WE focus on Trademark Brothers founded by Mo Abbas and Dom Coles.

What do you think the judges liked about your idea?

Our approach is different from traditional legal services and our approach to acquiring clients and communicating with them is also very different. We think they saw our potential to disrupt the legal services industry.

The legal sector remains very traditional. Because of that it’s ripe for disruption in a lot of areas - with intellectual property and startup legal services a particularly neglected area at the moment.

I think the judges liked our fresh approach and the traction we could demonstrate for our idea so far.

What are the benefits of having a trademark, particularly for small businesses and start-ups?

For smaller businesses the big fear is always that after a few years of hard graft, years spent neglecting your friends, family, and hobbies to build something you’re passionate about, that something will come along and put you back to square one. The benefit of having a trade mark is that you make sure the elements of your brand are protected.

So, crucially for a startup, no bigger fish are going to come along and tell you that the name you now love doesn’t belong to you and you have to rebrand.

Having to do that can feel like going back to square one – we’ve known many companies who unfortunately found this out too late!

You were already trading before starting the programme. What were the challenges getting the business up and running?

The biggest challenge for us was validating our service and making sure people knew about it.

Being an entrepreneur represents a unique set of challenges.

The freedom you get does come with a lot of stress and the pressure of getting new clients often directly relates to whether you can pay your bills that month.

I think the biggest challenge is dealing with uncertainty but we’ve tried to deal with this by having a clear vision of what we want to do.

What have been your biggest successes so far?

We have managed the IP portfolio of a multi-million company that is stocked at a number of retailers, including Boots.

There have also been a couple of more personal successes. We received an expression of interest by a potential investor very early on which gave us a confidence boost, as did winning the StartUp Sussex competition.

Perhaps overall it’s being able to say we have a self-sufficient business that has been set up with no external financing and very little personal investment. We built it ourselves in a difficult industry selling a fairly complex service.

We now have a long client list, several part-time staff members, and we’re very proud of the great testimonials previous clients have given us.

What was the most important thing you learnt during StartUp Sussex?

We took some really important things away from the workshops with the Innovation Centre team; how to register for VAT, what to consider when handling our finances (other than the obvious, which is getting an accountant!), but most of all, we learnt that happiness and motivation is the key to building a successful and prosperous business.

What does the future hold?

We want to expand and grow.