Starting a Business in Florida

Visit the Department of State's Starting a Business page. The Small Business Development Center is also a great resource.

1) Write a business plan

Here are a couple of posts I've devoted to this subject - Business Plans: A Quick Guide and Piecing Together the Business Plan.

The Small Business Administration has a handy page about writing a business plan.

2) Decide on a location

Sunbiz.org has a page devoted to selecting a location with handy links about demographics and economy.

3) Choose a business structure

First, read this great article on how to choose your business structure - click here to read PowerHomeBiz's Choosing Your Legal Structure.

Once you've done that go to the Division of Corporations site, which is where you can search and file corporations, LLCs, LLPs, fictitious names, etc.

4) Taxes

Read the Start-Up Kit for New Business Owners.

5) Licenses & Permits

Business license information can be found here.

Mention our blog & get $25 off of our Premium Package.

It's Graph Time Again!

As promised in this post, I'm revisiting the USPTO's Performance & Accountability Report.

I decided to take a look at the highest number of applications filed based on state residency. Here are the top 6 out of the 310,296 applications filed by residents of the US:

Now let's take a look at these same states to see how many made it to registration. This represents a portion of the 122,266 applications registered to residents of the US. Of course, there's going to be some rollover from those filed in 2006/registered in 2007 and those filed in 2007/registered in 2008 but this gives a pretty fair snapshot:

It still boggles my mind that such a large number of trademark applications are filed that NEVER make it to registration. This is why we always stress to our clients to stay on top of their trademark filings. The USPTO will not keep watch of your trademark; that's your responsibility. Also ensuring that the name is available in the first place will get you past the dreaded refusal Office Action.

Mention our blog & get $25 off of our Premium Package.

TradeMark Express Value Package

We've added a new option when it comes to getting your trademark. TradeMark Express will search your mark in the pending & registered Federal and State trademark files AND in the US National Common-Law files. Based on your approval, we will then prepare AND file your US Federal trademark application - all for one fee of $399. Order this package today!

HOW IT WORKS:

1) US Federal & State trademark research - TradeMark Express will search the pending AND registered Federal AND State trademark files in accordance with the USPTO's policy, namely looking for similarities in Sound, Appearance or Meaning. This involves searching synonyms, spelling variations, word placement, etc.

2) US National Common-Law research - TradeMark Express will search for commercial availability of the mark in numerous files. Businesses have "first use" or Common-Law rights to their trade names in whatever geographic trade area they serve. The US National Common-Law research will help you to determine if you face any trade restrictions.

Once both searches are completed, the entire report will be emailed to you. At this point, you'll need to read through the entire report to look for any conflicts or similarities.

Should any conflicts or similarities arise, you will need to discuss them with a trademark attorney. To upgrade this package, simply contact any of our offices and for an additional $101, TradeMark Express will analyze both searches and you'll be provided with a trademark attorney (nominal fee for West Coast attorney) to discuss the results.

TradeMark Express will also email you our Worksheet with the above research. Once you're ready for us to prepare & submit your Federal trademark application, complete the worksheet and send to our Arcata office. Once received, we will then prepare and submit your Federal trademark application.

The USPTO charges a fee of $325 per class, which is separate from TradeMark Express' fees.

Starting a Business in California

When starting a business in California, start your research at these two sites:

The California Business Portal & The Secretary of State's Starting a Business page.

On the SOS' page, you'll see the Secretary of State details 5 recommended steps:

1) Write a business plan

Here are a couple of posts I've devoted to this subject - Business Plans: A Quick Guide and Piecing Together the Business Plan.

The Small Business Administration has a handy page about writing a business plan.

2) Deciding on a location for your business

If you need assistance, check out the Labor & Workforce Development Agency's Business Investment Services page.

3) Choose a business structure

Entrepreneur has a great article on this subject, Choose Your Business Structure.

4) Taxes

Click here for those documents.

5) License & Permits

Check both of these sites: CalGOLD and the CA Department of Consumer Affairs.

The Secretary of State also has a listing of business resources - check here.

Fun With Graphs

Every year the USPTO publishes an online Performance and Accountability Report, which contains some pretty interesting statistics about patents & trademarks. I used this site to create a couple of graphs to provide a visual on these stats.

A 27% increase in 4 years is pretty significant. The increase every year goes to show how important folks are taking their trademarks & brand identity.

The above is a 5 year look at the number of registrations issued. As you can see, the number of applications filed versus those that move to registration differ greatly. This is going to be for a number of reasons -- refusals, abandonments, oppositions, etc.

Look at 2006 - 128,672 applications never made it to registration. Even if each one of those applications consisted of only 1 class filed, that's a total of $41,818,400. Let's even say that all 128,672 applications used TEAS Plus -- that's still a total of $35,384,800! That's staggering.

There's all sorts of statistics available so I'll be devoting a couple of more posts on the various findings.

Starting a Business in...

Being in the trademark biz, we get a lot of questions from folks about starting their own business in their state of residence. Admittedly, I don't know a lot of the ins & outs required for each state. I think it's high time I educated myself.

That being said, I'm going to dedicate a post a week to the various resources, steps & sites for each state. Once a week seems to be a good pace. I think anything more than that would make this blog a bit of a boring read.

Anyone have a state in mind they'd like to know more about? If so, leave a comment or email me at shannon@tmexpress.com

Logo Search: Trudging through the USPTO

Searching for designs on the USPTO site is a bit tricky. I'll explain it step by step.

First, go to this link. This is the searchable design search code manual. Type in simple keywords that describe your logo. For instance, typing in telephone brings up the 6-digit codes for telephones, telephone poles, answering machines, etc. Make note of all the 6-digit codes relevant to your logo.

Second, go to this link. This is the main trademark hub page. From here you'll see 2 columns. Look at the right hand side for a link that's titled Search. Click on that.

Now click on Structured Form Search (boolean). In the first search term box, type in the 6-digit code, no spaces & no dots. Change the field to Design Code. Stopping here will likely result in too many hits to look at so let's use the rest of the search boxes to narrow it a bit.

Change the operator to AND. In the next search term box, choose one keyword that describes your goods/services, e.g. clothing, software, etc. Change the field to Goods & Services. Now click Submit Query.

You should then see a listing of marks that you can view in more detail.

I've been in the trademark field for 14 years & I do not recommend that anyone conduct this logo search & consider themselves to be done. There are so many nuances within the USPTO as well as with trademarks in general that the likelihood of missing something is high. However, I feel the above provides a good snapshot of how involved searching logos can be & is a nice primer for those folks interested in protecting their logo.

You've got to keep the USPTO's guidelines in mind. Logos need not necessarily be exact to be considered a similarity. They take into consideration things such as similarities in Appearance or Meaning as well as similarity in industry. Your logo may look like one definite thing to you but you have to emotionally detach yourself from it & see all the inherent possibilities. It's those possibilities that will also have to be searched.