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The Sim Cafe~
The Sim Cafe~
From Legal Expert to Entrepreneurial Leader: Tricia Meyer's Story of Innovation and Intellectual Property
Discover the incredible journey of Tricia Meyer, a legal virtuoso turned entrepreneurial force, as we sit down at the Sim Cafe for a conversation that's as enlightening as it is inspiring. Tricia, the mastermind behind Meyer Law and The Clever Baby, opens up about her leap from corporate law to the helm of her own ventures, offering a wealth of knowledge for anyone looking to navigate the business world with legal finesse. From the birth of her unique baby food dispenser and teether, Jet, to the complexities of corporate structuring and privacy laws, Tricia's tale is a testament to the power of innovation meeting expertise.
As we unravel the threads of Tricia's professional tapestry, we probe into the day-to-day dance of an entrepreneur balancing a bustling family life with the demands of leading multiple businesses. Her insights into intellectual property protection and the strategic maneuvers behind product refinement provide a roadmap for safeguarding your brainchild in the competitive marketplace. Whether you're a startup enthusiast or a product innovator, our discussion with Tricia Meyer is a goldmine of practical wisdom and encouragement to push the boundaries of what's possible in the entrepreneurial landscape.
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The views and opinions expressed in this program are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or positions of anyone at Innovative Sim Solutions or our sponsors. This week's podcast is sponsored by Innovative Sim Solutions. Are you interested in the journey of simulation accreditation? Do you plan to design a new simulation center or expand your existing center? What about taking your program to the next level? Learn from Deb Tauber from Innovative Sim Solutions. A call to support you in all your simulation needs. With years of experience, deb can coach your team to make your simulation dreams become reality. Learn more at www. innovativesimsolutions. com or just reach out to Deb Contact today. Welcome to The Sim Cafe, a podcast produced by the team at Innovative Sim Solutions, edited by Shelly Houser. Join our host, Deb Tauber, and co-host Jerrod Jeffries as they sit down with subject matter experts from across the globe to reimagine clinical education and the use of simulation. So pour yourself a cup of relaxation, sit back, tune in and learn something new from The Sim Cafe.
Deb Tauber:Welcome to another episode of The Sim Cafe. So today, Jerrod and I are truly grateful to have Trisha Meyer, with Meyer Legal, as our guest today. Welcome Trisha , and thank you for your time and all the things that you've done. Why don't you tell our listeners this episode is going to be very unique, as we've never interviewed an attorney in the past, so we'll get and an entrepreneur. So we'll get some different thoughts from a thought leader. So thank you so much for joining us.
Trisha Meyer:Thank you so much for having me. I'm super excited to be here today and to tell you all about Meyer Law and the Clever Baby. So I guess I'll kick it off and tell you a little bit about Meyer Law. So I started that 14 years ago out of really frustration with my in-house job. I just knew that that wasn't the path that I wanted to stand forever and knew that I wanted to start my own firm and thought that I had some really good experience under my belt working at Discover and HSBC and then an IT company, an international IT company and so I started Meyer Law while I was working full time for this other company for a period of time and built up the practice started in Chicago, expanded to Denver, Los Angeles and then Traverse City, and we help companies of all different sizes, from little itty-bitty startups all the way up to large corporations.
Trisha Meyer:We help with six main areas corporate what type of entity to set up and getting founders agreements in place and all that kind of stuff doing stock grants and all of those types of things. And then we help with employment and hiring. So, as you're building your team and scaling and growing, you know, making sure that you have the proper agreements and protections in place. We also help with general contracts. There's a lot of contracts that you need when you are starting and growing a business and making sure that you have the proper agreements in place, structured the right way, with the correct protections, and things of that nature. We also help companies when they are fundraising and engaging in M&A activity and then also privacy laws, which are just really ever changing nowadays across the entire world. So all of those things keep us very busy on the Meyer Law side of things.
Jerrod Jeffries:Wow, being mergers and acquisitions for some who aren't familiar, but it sounds like also there's a lot of synergies. Probably in your legal side and I don't want to say previous life, because of course you're still practicing and crushing it, but from the legal side that could actually play into and have synergies with the Clever Baby. Is that correct?
