If We Can, You Can

Author:

Ross Cooney

Business:

Rozmic Wireless

Published:

10/11/2008 11:14:00

I’ve made heaps of mistakes; I think I’ve probably made every mistake possible. One mistake cost me £180,000 so it was a pretty serious one.

We had an email management product which we spent two years developing and was quite an expensive process. We sold the intellectual property to a company based in Stoke on Trent. The sale price was quite high, but we ended up not being paid the final £180,000.

The real reason for it was because we didn’t spend enough time with advisors, and we didn’t secure the contract correctly. They paid us part of the money, refused to pay the final part, but at the same time claimed that they owned the intellectual property.

I think we would have sidestepped that problem if we’d taken on proper advisors at the time. I may have spent £20,000 on lawyers, tax advisors etc., but at the same time £20,000 is cheap when you’re about to lose £180,000.