A trademark can become one of the most valuable assets a business owns. It may represent reputation, customer trust, market recognition. But registration is not the end of the process. To keep it active, the owner must meet maintenance deadlines, continue using the mark properly, and ensure the official record reflects the real business.

In this episode, we explain how often trademarks must be renewed, why the answer depends on the jurisdiction, and which deadlines owners often miss.

In the United States, federal trademark registrations generally follow a ten-year renewal cycle. However, there is a critical maintenance filing due between the fifth and sixth anniversaries of registration. This filing confirms that the mark is still being used for the goods or services listed in the registration.

A business cannot simply circle the tenth anniversary on a calendar and ignore everything in between. Missing the fifth-to-sixth-year filing can cause the registration to be canceled before the first renewal deadline arrives.

Between the ninth and tenth anniversaries, the owner generally files a combined Section Eight and Section Nine submission. The Section Eight portion confirms continued use, while the Section Nine portion renews the registration for another ten-year term. After that, the process repeats every ten years.

We also examine international schedules. The European Union, Canada, Australia, and registrations managed through the Madrid System generally use ten-year renewal periods. Even when the cycle is similar, filing windows, fees, evidence requirements, and grace periods can differ.

One important correction for anyone relying on older articles: Canadian trademark renewals are now generally handled in ten-year periods, not fifteen-year periods. Outdated information can create expensive planning mistakes for global portfolios.

This episode explains why renewal should be treated as a brand audit rather than a routine payment. Before filing, the owner should confirm the legal owner, review the listed goods and services, collect current evidence of use, verify licensing relationships, and identify products or services that are no longer sold.

We discuss common hazards, including filing under the wrong business entity, claiming use for discontinued goods, relying too heavily on grace periods, paying misleading private notices, and overlooking related international registrations.

A trademark can potentially remain protected indefinitely. A registration may continue through repeated renewal periods as long as the owner meets the legal requirements and the mark keeps functioning as a source identifier.

The episode covers a practical maintenance process. Start with the official registration date. Record every filing window and grace period. Assign responsibility to a specific person or team. Save prior submissions and specimens. Review ownership after mergers, conversions, or acquisitions. Build reminders early enough to solve problems before the deadline becomes an emergency.

For starup founders and small business owners, this matters because a missed renewal can affect far more than a certificate. It can complicate licensing, fundraising, franchising, enforcement, due diligence, acquisitions, and expansion. A lapse may also create opportunities for competitors and increase the cost of rebuilding protection.

The central takeaway is simple: in many major jurisdictions, trademarks generally renew every ten years, but U.S. owners must also remember the filing between years five and six.

A strong brand deserves more than a sticky note and good intentions. It deserves a reliable maintenance system.

Listen to learn how trademark renewal works, which deadlines matter most, and how to keep a valuable brand from becoming an avoidable legal problem.

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

In this episode of The Inventive Journey, Devin Miller interviews Sergey Korolev about a founder path that refuses to stay in one lane. Sergey’s story begins with robotics engineering at Bauman Technical University in Moscow, includes competitive water polo, moves into enterprise automation, and then grows into Just Food, a meal kit and delivery business that reached roughly $10 million in annual revenue over about six years.

Just Food was not a cute side project with a logo and three inspirational quotes taped to a wall. It was a real operating business with logistics, customer expectations, influencer marketing, engineering demands, and the daily joy of discovering that food delivery is simple only when someone else is doing it. Sergey and his team grew the company in Russia’s health and fitness market, learning how to build systems, manage pressure, and turn a real customer need into a scaling company.

Then the environment changed. Sergey explains how geopolitical constraints made it difficult to build the kind of global company he wanted from Russia. He eventually moved to Portugal and stepped away from running the food tech company. That transition forced a bigger founder question: after building one successful company, what comes next?

Sergey did not want to simply recreate the same model in a different wrapper. He wanted a company that could be global from the beginning, a category with meaningful technical depth, and an engineering partner who could bring serious domain expertise. That search led him into mobile application security and to the creation of Oversecured.

Oversecured helps enterprises find vulnerabilities in mobile applications. The company focuses on a problem that is becoming harder for businesses to ignore. Mobile apps are not just tiny brand brochures anymore. They handle authentication, payments, private data, location, workflows, and connections to backend systems. When mobile security is treated as an afterthought, the risks can become very real, very fast, and very unpleasant for everyone except the attacker.

