A week in the life of this IP strategist

I thought it would be interesting to start recording a typical week in my life as a lead consultant in ipVA. I’ll try to be true to keeping a weekly record but the ambition may be beyond me. Or if this becomes too mundane or repetitive I’ll stop it. But I do think what we do and how we do it is a little different and therefore worth sharing.

Client confidentiality prevents providing any giving any client details, but I thought it might be a useful exercise to give people a feel for the sort of things we do at ipVA. So here has been the last week in the life of this strategist in the week beginning 13th October. Not all weeks are like this one, this has been a little on the brutal side and has packed a lot in, but it is becoming the norm.

Monday.

A real fun day with a cleantech business we have recently started working for in the run up to a funding round with Chris and Stephen. One of the IP challenges with clean technologies and their IP is that the base technologies that they use are often pretty old. And this company is typical. A lot of work to do to create a solid IP story over the next 6-8 weeks. Assets to build, risks to decipher and explain and a governance and reporting program to implement. But we made a positive start, brought people to a common level of understanding and made a few people smile with “well I’d never thought of IP that way”. I truly love what we do. The day finishes with sending out the outputs from our meetings and a summary report and recommendations. A clear path forward we think.

Tuesday.

At a media client all day working on an open licensing strategy and options to implement it. This is hard stuff and pretty new to me. Jordan has opened my eyes to the whole open content area over the last 12 months and this project demands a shift from a closed and highly proprietary model to an open or partially open model for a new platform technology. Some good comparables to look at though but some serious research and modelling to do before the right option will become clear. Jordan has pulled out some amazing research (lots of privately known data) on the revenue models behind the iPhone as a comparable that have opened the client’s eyes. We have a short number of weeks to get the story straight but this should be enough. I’m confident we will pick up pace on this one in he next few weeks.

Few days end much before 10pm and this one closes with a few catch up items. A VC backed client needs to understand a specific risk and we speak about a program to understand this by a technical assessment. A 9:30pm call with the client we are visiting on Thursday to agree an agenda and discuss one specific area of concern and a call with Stephen to discuss yesterday’s meeting and how we can keep on making our client smile.

Wednesday.

A couple of meetings cancelled so some time to catch up on report writing. A 6am start to write a red flag diligence report (getting better at these… lots of practice) and a feedback session with the client around the end of the morning – all positive. Another diligence project we are running has thrown up a tricky ownership issue that could take a week or two to unpick. I think we can solve it though. We also picked up three new opportunities on Wednesday (the current run rate is around one per day into our funnel) from our network and an opportunity to contribute to the 100 day post investment plan of a VC investment. A really cool technology and one to watch. Even dinner with a mate on Wednesday evening doesn’t escape from some IP evangelism… he’s brought a napkin from a dinner we had 4 months ago when I drew out an IP plan for his company. I hope I’m not becoming boring. 1130 to bed and…

Thursday.

Ouch, a 4am start to fly to Europe on a new project preparing a business for exit with Dave and Rob. After an intensive first day I think we have a solid plan for the next 3 months. Poor Dave was flagging by 6pm as the business CTO looked as though he could go through the night. Rob, as ever, highly creative, drawing away. There are times, many times, when I simply love what we do and how we do it. I laughed with Maria, my wife, a couple of weeks ago, that we’d found the Rosetta Stone to help people with no IP background, understand and get IP. I know, laughable, but we do seem to make it make sense. An 11pm finish and then…

Friday.

Bugger, another early start to fly back to the UK. Writing up our project plan from the day before till lunchtime, budgets to do, priorities to resolve… feels about right. Then it’s into prepping for a fund presentation we are giving 4 weeks from now, signing off the spec on a new product we are shortly to launch and discussing a referral agreement we want to sign for a SW provider. Just time by the end of the day to talk to an excellent possible consultant to add to our team. The last 6 months has been very kind to us with the quality of good candidates out there. We are now up to 16, with 4-5 more people with whom we are in active discussions. We set out to build Europe’s best IP advisory business. Maybe, just maybe, we will get lucky. An 8pm finish and a 75 hour week. Ugly but fun.

Its a little tough to switch off something that is just so damn interesting. Even my Saturday morning tennis with Maria gets interrupted with a thought of “what if we could do that, rather than that…wow!”. I literally do tire myself out at times.

Roll on Monday. This week is quite a big week for us with a few pipeline opportunities to get over the line. We’ve also skipped our regular Monday morning planning session for the last 2 weeks because of client commitments so back to the rigour tomorrow morning. The next month to plan out. More streets to walk, doors to open… it is like a pioneering mission sometimes but so much more fun now than 12 months ago.