Legal Tips for Small Business Owners

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Small Business Owners|Legal Tips for Small Business OwnersAs the owner of a small business, it is essential that you consider the law in running your business as you will obviously want to make sure that you are operating above board and know how to protect your small business. A small business can struggle if they encounter any kind of legal issue, which is why it is so important to be aware of a few tips which could come in useful when it comes to abiding by the law and protecting your business. Read on to find out the best legal tips for small businesses and how they could help.

Choose the Right Business Structure

First, you need to make sure that you choose the right business structure and one which will protect your personal assets at risk if you encounter a legal issue. You will be able to protect your personal assets by forming a limited liability partnership or limited company, so it is important to spend some time researching what would be best for you.

Create Contracts for All Agreements

Many business owners make the mistake of not creating contracts for agreements, but this could prove to be costly down the line. This is why contracts need to be drawn up for every single agreement, which also helps to clarify what is expected and should stop any misunderstandings from occurring.

Create Terms and Conditions

Similarly, you need to create Ts&Cs in order to protect the business and to outline what is expected when a consumer enters an agreement with your business. Without this, you are putting yourself at risk of uncertainty and misunderstandings, so you need to establish the rules in order to protect yourself.

Protect Your Intellectual Property

You do not want other companies benefiting from your intelligence and creativity, which is why you need to use trademarks, patents, and copyrights to protect your intellectual property. Additionally, when you create a new idea, product, service, or anything else, then you should always do a patent and trademark search to avoid stealing intellectual property.

Find Reliable Lawyers

It is also important to do your research, find the best corporate lawyers in your area, and consider different potential issues. As an example, you will want to find an expert eminent domain attorney in the event of authorized companies trying to take your private property for public use, and they will be able to fight on your behalf to stop this from happening or secure the best possible amount.

Stay Current With Changing Laws and Regulations

Finally, you need to make sure that you keep up to date with changing laws and regulations as these can change and often. HR will help a business stay compliant and make necessary changes relating to employment law, which will stop you from encountering any issues.

Hopefully, these legal tips will be of use and help you to protect your business. In particular, small businesses need to be wary of the legal issues that can arise from running a business and make sure that they have the best protection in place.

3 of the Most Common Legal Issues Still Suffered by Businesses

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Legal Issues|3 of the Most Common Legal Issues Still Suffered by BusinessesRunning a business with employees, especially one with premises automatically grants you a duty of care to your staff. As an employer, you expect a certain level of professionalism from all of your staff members as much as they expect it from you and for their safety to be in your best interests.

But even the best employers and businesses run into legal issues from time to time, whether right or wrong, and even in 2021 businesses still face some of the same legal issues that have been around for a long time:

  • IP Theft
  • Health and Safety Issues
  • Discrimination or Harassment

Many businesses, especially successful ones, are often accused of stealing something from another entity such as a logo, a product idea, or even a name while employees claiming accidents at work have never been higher. Discrimination and harassment is still an issue for employers and great care should be taken to protect everyone involved.

Know Your Property

A developed piece of material work such as a patent, trademark, copyrighted work, or even a trade secret such as a manufacturing process (think Coca Cola) is known as intellectual property. That is a property that isn’t grounded in the physical world such as a car or a house but one that has been creatively generated.

Claims concerning IP happen all the time and many bigger cases include those against songwriters, patent holders, and manufacturers. Pop superstar Madonna famously lost a case against a Belgian songwriter over her hit song ‘Frozen’ while Nintendo narrowly won a case over a patent concerning how a user input device (controller) handles shared data streams.

You can initially protect your IP by identifying it, securing it, and labeling it as such with the use of official company logos, which are themselves IP. But the range of issues concerning IP is very broad and is governed by a complex set of rules so the best advice would be to contact a business law attorney should you find yourself worried about infringement or if a claim has been made against you.

Duty of Care

Business establishments of all kinds are deemed reasonably responsible for the wellbeing of everyone directly associated with them. You may have heard of people claiming accidents at work because of negligent safety measures and receiving large payouts. This happens all the time and for the most part, these could have been avoided.

