Register Your Business Name

One of the most important part of a franchise system is the licensing of the franchisor’s marks, or name, to the Franchisee. For this reason, it is important to consider the status of your name registration early in the franchise development process. By registering your name, you are putting everyone on notice that you are claiming the name for your own business use.

You will want to end up with a federal registration at the U.S. Patent Office. www.uspto.gov

• You can go to their web site and conduct searches of registered names. However, just because you don’t find your name in the database, it does not necessarily mean that you can register it.
• When you apply for a registration, the Patent Office will identify other owners of registered names that may be in conflict with yours, and will contact them to let them know about your application. They have a certain amount of time to respond, and your application may be challenged.
• You can expect the process to take as long as 12 to 18 months before you receive the registration for your trade mark or service mark.
• A Trade Mark is applied to “goods,” like a computer, clothing, etc.
• A Service Mark is applied to a “service,” such as some type of professional services, a restaurant, etc.
• An attorney can make the filing for you with the USPTO, or you may do it yourself. The filing cost paid to the USPTO is about $275 per name, slogan, or logo registered. You may want to register under more than one classification.
• From our experience, we would say that it is usually necessary to register both your business name and your logo, as separate applications, in order to obtain sufficient coverage and protection. It is preferable, sometimes, to register your logo in black and white, rather than in color, so that someone could not just change the color and claim that it is a different mark.

Wherever possible, you should first register your name with the state in which you are located or even states in which you are doing business. Sometimes creating a corporation in your state automatically registers your name. The federal registration, when obtained, will supersede state registrations.

Registering your name federally, and locally, does not mean that you will avoid name conflicts as you expand into new states. You are likely to find some existing businesses in some states who are already using your name. In this case it may be necessary to operate under a different name in that area, modify your name, or negotiate something with the existing business.

You can conduct searches of existing and proposed names using the internet, on-line state searches, yellow pages, the U. S. Patent Office, URL searches, and other means. However, it would be necessary to search every state in order to be sure that your name is not already registered, and not all states have on-line name search capability. There are also professional firms that will conduct a more extensive search for a fee of $500 to $1,000.

One of the major considerations today is whether or not a desirable Internet URL is available for your name. For this reason, companies choosing a new name frequently begin with internet name availability searches and then move to the more traditional searches.

Even though there can be no guarantee that you will not encounter naming conflicts in the future, conducting a search and registering your name as soon as possible will help reduce possible conflicts.

More information can be found at:  www.biltmorefranchise.com