Your customer list. Your proprietary recipe. Your pricing model. Your manufacturing process. These aren't just valuable to your business — they may be legally protectable as trade secrets. But trade secret protection doesn't happen automatically. You have to actually take steps to keep them secret. And most businesses don't.

Under federal law (the Defend Trade Secrets Act) and state law, a trade secret is information that derives economic value from not being generally known and that you've taken reasonable measures to protect. That second part is where most businesses fall short. If you're not actively doing things to protect confidential information, you may not be able to claim it as a trade secret when someone walks out the door with it.

What does "reasonable measures" look like in practice? At a minimum: non-disclosure agreements with employees and contractors who have access to sensitive information, confidentiality provisions in your vendor and partner contracts, limited access to your most sensitive data — need-to-know only — and some kind of written policy that communicates to employees what's considered confidential.

I work with a lot of hospitality and food and beverage clients. For a restaurant group, the trade secrets might be recipes, supplier relationships, and cost structures. For a multi-unit retail business, it might be vendor terms and pricing matrices that took years to build. For a franchise concept, it's often the operations manual and training systems. All of that is vulnerable the moment a key employee leaves and there's nothing in writing about confidentiality.

The good news: protecting trade secrets doesn't require expensive technology or elaborate systems. It requires good contracts and good habits. If you haven't thought carefully about what information in your business is competitively sensitive and how you're protecting it, that's the conversation to start having now — not after someone's already taken it.