be operating online or youre yop rating something that will expand nationally gorks to the tpo. Its free. Go to their uspto. Gov site and search. Put in a name youre going to search for and dont freak out if you go on there and see someone else has a similar name. It will give you a whole list because the way a trademark works, its for that brand. So for the am computer, that means youre going to get a good quality Apple Computer but you could call your store apple if you sold ams. Its per industry. Thats where you need to do preparation and seek proper advice because thats where the people mess up on the classes and some of the other things and the proper advice will come from qualified professional. Also do an internet search. Just a simple internet search to see if theres anyone out there with my name or my symbol. Yes. Or a logo. A lot of people think, well, if no one has a federally registered trademark, im good. No, you have to look at google because somebody might be operating in your state, just in your state. They might have a restaurant or Something Like that or they might have be operating nationally but they havent done their trademark registration. Make sure you know whats out there. Yes. Registering your domain name. This is one people always forget about. Is not always the same. Not the same. Necessary to register your domain name but that didnt give you any trademark rights especially it might lead to infringing on somebody elses. People, i think think a lot of people dont understand between trademark and copy right. Once you have a trademark, in what circumstance do you need a copyright . You get a cop rite when you express it in a tangible medium. So when you have created whatever it is, whether its the logo, you create. It its doichblt. You dont have to register it but if you do you have to register it and it allows you to use it exclusively. The copy right says i own it and you can decide who other uses i. Very different. Got it. We get so many questions i appreciate your coming on and helping us sort it out. Social media is a great way to reach your current and potential customer base, but any errors can hurt your businesss reputation. Here now are five ways you can avoid making following mistakes courtesy of ink. Com. One, giving people the wrong access. Social media is a chance to share your voice, so make sure your post reflekts your companys point of view. Two, getting hacked. It can lead to losing your followers trust. Three, being on every platform. Do a Little Research and just think with the network your target customer is on. Four, spamming your followers. Do not overshare. According to buffer, you should be aiming to post or twitter 14 times day, facebook two times and linked in once a day. But dont automate all your update. Follow errs will know if you earmark actually taking the time to engage and converge with them. Coming up. We have more advice about how to grow your business. Well answer questions including recruiting and managing appropriately and some of our viewers tell us about their favorite tools and online resources. If i can impart one lesson to a new Business Owner, it would be one thing ive learned is my philosophy is real simple American Express open forum is an online community, that helps our members connect and share ideas to make Smart Business decisions. If you mess up, fess up. Be your partners best partner. We built it for our members, but its open for everyone. Theres not one way to do something. No details too small. American express open forum. This is what membership is. This is what membership does. 80 owners of the company just recently con verlt 20d to the employees, and it gives us what we desire on the control side and the vision side. You know, people feel like now they have a piece of it. They have a piece in the growth of this company and all the great things we do. The american Hispanic Business Community continues to grow which is why we headed to the Us Hispanic Chamber of Commerce National convention in Salt Lake City this week. According to the chamber, its three times the national average. One of the highlight us was the first latina to ever hold that position. Contra c contrarasweet wants to become the new sba. Were tout there become the new sba, smart, bold, accessible, to make sure were using Smart Systems to deploy the technology thats available today. To make our interface with the banks easier so we have a quick interface with their client. Were acting on bolder initiatives. Were looking for ways to make new market communities. Its time to answer some of your business questions. Lets get our board of directors in here to help us out. The cofounder of the largest platform where shes now chief Investment Officer and jen groosher is best known for creating the butler bag as well as her lifestyle brand em foured by jen gruber. The first is about employees who remote completely. My question is to best recruit and retain employees when you have no physical presence with them in the city . Which theyre working. I think this is a great question. I am in favor of employees working in the office if they can, but there are some cases where you need an employ in a different city. And theres some cases where when youre looking for tlenltd, you need flex tkt. We do four things. We look for proactive people, people who will lean in and reach out. You need that kind of mindset to be successful. Second we invest in Communication Technology so theres no reasons why you cant communicate. The third is we make sure theres a travel budget. The fortunate thing is we make the communications quite affordable. We take the savings and invest in a travel budget to allow people to come to the travel office and connect with other people and build that rapport and relationship. And the fourth thing we do is make sure our oneonones with employees and their managers truly happen. And its not just about how theyre doing with work but also to ask them about whats going on with their life and everything because everything that happens at the water cooler doesnt happen when youre remoment if you do those four things, youll a selfmotivated person who takes into account their own selfresponsibility whether somebody is looking or not. That is the core principal of this. Then the ongoing conversations with technology that will allow for communication is really important so that you could feel like youre part of it. I work with a lot of companies that are in different states and im constantly on Conference Calls and skype meetings. That allows me to feel connected and part of the team culture. I think another part of it is ongoing communication. Support of that. Everybody is growing and evolving together as a team, no matter where they are, so that they have the Mission Statement of the company, always part of who they are and how theyre behaving. And, lastly, is to get them to be able to be at events together, even if its quart quarterly, important so theres a Human Connection on this ongoing basis. I like what you said, too, about the Mission Statement because its incredibly important. It requires having a company like yours, a very clear Mission Statement. The culture is very clear and then it is not as hard to transfer that to people who are working remotely. Lets move on to the next question about keeping you and your business focused. How do you keep focus on your core model as you see yourself growing and scaling in some other areas . I like this, i think of it as the shiny