Excerpted from SEAK’s course, “How to Become a Successful Physician Inventor”
You’ve got an idea, you’ve found somebody to buy it. How do you protect yourself? These are things that I did sometimes, but not all the time. You need a representative to do it.
Exclusive versus non-exclusive. Most of the time, people will want an exclusive, but sometimes they want a non-exclusive. That’s up to them. That’s a business decision of which you will not be able to influence them. You definitely want, in there not on there, you want a royalty. If you can get a royalty, you definitely want a royalty. The royalty gives you money. It gives you money when they sell it. If you have a royalty, you can get what’s called an advance against the royalty. An advance against the royalty is, you get money now. You get 100,000 now, and when they sell product, they withhold your royalty until you get to the 100,000. But you have money in your pocket now, and that’s something that you can arrange. That’s an advance against royalty.
Net sales is a term that I don’t particularly understand, but the royalties can be against gross or net sales. Ideally…oops, what’d I do? Ideally, you want it against net sales. You want to be able to examine their records, you wanna be able to examine at least one of the two or three or four books that they keep. Hopefully, you get to look at the one that’s the actual book, rather than what they’re presenting to their tax attorneys. And you want to get paid on a regular basis. You want it spelled out in the contract as to when you will be paid. I will be paid on the 15th of every month. I will get my royalties on the 1st of every month, not just when they wanna get around to it.
People will say “No.” This is, and they will say “no” often. I’ve said that about five times here so far, six times. Thomas Watson, the head of IBM said to Jobs, “Get out of here. You stink.” And this is Steve Jobs, got no. He got no a lot. He got no a lot. Dr. Seuss got 27 companies said “no” to him before one company said “yes.” Rocky was turned down by everybody in the world before somebody finally said “yes.” There is a quote from a couple more. The fellow, a patent examiner who got tired of making copies. I don’t know whether you’re old enough to remember carbon paper. Carbon paper was a disaster. It just made a total mess. Your fingers were awful. It just, it stank.
