# John Pryor

John Pryor writes about how businesses can identify and protect valuable knowledge, including trade secrets, customer insights, pricing methods, and workplace know-how.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/john-pryor/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-pryor-gb
- Based on 17 dated posts, latest 2026-04-14

## Summary

John Pryor is most useful for explaining how businesses can name and protect valuable knowledge.

- Best for: A trade-secret programme for small and mid-sized business leaders, especially legal, insurance, or knowledge-management providers.
- Not for: A cybersecurity vendor selling breach-detection tooling to CISOs through short-form video to security practitioners.
- Check first: Confirm whether they accept sponsored work and have recent audience data.

### Takeaways

- Most businesses already hold trade secrets but cannot name or defend them.
- Contact details are not secrets; buying behaviour and pricing history can be.
- When experienced people move, relationships travel and records do not.

## Main ideas

- **Losing competitive edge matters more than losing customer records**: Discussing the Jaguar Land Rover breach, John Pryor quotes Ciaran Martin, the former head of the National Cyber Security Centre, to argue that losing customer information is not the real damage for a company like JLR. They make the priority argument in their own words: the law tells companies to treat customer data as the number one concern, while securing a firm's operations and competitive edge matters more. Pryor attributes the mismatch to three factors: GDPR fines push compliance to the top of the agenda; security teams protect systems and personal data rather than business-critical knowledge; and many firms do not know which intangible assets they hold. What disappears quietly, in their account, includes trade secrets, data-derived insights such as segmentation and pricing models, AI and machine-learning models with their training data, strategic plans and acquisition targets, and supplier and partner intelligence.
- **Most businesses already hold trade secrets — they just cannot name or defend them**: Pryor's starting point is that ordinary small and mid-sized firms own trade secrets without calling them that. Because the assets are never written down or classified, the business cannot prove they exist—and proving their existence is the first step in defending them. They note the uncomfortable consequence: these secrets are lost, leaked or copied through neglect, not malice. Pryor also identifies a gap in the advice market: intellectual property law firms concentrate on patents and trademarks, cybersecurity firms on breaches, and internal teams are busy keeping the business running. That leaves nobody covering the day-to-day management of intangible assets. Their proposed fix is strategic rather than legal or technical: identify what is truly valuable and vulnerable, structure knowledge so it is usable and protectable, build incentives and processes that reduce leakage, and add resilience without bureaucracy.
- **Contact details are not secrets; buying behaviour and pricing history can be**: Pryor draws a careful boundary around customer data rather than treating the whole CRM as confidential. Email addresses and phone numbers are generally available, so they cannot be trade secrets. Non-public insight can qualify: customer preferences, buying behaviour, pricing history, internal notes, strategic relationship information and churn risk. They apply the three conditions information must meet under UK and international trade-secret law — it is not generally known or readily accessible, it has commercial value because it is secret, and reasonable steps have been taken to keep it confidential — then turn each into a question readers can answer about their own operations.
- **When experienced people move, relationships travel and records do not**: Reacting to news that twenty-one intellectual property lawyers moved from one firm to another, Pryor asks what goes and what stays. Trust and expertise are personal, so client relationships very likely follow the individuals; that is much of what such a move is about. Confidential material is different: lawyers retain a continuing duty of loyalty and confidentiality after leaving a firm, including not using or disclosing trade secrets learned in earlier work. The risk of inadvertent disclosure in new engagements is real. They apply the same test as elsewhere — CRM information is a trade secret only if it is not widely known, gives a competitive edge and has been protected by reasonable measures — and conclude that copying or transferring client records, notes or internal strategy documents in that situation would likely amount to misappropriation. The post also asks what sits in people's heads rather than on systems.
- **The fix Pryor argues for is plain-language diagnosis and self-checking, not legal or technical advice**: Across all four posts, Pryor treats the practical problem as one of management, not law or IT. They identify the missing support as strategic guidance on managing intangible assets in the real world—not legal advice or tech solutions—and typically list actions in short numbered or flagged points before closing with questions aimed at readers' own businesses. There is a tension in how they use the law: they criticise compliance-led thinking for crowding out competitive protection, yet rely on the statutory trade-secret test to decide what counts as protectable. They also argue that protection should not come at the cost of how the business works: confidentiality measures should not kill collaboration or agility.