Trisha Meyer:That is correct. And actually, if it wasn't for my experience with the law firm and then mentoring it, incubators and accelerators across the United States, I don't think we would have known where to go to get the Clever Baby started. So just to give you a little background about the Clever Baby my husband and I were feeding our sixth baby and we had an idea to feed him. He was, he was teething, he was in a lot of pain, so we'd given him some Tylenol and the dispenser was sitting next to his baby food purees. And so we had an idea to fill the dispenser with baby food and start feeding him that way, and he immediately stopped crying, got the biggest smile on his face and was so happy. I'll never forget it. And from there, that is how the idea of our first product was born.
Trisha Meyer:It's called jet. It is the first of its kind dispenser and teether all in one. The teether pops off of the dispenser, and the dispenser can be used with either baby food or medicine. There are markings in both teaspoons and milliliters to make sure that there is dosage accuracy when you're talking about medicine, and you can also track how much your baby's eating. And then the teether is the perfect shape for baby to get relief to those back teeth and also grasp. And if I wasn't mentoring at these incubators and accelerators across the US, we just wouldn't have known where to even get started and where we did get started was M Hub in Chicago.
Trisha Meyer:I don't know if you've ever heard of M Hub yes, I have. Okay, so it's basically an accelerator, or an incubator, rather, for hard products, and so I reached out to somebody over there and told them what we were trying to do. They hooked me up with the person there that helped us really start designing jet, and so from there, that's how it all started.
Jerrod Jeffries:And I love that, because this is also, it seems like, obviously a problem you are facing yourself and I hear correctly it was the sixth baby.
Trisha Meyer:That's right. Yeah, the sixth baby.
Jerrod Jeffries:Maybe you wish you would have found this out for the first one, but like the number, as they say.
Trisha Meyer:Right, exactly, exactly. I was joking with my husband that maybe we need to have a seven so we could actually test the product out on our own child. But no, we are golden with six. That is true.
Deb Tauber:Trisha, you came up with the idea six years ago Because your youngest one is six now, so it took a while for it to take off For listeners who are trying to do something and thinking. I think we talked a little bit earlier in the episode about how hard it really is to start a business.
Trisha Meyer:And it's really difficult. It's difficult to get traction and you know we had the idea in 2018, that is when we had the actual idea and immediately before we started talking with anyone, I wanted to get that entity established because I didn't want to have to worry about assigning things over later. You know, that's the lawyer mentality. We immediately set up that entity before we had those discussions, and went into the design phase and went through a multitude of designs and prototypes before we actually landed on the final one. And then Covid struck. And then, all of a sudden, I became a teacher to my six kids when they were home schools for almost two years. So doing that in addition to trying to keep, you know, the cover, baby moving plus keeping the wheels on the bus with the law firm was a lot going on. And then, frankly, we had a hard time finding a manufacturer that would work with a startup. We found a ton that you know didn't work with startups or didn't work with baby product companies or you know things of that nature. So one day I just happened to be at lunch and was talking to an IP lawyer that I knew and told him that I was trying to find a manufacturer to manufacture this baby product that we have designed and ready to go, and we couldn't find a manufacturer. And it just so happened that his dad worked for years at a plastics company in Chicago, so he made an introduction for me and from there the rest is history. We found a perfect partner who's been able to help us along the way. He's been amazing. We find the design a little bit more even before we went through our first production run.
Trisha Meyer:So I think it's challenging sometimes finding the right people, you know, and one other thing I'll say is this is we thought we found the right person before we were introduced to the manufacturer that we ended up using, somebody who had had massive success with baby products.
Trisha Meyer:They had an international presence, could really take us under their wing and, like, really painted this amazing picture for us, but at the end of the day, we were waiting on them so long it was like nine months in total, from beginning to end, that we were waiting on them. You know, kind of they were not necessarily stringing us along, because I do think that they had really good intentions I just feel like they didn't have the bandwidth to truly help us, and so then, finally, it got to the point where I'm like okay, we got to move on like they are not in the time to us that we need to get this thing moving, and so that's when, then, I started looking elsewhere, and I mean, I mean, I reached out to hundreds of companies before we found this introduction to the one Backyard.
