Protecting a Fitness or Wellness Business: A Practitioner's Guide to Format Protection, Instructor Agreements, Music Licensing, and Franchise Structures
By Casey Scott McKay ·
A working guide to acting for studios, format owners, trainers, wellness brands, and the platforms that distribute their content. It opens by reframing the client's usual question about format ownership into the six assets that are genuinely protectable. It then works through naming and clearance, the registration programme that is worth running, studio trade dress, instructor and trainer agreements, the music licensing failure that costs the sector most, certification schemes, and the choice between franchising, licensing, media, and equipment as a growth structure. It closes with three worked engagements and a first-hundred-days plan.
IP and Technology > Copyright | Guide | Published 14 August 2024 - Updated 18 May 2025 | Casey Scott McKay - marksy.us
Reframing the first conversation
Almost every engagement in this sector opens with the same question, and it is the wrong one. The client wants to know how to protect the format. The useful answer is that the format is a system and cannot be protected, and that six other things can be — the name, the premises, the materials, the recordings, the credential, and the equipment.
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