object. Right . So, theres a shiny object out there. How are you not always reaching and focus on the core model. Go after the ones where theres potential, but not go after everyone. You must face this all the time. Yes. You know, since the beginning there have been shiny objects everywhere. We were the first platform and try to discover what we were and what we were offering in terms of value. Over time, what has really worked for us is to look at all opportunities as a nice problem to have. The fact that there is more opportunities that you can go after is great and then look at all opportunities and filter it through your longterm vision and your longterm mission. A perfect example of this, in the Business Owners help and create and raise as much money for your projects or businesses. For a long time we had a lot of feedback from customers who said they wanted more analytics tools on the back end and had nothing to do with raising money and when we actually looked at the opportunity and saw that by providing data to our customers would actually help them be more successful in testing tactics and raising more money. A great example of us not doing that was in the early days when we had a lot of feedback from customers who said we want an events module and put all of our events up on our fundraising page. How does this actually help people raise more money and within a few months, no traction with that feature and we got rid of it right away and we learned that was a waste of time and money to do it. In the end, what we took away from that is that you really have to listen to your customers because you never know where an idea will come from and then take that recommendation and filter it through the lens of how does it actually help us achieve our longterm mission. In your case, you can use minimal project idea where you launch things quickly. Jen, his question also made me think about if youre gaining traction in something that was not your core business or your core product, maybe it is a point where youre looking at it and saying maybe that is what i thought my business should be. Goes back to the agility estatement we said earlier and your customers will dictate where you need to go. I totally get the shiny object syndrome. How i stay focused. I have a core intention. Somewhat like a Mission Statement but my intention every single day that really impacts what i choose to work on or not. I think sometimes when we start on this process, we forget what that intention is and what our mission is and what our impact is going to be. If you stay focused on that, you can always do a litmus test for me. For me, as i grow our businesses, whatever i am focused on as a core business has an operational space and place so that selfperpetuating. So when i go focus on some of the other projects that it is still moving at a certain pace with or without me. I use licensing as a core Business Model, as well, because of that. I like to build my brand equity in certain products or services, brands, to a certain level and then i license them so i can go fulfill my shiny object syndrome and move on to the next project and thats what works best for me. It is different in different scenarios but licensing, as you know, a huge proponent of understanding the value that licensing could have. So good to see both of you guys. Thanks for coming on and giving your advice. Thank you. If any of you out there have a question for our experts, all you have to do is go to our website. The address is openforum. Com yourbusiness. Once you get there, hit the ask the show link to submit a question for our panel. Again that website is openforum. Com yourbusiness. Or if its easier for you email your questions and comments at yourbusiness msnbc. Com. You probably downloaded a dozen apps on your smartphone in hopes of making your day more efficient. Which ones are worth going back to again and again. We recently asked our viewers to share their favorite small biz tools. Store all your content and Important Documents in one place. So, when youre managing a team of how many ever that might not be in one location and certainly not using all one computer it is a great way to get everyone on your team access to all the documents and everything they need to collaborate new materials and make sure they are always informed. We used link it throughout our organization. Its virtually a white board. It replaces a white board you might have in your office. But its so much more than what you can do with a white board. It has analytics and work flows you can manage and different members of your team. You can see what theyre working on. So, for example, our Hr Department probably uses it better than anybody else and they manage our entire hiring funnel through link it. The one that made a difference for ours is a yammer. A web app for your phone and it allows us to communicate with other our employees and everybody on a consistent basis while email and facebook and those kind of things were nice, it was hard to really get unison and be able to share files and calendars and all of that kind of information and for yammer for us, its instantaneous. We can create groups within it and writers can just talk to writers for the white. We have a whole group that has everybody involved. When big debuts are happening and we can keep everybody informed of the projects that were working on and the goal is that we need to reach them. One that we started using more recently that a lot of our staff has enjoyed is slack. Which is essentially kind of like a private version of twitter where you can have multiple streams of conversations going on. You can hash tag things or private message people or include people with an app and a screen name. Thats really great for collaboration, especially when we have people working in different locations or out on the road. They can still communicate through this one app. To learn more about todays show, just go to our website, it is openforum. Com yourbusiness. Youll find all of todays segments plus some web exclusive content with a lot more information to help your business grow. You can also follow us on twitter msnb your biz. Next week, the power of having a business with more than one location. I never thought that we would grow to be the place to shop for running gear. One small Business Owner tells us why having three stores has been good for her employees, company culture, customers and the bottom line. Until then, im j. J. Ramberg and remember we make your business, our business. If i can impart one lesson to a new Business Owner, it would be one thing ive learned is my philosophy is real simple American Express open forum is an online community, that helps our members connect and share ideas to make Smart Business decisions. If you mess up, fess up. Be your partners best partner. We built it for our members, but its open for everyone. Theres not one way to do something. No details too small. American express open forum. This is what membership is. This is what membership does. A Police Officer shot in ferguson. Good morning, thanks for getting up with us. The search is under way in ferguson, missouri, for two suspects. Authorities say one of the men shot a Police Officer last night at around 9 00 p. M. This is what Officials Say happened. The Police Officer approached the two young men, the men ran away and then fired on the officer as he tried to pursue them. The officer was shot in the arm. He is expected to live. Ferguson has been the scene of