Expert Advice For Online Businesses

About twenty years ago I saw a Kawasaki Ninja 900 motorcycle and decided it looked like fun. I really had no experience with motorcycles and did not know anyone who had one. But hey, how hard could it be?

So I bought one and set off tooling around town. Of course I bought one of the most powerful street bikes ever made, It was fun, but I could not do any of the things I thought it would enable me to do. I would take a sharp corner and lay it down. The bike would shake and scare me so much at high speeds that I could not take it over 90mph in light colored pants. It was fun, well, probably more scary than fun. I just did not have the right bike, the right protective gear or the right experts to tell me how to use this incredible tool. I sold the bike a year later. In retrospect, I am lucky to be alive.

Now, twenty years later, I am hopefully a little wiser. I still like bikes, but have put aside a little of the hubris that prevented me from asking for expert help when I needed it most. I went and spoke with some licensed expert motorcycle racers I knew. They told me which bike, equipment, training and tracks they thought might work for me. I followed their advice to the letter and hung on every word and recommendation they offered. There would be time enough for experimentation, but without a baseline, I would never be able to tell if my changes were helping or hurting. My expert buddies told me what I was doing wrong, where I could improve and items I could use to go faster and do the things I wanted to do.

I studied, purchased the right equipment and hung on every word of advice they gave me. I took and passed my track license and my amateur racer license. In a little over a year from the time I first rode my new bike, I was on the podium at an amateur sprint bike motorcycle race, placing second in front of many other lighter bikers with bigger bikes and much much more time at the track.

That picture above shows you some of my on-track advisors E.J. Bender and Kevin Kernohan (guru-Randy was just too fast to make the shot) in Calabogie Canada last week. Why can I wear white shorts at 150mph now? I now know what I do well and what I do not. I also know that I do not want to waste time researching an answer an expert has on the tip of their tongue? I have no desire to reinvent the wheel. I have experts at my disposal, why not use them to help jump to the top of the learning curve? This advice applies even more so to companies looking to expand their internet presence.

You can do it yourself, but enlisting the help of internet experts in law, marketing, blogging, capital management, customer service, whatever your company needs to conduct online business. Do not lose that entrepreneurial spark. Just learn the track before you start cracking the throttle open here and there. Let the experts get you on the right track and headed in the right direction. After a few laps, you should have a feel for what you might change to make things flow even better.

Otherwise, you can try it on your own for a while. You still
find people like that at the racetrack. While I have yet to see one of them on
the podium, they do get frequent flier miles from the trackside ambulance team.

Brett Trout

online business experts business

Internet Laws and Your Business

Millions of companies do business on the Internet. Of those millions, what percentage has a complete understanding of their online legal liabilities? 30% 20% 2%? Actually, most LAWYERS do not have a thorough understanding of their clients’ online legal liabilities. You end up with a client afraid to ask and a lawyer afraid to tell. They both play dumb, ignoring the elephant in the room. The problem is that the client is standing at the rear of the elephant. And instead of guiding the elephant away from the giant tub of bran muffins and out the door, the lawyer is donning the Haz-Mat suit and polishing his/her $300/hr gold-plated shovel.

No attorney knows everything about Internet law. The best you can hope for is a business lawyer or an intellectual property lawyer who knows enough about the law of e-commerce to make educated guesses. Would it be best to slip you out the back, force the elephant out the front, or aim him toward your competitor? You need knowledge and experience to make that decision.

The Internet opens new doors, gives people the chance to try things lawmakers never anticipated. Pretty soon you have new activities conflicting with old laws. Before you can get new, better laws, however, you have to wait for someone to get mad enough to sue and for a judge to enforce the old law on the new activity. Given the unfairness of the result, the case is appealed and the courts “reinterpret” the old law to address the new activity. It is typically not until this point when lawmakers begin the multi-year process of making new laws tailored the new activity.

Unfortunately, by the time they actually create “new” law, the Internet has opened more opportunities, and we return to square one. What you need is an attorney who not only has a firm understanding of the law as it presently exists, but who has followed the foregoing process so many times that the attorney has some insight. The best attorneys, the ones who really know the law related to the Internet, will not hesitate to change their advice as legal developments foreshadow emerging opportunities.

Constantly adjusting, rather than burying your head in the sand or merely crossing your fingers is the key to navigating the Laws of the Internet. What can you do to help your business lawyer help you through the maze of online legal issues? Spot issues before they become problems. A handy desk reference like the book Internet Laws Affecting Your Company is no substitute for legal advice. It may, however, give you enough information to know when an early conversation with your attorney, may stave off later costly litigation.


Brett Trout

Other Related Topics:
Internet Laws Affecting Your Company, Internet Law