BIZLEBOX™ Business & Legal In-a-box for Out-of-the-box Thinkers

5. Mastering the Art of Co-Creating Content for Successful Business Collaboration

• Tamsen Horton • Season 1 • Episode 5

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What if your business could be more successful through effective collaboration? Prepare to get enlightened with our deep dive into the art of co-creating content in this episode of Bizzlebox Podcast. We dissect the process of developing something completely new with a collaborator, from creating a digital course to co-producing Intellectual Property (IP). Moreover, we take out the complexities of the legal and financial implications, ensuring your business goals are not only met but safely secured.

We then switch gears to share practical tips on smoothly sailing the collaborative waters without capsizing into legal and financial predicaments. Our focus is on the importance of separating IP and setting boundaries. We also bring you alternatives to co-creating, discussing joint events, challenges, summits, and webinars. Towards the end, we explore the resources Bizzlebox offers, emphasizing the significance of a legally secure business plan and building relationships with potential collaborators. This episode promises to equip you with the necessary tools and strategies to make your collaborative projects a success.

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Tamsen Horton:

Today we are going to tackle a topic that I enjoy talking about, I get really fired up talking about, and that is co-creating content with someone else. What do you need to be aware of, what are the biggies, what is going to turn around and bite you in the tush when you least expect it and, practically speaking, how to navigate it so that you can accomplish the business goal, which is you want to create with someone else. You complement each other in some way, shape or form, and you'd like to keep the legal implications as positive as possible.

Kip Horton:

Welcome to the Bizzlebox podcast, the go-to source for out-of-the-box entrepreneurs. Here you found business and legal in a box, all neatly packaged how thoughtful, with entertaining stories and unforgettable metaphors from licensed attorney Tampson Horton to design and achieve a profitable and legally secure business that makes an impact and allows you to fully live on your terms. Can you ever have an attorney without a disclaimer? Nope, never going to happen. Here's one just for you. Bizzlebox provides high quality info on business and legal issues, but to get the best advice for your situation, find an attorney you know like and trust. Tampson is an attorney, but she's not your attorney. She is my mom. Now here's Tampson.

Tamsen Horton:

Now, if you have ever thought, or been invited, to co-create a course with another person, you are going to really enjoy this episode. This episode is coming in based on a question from a Bizzlebox member. The question was, or the statement was I am interested in creating a course with another person. What are the biggest things I should be aware of? I so love this question. It is a topic that, as you will see, kind of sprouts tentacles very quickly. There are multiple different angles that you want to be aware of, you want to be proactively taking care of, and that is what I'm going to walk you through today. So first, like we always need to do, we need to define the terms and exactly what is at play, and in this question, that was I'm interested in creating a course with another person. Let's start by defining creating. Now, at first glance, this one might seem like super easy to define. You might be like Tampson that's silly, like you're creating something. You're making something that didn't exist before. As you're going to see when we go through all of the different points and the biggest things, to be aware of this innocent looking word, creating, this is a murky one. This is really, really murky. Our goal is to make it not murky. Our goal is to make it crystal clear, beautiful blue. Everyone wants to go swimming in it. That is what we want to do. So, as we're starting, let's just say that it is making something that doesn't already exist. All right, let's use that as our baseline definition for creating.

Tamsen Horton:

Now, what are we creating? We're creating a course, so a digital course. We're going to define that as a specific piece or pieces of content, and when you are making this content, when you are creating content, you are creating intellectual property. Do you see how quickly these tentacles are growing? So, intellectual property, which I will often call IP. You've probably heard other people talking about IP, ip law. There are four pieces that fit under the umbrella of intellectual property, and those are trade secrets, which think Coca-Cola's secret recipe. It's a trade secret. So that is one bucket that falls under the umbrella of intellectual property Copyright, trademark and patent. Now, we're really not talking about trade secrets or patents when you are creating a course, but copyright and trademark, yep, you are absolutely creating those things, and with another person. So this means we are co-creating IP, we are co-creating something that didn't exist before and now is going to exist.

Tamsen Horton:

So what are the biggest things that you need to be aware of. First and foremost, tangled and undefined legal and financial relationships. Okay, this is a biggie. You want, you must, define the legal and financial relationship of creating this course with another person. Now here is where, at times, I feel much like I described in episode one, where, before I was a lawyer, I would have these amazing ideas. People in my company would have amazing ideas and then the lawyers would come in and it felt like they were this big ogre who would take a club and smash that beautiful idea. Now that I am a lawyer, I totally get it. I really really get it. You want to know. You must it's not even a want. You must know whose business is legally responsible for this co-created IP. This co-created relationship, of course, becomes a relationship.

