When you start a company and you’ve created a brand there are three important rules you want to follow. First, you want to pick a brand that you can own well, that seems pretty obvious but what I mean when I say own I mean that it is really a brand. If you choose a descriptor or a generic, it’s not a brand, it will never create brand equity, and you don’t own it.

The second rule is that you actually do own it. We did a survey of small companies and found that 65 percent of them do not even own their company name and they don’t know it. And they’re thinking well, what’s the problem I haven’t had any problems yet. But when you sell your company there’ll be a due diligence process and then it will be discovered, 10, 20, 30 years later and how do you fix it then.

And the last part of brand equity, building brand equity is don’t quit. It takes a long time to build brand equity and it’s like pushing a boxcar on a rail, it doesn’t look like it’s moving but once it gets moving, it’s pretty hard to stop. And if you look at the valuations of many of the companies that have been sold most recently they’re phenomenally valuable but they have no hard assets at all, it’s all intellectual property and almost always is brand value.