Trisha Meyer:Yeah right, exactly so it takes a long time to find the right partners and you're not going to get anywhere if you don't have the right partners.
Jerrod Jeffries:Yeah, so well in I mean so is it also made in the US?
Trisha Meyer:It is made in the US, yeah.
Jerrod Jeffries:Yeah, but then a few other questions, though is like you're touching upon it. So finding the right partners can be very challenging, and of course, maybe it comes with volume or slew of different variables. But what were some of the other challenges or what were some of the aspects that you might be like? Well, if I do this over again, I would be watching out for that, or any pieces of advice for others.
Trisha Meyer:Yeah, I think that. I think it's very different how you grow a business today than you would have grown a business even five, six years ago. I think social media has changed so much. I think you can waste a lot of money going down the social media ads path. I think that our play has always been I'm not interested in the slow slog right like.
Trisha Meyer:I want to get this product out there, and so I think knowing more about how mass retail worked earlier on, I think could have been beneficial, knowing the importance of for a product company in particular who wants to get into retail, working with brokers and you know representatives to help you open those doors. It's very interesting though, I've got to say, because with my law I've opened thousands of doors, we've helped thousands of companies, I've got thousands of amazing relationships that I've built over the years, but getting in front of buyers is a totally different experience. It's nearly impossible. I mean I made a little bit of headway. We were part of targets forward founders accelerator program, which was an amazing opportunity that I'm so grateful for, and then we managed to get a couple meetings with a couple other large mass and specialty retailers. But now that we have started discussions with brokers. Those conversations have really opened up to a whole new level, and so I wish I would have known that early on, because I feel like we did waste some time.
Deb Tauber:Tricia, you've also received several prestigious awards. Do you want to tell our listeners about them?
Trisha Meyer:Oh, thank you so much. Yeah, I have been honored to receive over 30 awards throughout the lifetime of my career. I've been named on the Forbes Next 1000. This year I've been named in the Best Lawyers of America, the 2024 edition, which is really great. And then, as I mentioned, we were accepted out of over 5,000 companies that applied to Target's Forward Founders Accelerator Program. So those are a few that I'm really proud of, and it's the Forbes one, I'll say, because that kind of sets me apart. I got that one for being the founder of Meyer Law and I feel like oftentimes, as a service provider, I'm kind of shoved into the service provider bucket, not necessarily the entrepreneur bucket, but I am an entrepreneur at my core, at my heart. You know it's who I am, and so with that award I do feel like that kind of recognized me as an entrepreneur as well as a lawyer, and so that one is particularly special. Congratulations on that, thanks.
Jerrod Jeffries:And so how are you able to one juggle it into? Is there everything that's burning, that's when it's your attention, or do you have a good team on both sides?
Trisha Meyer:Yeah, that is a great question. I think every day is a new day, right? Some days can be really challenging, especially with all these sicknesses going around. You know when my kids are getting sick, passing it around to one another, it is just the day is thrown for a loop. But I'm you know, I'm used to that, I know. So you know you just take it in stride and you know tomorrow's going to be another day.
Trisha Meyer:But generally I rely on my calendar. I block times for when I'm going to be working on Meyer Law stuff, I block time for when I'm working on Clever Baby stuff, and then I obviously block time for all of my children's things that they you know there's sports activities and other you know activities that they have. So I try to stay true to my calendar. And then, as, apart from that, it's my team really. I mean, I really have a dream team that I'm working with on the Meyer Law side. They are amazing.
Trisha Meyer:They just really understand our core values and the way in which we are different and work with clients in a different way, and our transparency and our passion for really wanting to push the ball forward for our clients and help them be successful. So I think that having them by my side has been just. I couldn't do it without them. And then, on the Clever Baby side, my Meyer Law team partially a part of my team does support me on the Clever Baby side as well. And then we're also building out some more team members on that side, as we need more kind of bandwidth. So I think it really comes down to managing my calendar and building a really solid team to be able to push things forward.