Tamsen Horton:

Your buyers are going to be coming through an offer. They are going to be agreeing to purchase terms. Because you are a proactive, responsible business owner, you're going to have purchase terms for this co-created course and on that purchase term, there is a section that says parties and it outlines and identifies the parties to the contract. Typically, when you're making your own digital courses, when you're selling your own goods and services, it's just your business. It's your business and the buyer. So we need to know whose business is showing up on the purchase terms when your buyers are buying this digital course. The other piece is whose business is financially responsible? Whose bank account is the money landing in first when sales are made? All right, these two pieces are untangling and defining the legal and financial relationship. So that's the first biggie. You'll see, we're going to come back to it as we're working through, but right now I just want to keep it as short and sweet as possible for you.

Tamsen Horton:

The second one you want to be aware of is tangled and undefined ownership of the IP. You must, must, must define the ownership of the intellectual property. Here I think a story and a metaphor is going to help you really grasp what otherwise could be a really complicated concept. Now, as some of you know, I have two boys, kip, who is currently 12, and Tad, who is almost eight, and very frequently you have a kid's play date. All right, that's what we're going to use as the context for untangling and defining ownership of the IP.

Tamsen Horton:

So picture a kid's play date and one child has a red truck and one child has a blue truck, and so the kid with the red truck invites the kid with the blue truck over to play. Cool, they bring their trucks. They're having a fabulous time, they're playing, they're doing imagination, they're you know, if they're my kids it's monster trucks, sometimes it's four-wheelers, but there is no chance that a purple truck is going to come home. There's no chance. When the kids come home, at the end of the day, at the end of the play date, the red truck can go to the kid with the red truck and the blue truck can go home with the blue kid. That is clearly not tangled and very defined ownership of the truck, the truck being, in this instance, my metaphor for intellectual property. Red IP comes over to play, blue IP comes over to play. When they are trucks, I'm not getting a purple. There's no way I'm getting a purple truck.

Tamsen Horton:

Now let's contrast this with a kid's play date where, instead of bringing trucks, we are bringing slime. Okay, and for any of you that are around, littles who do adults have an interesting relationship with slime. In fact, as I am recording this, my husband was texting me pictures. Tad was making bags of slime to take over to his friend's house this afternoon. So very serendipitous. So a kid's play date where we are bringing red slime and blue slime. I think you can see where I'm going with this story. There are all kinds of chances that many shades of purple, and probably a few of icky brown, are going to be created as a result of that playdate. It is going to be very, very hard to go home at the end of the day with the red slime or the blue slime respectively. That is very, very different than a red truck and a blue truck. When we are defining the ownership of the IP, we want to do our very, very best to model our co-creation over that of the truck example versus that of the slime example. As the originator, we're going to make the originator of this course the red truck child.

Tamsen Horton:

Having guest contributors is a great way to accomplish the idea of co-creating without necessarily co-creating. As the person with the red truck, I want to co-create. I want people to bring their blue trucks over and play. I want them to make the experience more well rounded and having a guest contributor someone who comes in, plays for a while and then is easily isolated and not creating a slime situation, that is fabulous. Now, as the recipient and the person being asked to co-create, or the blue truck person. Being a guest contributor is a great way to expand your reach. It's a good thing. Playdates are fun. Playing with others is fun. People have lots of different, really cool toys that. It's fun to mix them together and bring them together. We just want more trucks where we're not creating purple trucks Then we do slime where we end up with every color except the color we came to the playdate with.

Tamsen Horton:

In terms of defining ownership of the IP, or another way to say it would be protecting the IP, practically speaking, you want to use a guest contributor agreement. Now, this also, as I'm going to keep weaving through is why you will pick up very quickly. I am not a fan of blending legal and financial responsibility. In very many situations. One of the things that I take great pride in is listening to your ideas, listening to that business excitement and instead of being the big green, mean ogre and smashing it, it's like okay, how can we? How can we do this? A guest contributor is a way and no matter what, if you are blending your content and others content, you must use a guest contributor agreement. I have, over the years, created a variety of these templates. They're all in Bizzlebox because sometimes you have paid, sometimes you have unpaid. The arrangements are a little bit different here and there, but you really want that ability to separate completely red trucks, blue trucks, so that we don't end up with purple trucks if the need arises, and having clear boundaries is how that happens. The problem with slime is there's no clear boundaries. Unless it's in a plastic bag, then there's, then there are clear boundaries. The blue slime can stay in its bag because the plastic bag is the boundary. It allows that to happen, and we'll keep touching on this.

