What is your IP and how do you protect it?

There is a widening gap between the professional advisers who have a system for acquiring new business and serving existing clients on the one hand, and salespeople going from one sale to the next on the other. Often the hallmark of those professional advisers is a way of doing business which can be unique to them - and because they may have emerged over a number of years, perhaps originating at a time in the past, they are usually not noticed as the great asset in the business that they should be.

A way of obtaining clients, which works systematically, is a goldmine. Yet often people think something else is their property. The biggest mistake is thinking that IP means something published - like a book. It may be intellectual, it may be property, but books in a market this small are seldom worth anything.

On the other hand, I've been involved with a group of advisers who found that their product comparison materials were really worth something when someone else decided that they might like to copy them.