Why I Trademarked The Change Republic
When multiple clients independently tell you to trademark your company name, you start paying attention. Trademarking The Change Republic was not just a legal process. It became a commitment to the work itself.
My clients told me to do it. So I did.
Some months into building The Change Republic, several clients said the same thing: "You should trademark this."
I did not take it as a legal tip. I took it as a signal.
That what I was building meant something to them. That it was worth protecting. That it was real.
So I registered The Change Republic® as a trademark in Switzerland.
Not to put a symbol on a logo. But to honor the trust my clients place in me every time they invest their time, money, and energy into our work together.
A trademark is a legal document. But for me it was also a decision.
To stop treating this as something I am doing for now. And to commit to building something that lasts.
Has anyone ever believed in your work before you did?
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Why client signals matter more than founder confidence
Founders often wait for some internal sense of certainty before they commit to the bigger version of what they are building. The certainty rarely arrives on its own. What I have noticed is that the most useful signal usually comes from outside.
→ When several clients independently say the same thing, that is a pattern, not a coincidence.
→ When the thing they are pointing at involves you protecting your work (a trademark, an IP move, a structural decision), they are telling you something you are not yet ready to tell yourself.
→ The decision to commit to the bigger version of the business is rarely a thinking-it-through moment. It is a willingness-to-be-seen moment.
I have spent a lot of my career watching senior leaders, both as colleagues and as coaching clients, hold back on the bigger version of who they are. Sometimes from humility. Sometimes from fear. Sometimes from genuine uncertainty about whether the bigger version is the right one. The clients who break through that hesitation almost always do it because someone else saw them first and named what they were already doing.
That is what the trademark moment was for me. Not a legal step. A signal accepted.
If you want a practical lens on how to build the bigger version of your own work online, my free 42 LinkedIn Lessons That Actually Work distils three years of LinkedIn lessons I learned the hard way, including the ones about owning your work publicly without sounding like a brochure. Leave your email here to download it: https://www.thechangerepublic.com/free-resources
More about me and why I built The Change Republic here.
https://www.thechangerepublic.com/about