Safe Shortcuts, and Why Consultants Don’t Share Their Checklists

In the last week, I have several clients building their commercial models to establish a licensing agreement with a third party. To decide on the best configuration for any long-term collaboration, you first have to assess all of the options and determine which will be the most suitable for your project.

This might sound easy, but in order to complete credible assessments of all of the options for (a) your commercial model, (b) your exit plan, (c) the relationship structure – distribution, license, franchise, trade-sale, etc., or (d) who the most suitable party might be, to increase your revenue potential and reduce your risks.

To complete all of this within a few days, you need a series of checklists. With one of these cases this week, we used the Commercial Modelling checklist (some 244 starting questions) to decide the best model (separate geographic agency model), we used another collaborator checklist to profile and identify the most suitable partner, and then we used another checklist of leverages, to build our case around de-risking the prospective partner’s investment.

You cannot search for these checklists on the Internet or create them using AI because most of them are proprietary. They are created from years of experience and all of the cumulative know-how and knowledge that having repeated this type of exercise over and over again will deliver.

When you hire a competent consultant to either complete this series of tasks for you or help you complete them, you are also getting that documented experience. There is no reason you could not figure all of this out over a few years of trial and error, but if you wanted to get your project from a pre-planning situation to a pre-agreement situation in under a week, you need that know-how.

Would you like to save a few years of hard-knock learning and get the help you need – to make sure your project can be configured and negotiated within a week or two? The best option is to find yourself a competent industry consultant who can help you build out your expertise to cover the commercialization phase of inventing, after you have completed the ideation phase. When properly managed, this should create your first or next significant cash-generating transaction, and if you repeat this process to grow your project, you will become ready to scale it.

Scaling a project is easy if you have a protected asset, solid and growing cash flow, a substantial growth trajectory, and one or more planned value-realization points for you and your investors.

Venture capital and private equity firms will examine your project from a different perspective. They want to know if (a) their industry contacts, skill, and collective expertise can accelerate your project, (b) if they put in 10 times the equity, they can generate 100 times the returns, and (c) your exit can align with their plans. Each one of those criteria will contain or reduce their risk.

Finding a competent consultant or coaching program will reduce your commercialization cycle from years to months (and sometimes to just a few weeks). The key issue for you is how or where to find that level of expertise that specializes in IP commercialization. This doesn’t mean your accounting firm or legal advisors have any experience or have developed the checklists you need to work to, in order to reduce your time and their costs for you.

Here is where to start your search: www.kickstart.plus.

P.S. If you can see how this information can help you get better traction in your current project, here are four ways we can help you get your plan finalized, have your project adequately funded, and plan your first/next cash-generating transaction:

1. Check your project for commercial-readiness with our free 6-page report: https://innovationsuccess.scoreapp.com/
2. Let us see if your project can be eligible for the Inventors Academy program: book a chat with our program coordinators - www.academy30mins.com
3. Be part of our community by joining more than 80,000 members in both of our LinkedIn special interest groups: https://www.dhirubhai.net/groups/8531890/ and https://www.dhirubhai.net/groups/40975/, and
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