In 2005, when I started my online business and published my first blog post, legal protection was the last thing on my mind. I believed it was only necessary for established businesses.

Now, with years of experience as an online entrepreneur and a law degree under my belt, I realize how misguided that thinking was.

Whether you’re just getting started as a content creator or an established online business, believing you’re “too small” for legal protection is a dangerous misconception. Let’s take a look at why size doesn’t matter when it comes to legal risks in content creation.

Related: 3 Areas of Law Every Entrepreneur Should Know

1. The dangerous mindset of “I’m too small to matter”

When you’re just starting out, legal considerations often take a backseat to content creation and audience building. However, the internet and the law don’t discriminate based on the size of your platform.

Consider this scenario: You’re a lifestyle vlogger with 500 subscribers. You use a popular song in your latest video, assuming it’s harmless given your small audience. Suddenly, you receive a cease and desist letter for copyright infringement. Your channel’s size doesn’t shield you from legal consequences.

The “I’m too small” mindset can leave you vulnerable to various legal risks, regardless of your audience size.

2. Size doesn’t matter, but impact does

In content creation, your potential impact outweighs your audience size when it comes to legal exposure. Here are two examples:

1. A fitness influencer with 5,000 Instagram followers shares a “miracle” weight loss tip that causes harm to a follower. Despite the relatively small following, the influencer could be held liable for the damages.
2. A podcaster talking about a famous celebrity makes negative statements that are untruthful. Even with a limited audience, this could result in a lawsuit for defamation.

These scenarios illustrate that the size of your platform doesn’t determine your legal risk. Your content’s potential impact does.

Related: Don’t “Shake Off” These 5 Business, Brand and Legal Lessons From Taylor Swift

3. Three key areas every creator should address immediately

To protect your content and your business, focus on these three critical areas:

1. Intellectual property protection

Safeguarding your brand and respecting others’ IP rights is crucial. This includes your brand name, logo and original content. Equally important is ensuring you’re not infringing on others’ rights, such as using copyrighted content without permission.

Action step: Conduct a trademark search for your brand name and consider registering it if it’s available or discontinue using it if it belongs to someone else.

2. Terms of service and privacy policies

These documents are essential, even for small creators. They set expectations for your audience and protect you legally. For instance, a clear privacy policy is crucial if you collect any user data, even just email addresses for a mailing list.

Action step: Draft basic terms of service and a privacy policy, or consult a legal professional to create these documents.

3. Set up a business entity

Establishing a proper business structure, like an LLC, can provide personal asset protection. This separation between personal and business assets can be crucial in the event of legal issues.

Action step: Research the benefits of forming an LLC or other business entity for your content creation activities.

4. The cost-benefit analysis: prevention vs. reaction

Investing in legal protection early may seem costly, but it’s often far less expensive than dealing with legal issues reactively. For example, the cost of trademark registration is minimal compared to potential damages for trademark infringement.

Consider this: A business colleague of mine recently spent several thousand dollars to settle a copyright infringement claim. Had they simply been aware of copyright law and spent a small amount to license the image, they could have avoided the issue at a fraction of the cost.

Related: So Somebody Stole Your Content. Now What?

5. Starting small: three steps for immediate protection

Even with limited resources, you can take steps to protect your content business:

1. Educate yourself on basic copyright laws relevant to the type of content you create and use.
2. Use proper attribution and obtain necessary permissions for any third-party content you use.
3. Implement basic legal documents on your website or channel, such as a simple terms of use and privacy policy.

Legal protection isn’t just for big creators — it’s a fundamental aspect of running a content-based business, regardless of size. By addressing these key areas early, you’re not only protecting your current work but also laying a solid foundation for future growth.

A sound legal strategy is about recognizing potential risks and taking proactive steps to protect your creative endeavors. Don’t wait until you face a legal challenge to start thinking about these issues.

Your content, your brand and your peace of mind deserve protection from day one.

Professional services firms make up a majority of the small business universe in the U.S. Most never cross the seven-figure revenue mark or even see it on the radar. They tend to be dominated by a few loyal clients. Hard-driving founders work 24/7 to get projects done and, if a client asks, they will sell the few minutes they have free every week to breathe. They depend so heavily on the owner’s time and talents and are notoriously hard to scale and monetize.

My partner and I ultimately scaled our professional services firm to nearly eight figures when we finally figured out that larger opportunities tended to go to larger businesses. We were good at selling and delivering for our clients. But with just the two of us playing all roles in our business, we were overburdened — and clients knew it. They saw us juggling multiple tasks and companies and got used to receiving emails at all hours of the night when we finally had free time to answer their questions. They often gave additional consulting engagements to other firms because of our limited bandwidth. We lost millions of dollars in opportunities when we thought small.

