You built the platform. You hired the developers. But does your company own the code, and which technical innovations could deserve patent protection?

Patent and trademark attorney Devin Miller explores Miller IP Law’s approach to intellectual property for software integration, API, SaaS, and PaaS businesses.

Learn how to evaluate technical improvements, protect your platform’s brand, address contractor ownership, and spot licensing issues before they complicate growth.

In this Inventive Expert episode, Devin Miller sits down with Paige Arnof-Fenn to talk about a question many small business owners keep asking: is blogging still worth it?

The answer is yes, but not in the old “publish something because someone said SEO” way. Paige explains that blogging can still be a powerful tool for building trust, answering customer questions, and showing expertise, but only when it fits the business, the audience, and the founder’s ability to stay consistent.

For small business owners, that distinction matters. A blog can be a helpful resource. It can support sales conversations, improve search visibility, and give prospects a reason to believe you know what you are doing. But an abandoned blog can also make a business look inactive. Nobody wants a prospect to visit the website and wonder whether the company is still open or simply trapped in a very long brainstorming session.

Paige recommends starting with focus. Instead of trying to launch a blog, newsletter, YouTube channel, podcast, LinkedIn campaign, Instagram feed, and TikTok strategy all at once, businesses should identify where their audience already pays attention. For many B2B service businesses, LinkedIn may be the best starting point because it supports professional credibility, thought leadership, and useful conversations.

The episode also explores how founders can use guest posts, newsletters, podcasts, and interviews before committing to a full publishing schedule. This lets a business test topics, build authority, and find out what the audience actually values. It is a smarter path than starting a blog with heroic enthusiasm and then letting it sit untouched like a treadmill in January.

Paige and Devin also discuss practical content systems. An editorial calendar can help founders plan ahead around seasons, industry trends, customer questions, and recurring business themes. A running idea list can capture insights from sales calls, client conversations, objections, and common misunderstandings. Those real-world questions often make the best content because they come from actual buyers, not from a panic search for “things to post today.”

AI is another major topic in the conversation. Paige explains that AI can be useful for creating outlines, summarizing ideas, and repurposing content, but it should not replace strategy or judgment. AI can help founders move faster, but it still needs human review for accuracy, voice, compliance, originality, and brand risk. In other words, AI is a helpful assistant, not the person you leave alone with your entire reputation and a publish button.

The episode closes with an important warning about the myth that there is no such thing as bad PR. Paige pushes back on that idea. In today’s social media and AI-driven environment, going viral for the wrong reason can hurt a business. Negative attention can spread quickly, get clipped, summarized, shared, and attached to a brand long after the original moment has passed.

That makes brand trust more important than random reach. A strong marketing strategy is not about being everywhere. It is about being useful, consistent, professional, and memorable where it matters most.

This conversation is especially helpful for startup founders, consultants, professional service firms, and small business owners who want to build a smarter marketing presence without exhausting themselves across every platform. Paige brings practical experience, and Devin keeps the conversation focused on what business owners can actually use.

Listen to this episode for clear advice on blogging, LinkedIn, content calendars, AI, social media focus, and protecting brand trust while still showing up in the market.

To chat about this one-on-one, grab a free consult at strategymeeting.com

In this episode of Inventive Expert, Devin Miller sits down with Robert White for a practical, honest, and surprisingly funny conversation about why smart founders still lose companies they built—and what startup founders and small business owners can do to avoid joining that club.

Robert brings decades of experience founding and leading high-impact experiential education companies. His work has reached more than a million people, and his lessons come from both the wins and the painful moments that only business ownership can provide. In this conversation, he shares why founder confidence is powerful, but founder hubris can become expensive.

The episode opens with a key question: should founders promote their origin story? Robert explains that not every founder is a natural self-promoter. In fact, he describes himself as a serious introvert. Yet he also makes the case that people need to understand the human story behind a business. The trick is not to overshare. The trick is to share the parts of your story that connect to the purpose of the conversation, the customer’s need, and the company’s mission.

Devin and Robert also explore the difference between working in your business and working on your business. Working in the business is the daily doing: solving problems, handling people issues, serving customers, managing forms, making calls, and keeping the machine moving. Working on the business is the higher-level work: strategy, positioning, systems, culture, delegation, and long-term direction. The danger for many founders is that they become doing machines and forget to build the company that supports the doing.

Robert shares a powerful lesson from his own career. One of his companies grew to major revenue and profit, and he turned down a large acquisition offer. At the time, he believed he was protecting the people and the idea. Looking back, he sees that decision differently. He calls it hubris. The company still needed stronger operations, better leadership support, and a founder who recognized what he was good at—and what someone else could run better.

That honesty makes this episode especially useful. It is not a polished victory lap. It is a founder-to-founder conversation about what happens when success creates blind spots. Growth feels good, but growth can also hide weak systems, unclear roles, poor delegation, and leadership gaps. A founder can be brilliant and still become the bottleneck.

Devin adds an important counterpoint: founders should not delegate so much that they lose touch with the actual customer experience. Sometimes getting into the weeds reveals opportunities competitors miss. Devin shares an example from his own firm’s onboarding process and how Digital Devin helps explain client intake steps. That kind of founder involvement is not micromanagement when it creates better systems and a better client experience.

The episode lands on a balanced leadership lesson. Founders need to zoom in and zoom out. They need to know when to inspect the details and when to step back and think strategically. They need operators, systems, self-awareness, and space to reflect. They also need to keep learning, especially in thought-leadership businesses where old ideas can quietly become stale.

Listen to this episode if you are building a startup, leading a small business, scaling a service company, or trying to figure out how to grow without losing control of the thing you worked so hard to create. Robert White’s advice is direct, practical, and grounded in real experience. Devin Miller keeps the conversation focused on what founders can actually do next.

Smart founders can still lose companies. But with humility, structure, delegation, storytelling, and a disciplined habit of working on the business, you can build something stronger than founder adrenaline.

To chat about this one-on-one, grab a free consult at strategymeeting.com