## Work to read

- [Yes, I Have Trade Secrets, No I Can't Defend Them](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/john-pryor-gb_yes-i-have-trade-secrets-no-i-cant-defend-activity-7369621074419953665-NjzR)
- [CRM Data as a Trade Secret: Are You Protecting Your Most Valuable Asset?](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/john-pryor-gb_crm-data-as-a-trade-secret-are-you-protecting-activity-7381931449391894529-8puv)
- [The Real Issue is Not Customer Data, it's Keeping the Business Competitive](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/john-pryor-gb_the-real-issue-is-not-customer-data-its-activity-7371792186310283264-AwZC)
- [Twenty-one IP lawyers carry a lot of expertise to their new firm. What goes and what stays?](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/john-pryor-gb_sheppard-mullin-welcomes-21-attorney-intellectual-activity-7384141425463959553-NVBI)

## Partnerships

John Pryor's four available LinkedIn posts are analytical writing about trade secrets and intangible assets: how companies identify what is valuable, why personal-data rules overshadow that work, and how knowledge moves when people change firms. None is sponsored, promotes a product, names a partnership format, or sets out terms, deliverables, pricing, or a way to propose a collaboration. Brands would need to approach them directly rather than respond to a published offer. Ask whether they accept commercial work and request any sponsor policy, media kit, or rate card before costing a plan.

## Alternatives

- Eduard Meelhuysen: Choose Meelhuysen when the campaign’s first job is scope qualification rather than asset inventory — when an executive committee needs to establish whether the business falls under a mandatory regime and could prove readiness if tested. The two posts reviewed do exactly that for NIS2: they set out who is covered (essential and important entities across energy, healthcare, logistics, manufacturing and digital infrastructure), the size thresholds of 50 or more employees or €10M+ turnover or balance sheet total, and the extension of scope to critical suppliers and service providers in the value chain. They argue that the real risk is assuming you are out of scope, and that most companies have an awareness problem rather than a compliance problem. Each post closes with a self-assessment route, giving a legal, insurance or advisory sponsor whose offer is a readiness check or evidence pack a working tool to put in front of readers from the first post.
- Michael Abtar: Choose Abtar when the need is sector threat awareness rather than asset protection, and the audience is a security or risk function rather than the board. Abtar’s posts enumerate threats in detail. For pharmaceuticals: intellectual property theft of formulations and research data, ransomware, clinical trial data breaches, supply chain vulnerabilities, IoT and medical device risk, data-integrity compromise, employee training gaps, state-sponsored attacks and biomedical espionage. For financial services: advanced persistent threats, cryptocurrency risk, distributed denial of service, insider exploitation, mobile banking weaknesses, regulatory compliance, cloud risk, identity theft, misuse of machine learning, and supply chain attacks. Each entry pairs a threat with mitigations — access controls, encryption, audits, backups, vendor assessments and training — making the posts suited to an awareness campaign, training module or sector-risk explainer where breadth across named threats is the point.
- Duncan T.: Choose Duncan T. when the campaign is technical and the decision concerns cryptographic lifecycle management rather than business knowledge. The posts announce a dated industry change — the CAB Forum approving a reduction in the maximum lifespan of publicly trusted SSL/TLS certificates from 398 days to 47 days by 2029 — connect it to the move toward post-quantum cryptography by 2030, and draw the operational consequence: certificate discovery, inventory and lifecycle management have to be automated. The second post carries the same argument into an event, promoting a webinar on cryptographic visibility and control alongside an acquisition and an expanded product stack. For a certificate-management or PKI sponsor, that is the right shape: a regulatory change with a date, a practical consequence for the reader’s operations, and a path to a product conversation. It also shows how to carry a supply-side story into event promotion.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/