Tamsen Horton:

The third one that you really need to be aware of is what I will just call messy wins and losses, and that is you need to define the financial wins and losses. If you lose a million dollars, who is on the hook? I like to use extreme numbers because our brains figure them out and, honestly, it really doesn't matter if you lose 10, 100, 1,000, 10,000, 222,000, or a million or five million. The idea is, if you lose a million, because that grabs your attention, it gets the attention of your co-creator, whose business is on the hook, because, remember, our very first thing that we have to be aware of is not having a tangled or undefined business and financial relationship. So, if we've defined our business and our legal relationship, this is helping us take care of this one, which is the messy wins and losses. You might say, well, how we're not going to lose a million dollars, oh, you'd be surprised. Ad spend hiring help. Basically, you have money going out and the sales didn't convert as expected. Somehow there is a negative sign and you expected a positive sign. So, when you are looking at this, if you lose a million whose business is on the hook and you need to be able to write on a line the legal entity that is on the hook, okay, you have to. Conversely, if you make a million whose business is on the hook, yes, you will be paying taxes, but that, honestly, that's really not the biggest issue that I see in these situations that I have been brought in to help untangle and clean up the mess after the fact, because when the sales convert better than expected, there is a really really fast game of they want more and or you want to give less. It's going to happen, it is going to happen and it is going to happen so stinking fast. And here is where it's going to their tentacles. You know they really are. It's like a big slimy moving all over the place, octopus, the tentacles of that undefined, tangling legal, financial are coming into play, and the undefined tangled IP are coming into play, and now we have the messy wins and losses which is tangling and undefined financial wins and losses. So those are the three big. If I had to just put them into big buckets for you, those that's where I would put them Now, practically, practically speaking and practical ideas because, again, I came into the law and if you haven't listened to episode one, you are always welcome to go back and listen to that and I give just a brief explanation of how I even ended up becoming an attorney and being able to sit here and share this stuff with you.

Tamsen Horton:

I don't want to be the big mean ogre. I am the facilitator, I'm the creator. I love making something out of nothing. I definitely love making money because you can do so much good in the world. You can make such huge impacts. When we are making things I don't like, however, making a mess Ask my children. There is a checklist for everything to prevent against the mess. So, practically speaking, we're going to tie into number one, which was a tangled and undefined legal and financial response. My insight.

Tamsen Horton:

My observation my been in the trenches for almost three decades on this is don't blend financial and legal responsibility. It is not fun. Instead, as the out of the box thinkers that you are that I am how can we accomplish the same result in a far less risky way? I have tackled this head on from all kinds of angles and angles that you probably wouldn't even think of when I myself, many years ago and I will share a bit more as we're going through this had my own really messy but it was easy to untangle it.

Tamsen Horton:

Co-creation situation and, as a result, it my what. I had spent years co-creating with someone in the midst of 12 hours. It completely disintegrated. It disintegrated on a Friday and by Sunday night I had. The humor in this is just not lost on me. I had business prenup. I had literally taken this horrendously hard situation that I went in and co-creating with another person and written down and thought out and transformed my own experience into how can I make sure no one else has to go through this because it's not fun. It a business divorce, which is what these end up being.

Tamsen Horton:

In many ways, when you blend financial and legal, you are marrying another business. It is not something to take lightly. It has huge ramifications. Business get damaged. You have contracts that are at play. You have finances that are at play. You have all kinds of stuff.

Tamsen Horton:

Business pre-nup was something that was really important to me in terms of let's come up with all the different ways that we could do this. That is really important. If you are curious about that, you can always check it out. It is inside Bizzle Box. It is there to make sure you don't have to go through what I went through because it was a mess. But the core piece of advice that I give to many, many, many people do not blend financial and legal responsibility until you have exhausted all the other ideas and all the other solutions I like to advocate. Break it. Come up with all the ways that this is a bad idea. If, when you are walking through all the ways that blending legal and financial is a bad idea, if you can overcome them, then guess what You'll probably make it. You probably will be a fabulous story of how co-creation worked really well. I guarantee, as you tell your story, what we would all be able to hear is that you had very clear expectations and defined boundaries.

Tamsen Horton:

Speaking of practical, I really want you to keep all your IP in separate containers. We want it to be so easy to separate blue trucks from red trucks, blue slime from red slime at the end of the play date, if needed. Out of the box, thinking you're like, okay, but we have to co-create a course. No, you don't. To me, that is blending two people within the same video. It's blending two people within the same audio. It's blending your ideas and my ideas into a PDF. It's blending your questions and my answers into a quiz. That is really really, really slimy. That is oozing. It is making purple all over the place. Instead, could you blend in the other person's content a blue truck as a bonus to your course? You remain financially and legally responsible. They are included as a bonus. You can make those paid or unpaid situations.

