A day in the life of an entrepreneur . . .

Today started like most others. After a restless night of tossing and turning, the thought of my pre-dawn venti Americano pulled me out of bed.

I arrived at the office and got the day rolling with a quick check of email before moving on to the prior day’s Website stats. I looked at the usual suspects — page views, keywords searched and referring sites, which is when the day took a bit of a turn.

In the referring sites I noticed a domain name (which will remain nameless for now) that appeared remarkably similar to our brand name (which is a registered trademark).

Curious to see where this link was coming from, I clicked on the referring URL. Much to my surprise, I landed on a Website for another PR firm and found text and services that appeared to be copied almost verbatim from our Website.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, they actually had an active link to our site from one of their services! No joke. I clicked on Press Release, and it took me to my own site.

Now when we published our service and pricing guide in early 2006, I figured that other PR firms would eventually consider evolving to a model of standardized services and set pricing, but I never thought anyone would be quite so blatant when doing it.

Now What?

Before contacting my attorneys, I pulled a few bits of background information from the Internet:

• Checked Go Daddy for domain name registration, which amazingly enough was public with the primary contact’s email address and phone number.
• Found the president of the company on LinkedIn (same contact as I found on Go Daddy).
  

From there I contacted my attorneys and drafted an email to the firm’s president. Hopefully the story ends there.

The Moral of the Story

• Be vigilant when monitoring and protecting your brand.
• Analyze your Website stats every day. You never know what you’ll find.
• For other entrepreneurs . . . be original. There’s nothing wrong with copying a successful business model, but at least put an original spin on it.
• Keep a good business attorney on retainer.