Jerrod Jeffries:Yeah, and speaking of a solid team and don't let me twist your words, so I'm just asking for clarification. Here is when you said you're working with a current partner who's developing the hardware piece of the dispenser. You said that they actually, you know, changing the design. So was that some sort of a prototype or how did, because I guess they were part of your team now too, I mean having a reliable partner such as that. So were you kind of simulating what would be best for that, or prototyping, or can you walk us through a little of that piece?
Trisha Meyer:Sure, what we did with that was the jet wasn't fitting as snug as we wanted it to on the dispenser. The tether wasn't fitting as snug, so we just had him make some refinements in the design process before we went for a full production run, just to make sure that when the jet was in use that it wasn't like spinning on the dispenser. We wanted to make sure that it was fitting properly. So it just took a little bit of trial and error and then printing some 3d versions and some samples to make sure that it was going to land correctly when we went for the full production run and Trish.
Deb Tauber:what was the IP process like? Getting your product out?
Trisha Meyer:Yeah. So I think it's important from an IP standpoint to look at your trademarks that you can apply for, just so that you have brand protection, because I think that as you build your brand, you definitely want to protect it. It gives you a competitive advantage and you know your company can be worth more for it in the long run. And then on the actual product itself, Jet. We did get a patent on Jet, a utility patent we have in the United States and then it's pending in the EU UK, Canada and Australia. We also have a design patent pending in the United States.
Trisha Meyer:So the process was well. First and foremost, when you're launching a new product, you want to make sure that you're not stepping on anyone else's toes, so you need to do a search in the patent database to make sure that you're not developing a product and going to market with a product that somebody has a patent on. So that was really the first step that we did. Once we found out, we were in the clear. Then we had a firm help us prepare the patent application. We personally don't work on patents. We work on trademarks. So my team worked on our trademarks, but not the patent. I did work with a third party firm for that. So he helped us file for the utility patent and the design patent and then also the international patents. He gave me a deal on the pricing because I'm a lawyer, so that was helpful.
Trisha Meyer:But it is expensive, of course, and I think what you also need to think about is not only is it expensive to obtain the patents, but it's also expensive to enforce the patents.
Trisha Meyer:So if somebody was going to come to market with a product that's just like Jet, you know we need to be there to be able to enforce that against them and prove that we have the patent and all of that.
Trisha Meyer:So it can be a costly endeavor, but I think when you're dealing with a product, if you find you are in the clear, I would highly recommend getting a patent on it because I think that it gives you unmatched protection. Now that we have the utility patent, we can enter into really cool strategic partnerships, Like I would love to do one with like a Hello Kitty and do a little Hello Kitty teeter on the dispenser or a baby shark Like that would be really cool. Or entering into strategic partnerships with companion products, like a baby medicine company, for instance, or a baby food company. I think it gives you the liberties to be able to do that, and I just think protecting your intellectual property is so important. It's your most valuable asset as your company, and so taking measures and steps to do so is something that I think every business owner should be looking at.
Deb Tauber:Yeah, you are my attorney, so that's how I know that you do your due diligence in your work and I thank you for your team.
Trisha Meyer:Yeah, thank you, a
Jerrod Jeffries:Trisha. So, going through all this, has there been inspiration from other outlets books, movies, articles or or anybody in any individual?
Trisha Meyer:There's definitely inspiration. There's definitely like competitive products, companies out there that I definitely aspire to be one day. There definitely leafs and bounds ahead of us, but I can definitely see us getting there at some point in time. So, yeah, I would say yes. And then I would also say that I've talked to a lot of people over my life. I've met a lot of people and I'm always asking folks for guidance and advice and tips, and I'm not always going to necessarily take the guidance and the tips, but it's always good to hear perspective and to kind of put it into, you know, in a perspective from my point of view and what I'm dealing with, and see if it resonates with whatever I'm dealing with at a particular time.