Protection from claims of this nature is essential to a business as while some may be genuine, there is a culture of falsely claiming injury towards organizations which has led to some businesses becoming overly cautious, such as McDonald’s and their rigorous labeling of hot products. The cost of a successful claim against you could potentially run into hundreds of thousands of dollars, which for most companies would be unsustainable and could lead to loss of jobs, decreased productivity, or closure.

The best thing to secure against these kinds of claims is to actually develop strict health and safety procedures. Ensure all your staff are fitted with any safety gear they need and have been trained to use them, label and mark safety concerned areas of a building, and reasonably discipline staff members who don’t follow safety guidelines. Do all that you can do to adequately profess that any claim against your health and safety standards is due to the claimant and not yourself.

Everyone is Equal

The last few years have seen very high profile cases against celebrities such as Harvey Weinstein but what of claims of discrimination or harassment against companies. Well, it does happen. Recently, Viacom, the parent company of CBS, has had to suspend two executives over claims that they created a hostile work environment for women and people of color.
It boggles the mind to think that this kind of behavior still happens in this day and age, especially from grown and professional men, but the sad fact is that year on year, the US Equal Employment Opportunites Commission (EEOC) hears over 100,000 cases of discrimination in the workplace.

It would be a very sad day indeed for any business owner to hear that staff members are being discriminated against, for any reason, so you should go out of your way to educate all staff about issues of discrimination whether it’s racial, gender, religion or disability related. Proactively enforcing a “Not Safe for Work” campaign can help since everyone is going to have different beliefs and conflicting personalities, but they should be left at home and aren’t welcome in the workplace.

What Are The Different Approaches And Theories Regarding Leadership?

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StrategyDriven Management and Leadership Article |Leadership|What Are The Different Approaches And Theories Regarding Leadership?While there are many definitions of leadership, it is clear that different leaders, scholars, and authors struggle to agree on a concise definition. John Gardner states that leaders step outside for change and inspire people to share their common objectives. This is a view that is shared by Bass & Stogdill, who define leadership as the art of leading others to do the right thing by sharing a consistent vision. However, through assessing great leaders of the past, we can see that there are different attitudes and opinions regarding effective leadership. Revolutionist Napoleon Bonaparte is considered one of the greatest leaders of all time, as is Martin Luther King. One was a tyrant; a fearless militant, the other inspired his followers into making them believe in an ideal world.

Leadership theories are mainly categorized into Trait Theory, Behaviour Theory, and Contingency Theory. Trait theory, also known as the ‘great man’ theory, is focused on the characteristics of leaders. In 1847, Carlyle stated in his ‘great man theory’ that leaders are born, and only those who have heroic potential could ever become leaders. This has progressed into a leadership theory whereby we attempt to identify characteristics that lead to the emergence of leadership qualities, for example, intelligence, achievements, self-confidence, personality, socio-economic background, demography, and physiological appearance.

Through research, it is evident that the term ‘trait’ is the source of significant confusion and ambiguity in the literature. Behavioral theory leadership was born out of the criticism of trait leadership. This is based on the theory that leadership qualities can be learned, rather than being inherited.

However, it is argued that learning the behavior of a leader does not always translate to results, as it does not factor in how the individual executes this theory. Some also criticize the approach by stating that it emphasizes managing organizations rather than leaders. This style of leadership provides definite conclusions while overlooking the variables in management and change.

There are also differing opinions regarding the Contingency Theory, which was created by Fred Fiedler in the 1960s. This model focuses on identifying a leadership style, with two key factors addressed: situational favourableness and least preferred co-worker scale (LPC). Some argue that leadership styles are fixed, something that has caused differing opinions. Many others argue that this simply brings confusion to the workplace.

Extensive literature research shows that the widespread criticism and perceived rigidness of these key approaches overall have led to new paradigm models, including concepts such as transformational leadership, visionary leadership, and charismatic leadership.

Despite the contrasting leadership styles that are in practice today, one thing that we can all agree on is the importance of developing your own leadership approach is imperative. This is something that industry experts like Bob J Bukowski have done well, enabling them to succeed in their industries.

So there you have it: an insight into leadership frameworks and the different approaches and theories that people use today. We hope that this will give you some inspiration for your own approach to leadership.