How to Trademark Your Body of Work | Berkley Sweetapple

Most established experts assume trademarking and protecting their work is a someday task, the kind of thing you handle once the business is big enough to need it. The truth is closer to the opposite. In this episode of The Soulful CEO Podcast, Berkley Sweetapple, an intellectual property attorney who helps founders own the work they are known for, joins Kristin Constable to explore how to protect your body of work and why doing it early is what lets you build something that can actually scale with you. Together, they break down what you can trademark, when to do it, and the costly mistakes that put a brand you have poured years into at risk.

WHAT YOU'LL HEAR

What "owning your body of work" actually means, and why control over your name and your method is what lets a business scale with you instead of getting taken from youWhy a trademark gets denied, and why the name you can protect is often not the one instinct would have chosen, told through Kristin's own Whole Life Leadership refusal and why Soulful CEO went throughA simple test for when to trademark: if you would be genuinely upset to lose a name, that is the one to protect, and almost always earlier than you thinkWhat you can and cannot protect, from your business name to your signature methodology, and the one condition that makes a named method ownable rather than just a phraseWhy legal foundations are less about paperwork and more about the confidence to be visible, raise your rates, and operate as the version of you the business is growing into

CHAPTER TIMESTAMPS

0:00 Own Your Work

1:30 What Ownership Means

2:00 Why My Trademark Failed

4:30 TM Versus R

6:00 When To Trademark

9:00 Can You Own A Method

11:00 When It Goes Wrong

15:00 Foundations And Confidence