Jerrod Jeffries:Certainly.
Deb Tauber:What is the time commitment to founders in your entrepreneurial leadership role and how do you help?
Trisha Meyer:So, while my team is fully committed to supporting entrepreneurs from coast to coast of all different sizes, what I'm doing now with the firm is more kind of high level strategy, growth and marketing and content creation. That's really what I'm focusing on these days and then making sure that my team has the support and the tools necessary to be able to help our clients in a very efficient manner and be very responsive and thoughtful with those relationships.
Deb Tauber:And are you still working with the women in business for DePaul?
Trisha Meyer:I'm not working with them anymore. That was an amazing opportunity that I was involved with for a few years, but it just my bandwidth has gotten so tight with the clever baby now as well that I've had to kind of say no to certain commitments, which is always a hard thing to do.
Jerrod Jeffries:Well, and the power of saying no. Sometimes you feel a little bad at first, but you realize that you get that much more. I don't want to say time back. You just get to reallocate that time to something that's more pressing. Yeah, I agree.
Trisha Meyer:Yeah, I agree.
Deb Tauber:Yeah, thank you so much. Now. Do you have any final thoughts that you'd like to leave our listeners with? Anything that you want to leave our listeners with?
Trisha Meyer:Yeah, I mean, I guess two fold. First, on the legal side of things, make sure that you've got a good legal partner in your corner who you can rely on, who can help guide you. Things will come up as you're running a business and you need to make sure that you have somebody to turn to, who you can trust, who's not going fail gow you and really has your best interests at heart. So I would say that, from contracts to corporate restructuring, to hiring, to protecting your brand with trademarks, to making sure you're complying with privacy laws, there is usually always something that needs to be done from a legal standpoint and you don't want to set yourself up for failure or for costly mistakes down the line. So making sure you have somebody that's aligned with you, who you can turn to and help you in those situations, is key.
Trisha Meyer:The business side of things I would say don't stand in your own way. I see people stand in their own way all the time, whether it be excuses. They can't do X, y or Z. They don't have the money, they don't have the connections, they don't have whatever it is. You're standing in your own way. There's always a way. Where there's a will, there's a way. You know. I mean, if you really truly want to do something, then I say, take the steps to just make it happen. And you're going to have good days, you're going to have bad days, you're going to have hard days, but it's all part of the process and for me it's definitely the right path. I wouldn't change it for anything. My life is crazy busy, yes, but I love what I do every day. I love what I do on the law firm side and I love that we're building this baby product company and obviously love spending time with my family, my big family. So just make the life you want and don't stand in your own way.
Jerrod Jeffries:I think those would be my fun, thank you, and you really put it in perspective when you're juggling a law firm and business and six kids. So anybody's excuse if I don't have the time. It's a little bit tossed up the window there.
Deb Tauber:Yeah, you got it. Yeah, that's for sure. Now, do any of your kids have entrepreneurial dreams?
Trisha Meyer:I do actually my four girls. I'll say that they want to be lawyers. My oldest one is torn between a lawyer and an entrepreneur. My boys both say that they want to be entrepreneurs and have their own business, although they're not quite sure of what type of business yet. But yeah, they all do. For sure It'll be interesting to see where it all goes. It's really it's amazing.
Deb Tauber:Well, thank you so much for your time and we appreciate your insights for our listeners about legal things that they need to keep in mind when they're either starting a business or selling a product.
Trisha Meyer:Yes, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it. I hope that you and your listeners have found this to be really helpful.
Deb Tauber:Thank you, Thank you With that happy simulating.
Disclaimer/ innovative Sim Solutions Ad/ intro:Thanks to Innovative Sim Solutions for sponsoring this week's podcast. Innovative Sim Solutions will make your plans for your next Sim Center a reality. Contact Deb Tauber and her team today. Thanks for joining us here at The Sim Cafe. We hope you enjoyed. Visit us at www. innovativesimsolutions. com. and be sure to hit that like and subscribe button so you never miss an episode. Innovative Sim Solutions is your one stop shop for your simulation needs, a turnkey solution.