Tamsen Horton:

The nice part is, depending on the tech that you're using. It's easy to keep that isolated within your tech. You could turn it on, you could turn it off, you can give access, you can revoke access, but you've kept their IP, their blue truck, in its own container. Or if you did run a play date with slime, you've been smart enough to be like you know what? Yep, we both have slime, but my mom says I have to come home with my only red slime at the end of the day, and so we're going to keep this slime in separate plastic bags. We're going to play at separate tables. We can still see each other, we can still talk together, but we're not mixing this. So that is very, very important. You could also provide an access code. So, as you're selling this container of whatever it is, you're co-creating a way to give buyers access to the other person's content, their blue truck in their own system.

Tamsen Horton:

I'm a huge Kajabi user. I've used it since my youngest son was born, way back in November of 15. And it's easy. In my tech, I can easily put content in separate lessons, in separate categories. I could also grant coupon codes and send someone to another system. So, whatever tech it is that you're using, you have ways of making boundaries and that you just want to be aware of. How can I keep this in its own container? You don't want purple trucks. You really, really, really don't want purple trucks, unless you tackle number one, which is having a clearly defined legal and financial relationship, and you're both going into it knowing yep, we want to make purple trucks Great. This is how we're going to handle purple trucks, if we ever need to divide this up.

Tamsen Horton:

The other way that you could practically speaking do this is could you do a joint event, a challenge, a summit, a webinar, any kind of joint together event, digital, in person, whatever the case may be, instead of a course? Really, a lot of times, what co-creating a course is at its core, when I keep asking questions and I boil it down to okay, why do we want to do this? What is really going on? The core part is you compliment each other, which is fantastic. It's also bringing awareness to what you both do and what you both bring to the table Again, fabulous, absolutely fabulous.

Tamsen Horton:

I talked about this during episode three, where I was breaking down the basics of email management and legalities in joint ventures. A lot of those concepts apply similarly here. Can we do this together in a way that we enjoy having red trucks and blue trucks together, but we don't want purple trucks and at the end of the day, we want to go home with our own truck. That is really important. And when you're co-creating, the more that you take your time at the beginning, even if it feels like it is slowing you down, because I know that's idea speed. I know the dopamine rush that comes with a new idea. I totally do. I am so wired similarly to you in so many ways. I also know, with the wisdom that my experience in business and law has given me, that if we wanna go really far and we wanna go really, really fast, we will always do that when we are on a freshly well-paved, well-put-together road.

Tamsen Horton:

When you take care of the big, the biggies which, in this case, are untangling and defining your legal and financial relationships, untangling and defining ownership of the IP, knowing exactly how you are going to define the messy wins and losses, that is the equivalent of taking the time to pave the road, knowing where the road is going, making sure that it's not like, okay, let's just go and we'll build the plane as we're going. I like that idea, but not when, especially, you are doing something with someone else, because the ramifications are so important to you. The ramifications are so huge and unfortunately, the law is not necessarily in your corner on this. When, and especially in the US, you are basically assumed to be a partnership, a true legal partnership, unless you've said otherwise. So the law is gonna treat you as if you have blended legal and financial responsibility together, and you might not want to. So that is a situation where the law is just not in your corner to begin with. So take the time, take an extra day, take an extra week, really think through.

Tamsen Horton:

If you're a Bizzlebox member, you can always go through business pre-nup. If you're not yet a Bizzlebox member and you haven't hired legal, hire legal, hire legal it's here to stand in the gap between those panicked late night Google searches or, in this case, that brilliant, inspired idea like, oh, let's go and let's run, and you got it launched by tomorrow, having no idea you got massive potholes all over the place that are gonna do nothing but slow you down and the needing to have really expensive one-on-one only attention totally focused on you. I like to call it mahogany law because and there's, mahogany law has its role it absolutely does. I have lots of clients where I provide what I would call mahogany law, but you have to have someone in your corner letting you know hey, we need to pay attention to this, and here's the easy way to pay attention. So I hope that you can take this information and use it.

Tamsen Horton:

And if you're not at the moment in a situation where you're like, oh okay, yeah, I'm not really creating with anybody. Maybe you have a friend that is. Maybe you have someone in a group that you're a part of. Would you please share this episode with them? You could save them so much time, money and effort and, more importantly, really help them protect the relationships of the people that they really really wanna work with, because that in my own situation, that was, and still is, the hardest point. This was someone that I admired, I was inspired by, I enjoyed, and the way that it went down. The relationship was just. It was damaged and that I would not want for anybody.

Kip Horton:

Thanks for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review and share it with a friend. At Bizzlebox, we love helping entrepreneurs succeed. We offer a variety of reliable, easy to use tools. At Bizzleboxcom, our goal is to help you have a profitable and legally secure business so you can make your impact while living fully on your terms. Until next time, take what you've learned and put it to work for you. It was a pleasure providing resources and policy. Please reach out to other people. Thanks a lot.