We broke through the million-dollar mark and kept right on going when we started thinking like a larger firm. We talked a bigger game at the beginning and took on debt to hire consultants and salespeople to get there. It was nerve-wracking, and there were some sleepless nights. But pretty quickly we started to see more opportunities in the pipeline, current clients expanding their scope of services with us and competitive opportunities we had never been included in before.

Here are three ironclad rules that drove our success:

Related: 4 Tips for Building a Million-Dollar Business

1. Start selling your firm, stop selling yourself

Unless you can charge tens of thousands an hour or clone yourself a few times over, you will never consistently make that much money selling your personal skills. You need people — or at least the illusion of more people (until you get bodies in place) to get real revenues. Our approach? We figured out what clients liked about us most and we rewrote our sales materials to include words like “our team” and “our approach.” Behind the scenes, we created a training guide and videos for new employees to learn our hows (and our whys) and then be able to sell them.

2. Resist the temptation to save salary expenses by hiring less experienced consultants

Our success ultimately was tied to our willingness to hire well ahead of the curve and put the expert team in place that our new sales materials promised. A big rookie mistake we didn’t make was to hire part-time or less experienced people than the business needed. Instead, we hired experienced heavy hitters who were bored in corporate America and looking for a new challenge.

We couldn’t quite meet their sky-high salaries, but we made up for it with flexibility and independence. In a few cases, we granted equity in exchange for work quality, tenure and sales. But we took most of the hit personally by staying at far reduced salaries for almost two years. It was a slog, but it allowed us to make a few key hires who were critical to driving the business and helping us hire more superstars.

Related: How I Built A Million-Dollar Business In 12 Months

3. Don’t skimp on sales

We fancied ourselves our firm’s best salespeople. Unfortunately, we also were the chief recruiter, head editor, lead administrative assistant and accountant. We just didn’t have enough time in the day to sell. But if you aren’t selling at a services firm, you’re dead in the water. Our only other option was to invest (heavily) in the sales function.

We hired someone to uncover and tee up opportunities, giving us more time to focus on closing bigger deals. Keep salespeople’s compensation risk-based. We used a highly motivating tiered compensation plan and built in hefty bonuses for achieving sky-high numbers. Our first salesperson doubled earnings year over year when he finally crossed the $2 million threshold. We made money, he was a happy employee, and my partner and I forgot (almost) about giving up several months’ salary to bring him in.

These days, it might make more sense to invest in a marketing platform like Hubspot, Salesforce or a myriad of other new competitors to do the heavy lifting. By the time we sold our firm, nearly 50% of new opportunities for our $100,000-plus consulting agreements came through these tools. Be sure to save some money in the budgets for marketing platform consultants. It took us a while to tweak our system and stop nearly two-thirds of our emails from getting snagged by spam filters.

Related: How to Scale Your Small Business in 8 Steps

Generally, the larger your team and the more it can run without you, the higher your revenues and profitability. Put your time and talents into increasing your company’s valuation — not tying yourself to it — and you’ll be rewarded with milestone sales and a payout that more than makes up for any sacrifices you make along the way.

Over the past few months, private sector CEOs like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and xAI’s Elon Musk have called for open-source AI models that allow everyone to see the code the AI is based on, and build on top of it for free.

Now the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) is encouraging open-source AI, too.

In a Tuesday report, the NTIA mapped out how the government can encourage AI innovation while limiting risks, like deepfake impersonations of people’s voices and likenesses. The report emphasized openness in AI development instead of restrictions.

“The openness of the largest and most powerful AI systems will affect competition, innovation and risks in these revolutionary tools,” said Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information and NTIA Administrator Alan Davidson.

^{The White House. Photo: SAMUEL CORUM/AFP via Getty Images}

The NTIA advised that the U.S. government collect evidence by conducting research into the safety of AI models. It also recommended that the government continually evaluate evidence and take action if needed.

The NTIA concluded that the government should monitor the state of AI, not restrict it. The focus should be on innovation and international collaboration on open AI models, per the report.

Related: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Calls Mark Zuckerberg’s Vision for the Future of AI a ‘Home Run Idea’

Herb Hogue, CTO of cybersecurity company Myriad360, told Entrepreneur that NTIA’s recommended approach “seems to be a prudent middle ground.”

“This move is a calculated decision,” Hogue said. “It maintains the momentum of innovation while keeping a watchful eye on the potential need for future oversight.”

Open-source AI models benefit from being transparent: Hogue explained that these models show the code they’re built on, which makes it easier to understand the technology and build public trust.

Keeping AI models open eases concerns around data privacy and biased training data, he said.

Related: AI Is Changing How Businesses Recruit for Open Roles — and How Candidates Are Gaming the System

Zuckerberg published a letter about the benefits of open-source AI development last week.

“There is an ongoing debate about the safety of open source AI models, and my view is that open source AI will be safer than the alternatives,” he wrote. “I think governments will conclude it’s in their interest to support open source because it will make the world more prosperous and safer.”