In the conversation, Sergey also shares one of his toughest founder lessons: underestimating emotions in negotiations. Founders often want to believe that business conflict is rational because there are contracts, spreadsheets, and people using phrases like “alignment.” But negotiations are full of pride, fear, trust, control, timing, and incentives. Ignoring the emotional side can turn a business disagreement into an expensive lesson with legal paperwork attached.

Sergey’s advice to founders is memorable: act more and think less. The point is not to be careless. The point is to stop mistaking private overthinking for progress. Startups learn by testing, selling, shipping, listening, and adapting. A founder who takes action creates feedback. A founder who only plans creates prettier uncertainty.

This episode is especially useful for startup founders and small business owners thinking about pivots, market constraints, cofounder selection, enterprise sales, or how to build after a previous chapter ends. Sergey’s journey shows that a pivot is not automatically a failure. Sometimes it is the most honest response to what the market, the world, and your own ambition are telling you.

Listen for a conversation about reinvention, global company-building, cybersecurity, zero-day vulnerabilities, negotiation mistakes, and why the founder path often looks obvious only after you have already survived it.

You will also hear how Sergey approached the zero-to-one stage differently the second time around. His criteria were clearer: build with the right technical partner, avoid regional limitations, and choose a market where deep expertise could become a durable advantage. That is useful perspective for any founder who has outgrown one chapter but has not yet named the next one.

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

In this Inventive Journey episode, Devin Miller talks with Justin Roopnarine about a career path that moved from electrical engineering to software, from the Air Force to finance, and eventually into fund management. It is the kind of founder journey that proves entrepreneurship rarely follows a clean straight line. Sometimes the useful path looks more like a wiring diagram, a flight plan, and an investment thesis walking into the same room.

Justin’s story gives founders a practical look at how different disciplines can compound. Engineering taught him how to break problems apart, study systems, and solve for constraints. The Air Force added structure, responsibility, mission focus, and the ability to operate under pressure. Finance added a respect for uncertainty, risk, and the reality that a smart thesis still needs disciplined execution.

One of the biggest lessons from the conversation is that founders need to make ideas concrete. It is not enough to have a brilliant concept living rent-free inside your head. Your team cannot execute what they cannot understand. Your customers cannot buy what they cannot explain. Your investors cannot support a thesis that sounds like it was assembled during a caffeine emergency. Clarity is not cosmetic. It is infrastructure.

This episode also explores why risk management matters for every startup, not just finance companies. Founders take risks constantly: hiring, product development, marketing, fundraising, partnerships, pricing, legal protection, and customer promises. The question is not whether risk exists. The question is whether the founder knows which risks are being taken, how large they are, and what the company will learn from them. Otherwise, “moving fast” can become a very expensive way to collect avoidable mistakes.

Justin’s fund-management perspective is especially useful for entrepreneurs because it reframes risk as something to design rather than fear. Smart operators do not avoid every uncertain move. They size the bet, define the hypothesis, track the outcome, and keep the business alive long enough to learn. That mindset applies whether you are managing capital, launching a product, or deciding whether one loud prospect’s feature request deserves three months of engineering time.

Devin and Justin also discuss the human side of building. Founder time is limited, attention is limited, and personal bandwidth is not a magical renewable resource that appears after the next funding round. Justin’s emphasis on protecting important personal commitments is a useful reminder that sustainability is not separate from performance. A founder who burns out does not become more strategic. They just become a bottleneck with calendar invites.

The conversation is especially helpful for startup founders, small business owners, emerging fund managers, technical founders, veteran entrepreneurs, and anyone trying to turn complex expertise into a business others can understand. It is also a strong reminder that your unusual background may be one of your biggest advantages. The point is not to have a perfect resume. The point is to build a skill stack that helps you see problems differently and act with discipline.

Listeners will walk away with practical lessons on simplifying complex ideas, documenting assumptions, managing downside risk, building clearer operating systems, and protecting the time needed to make better decisions. They will also hear why the founder’s job is not merely to be the smartest person in the room. It is to make the room smarter by communicating clearly enough that everyone can move in the same direction.

If you are building a startup and your strategy currently exists only in your head, this episode may gently tap you on the shoulder with a whiteboard marker. Write it down. Simplify it. Test it. Share it. Then build systems that let the business grow beyond founder translation.

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