TERMS & SUBSCRIPTION AGREEMENT

Talent Fuel — powered by Cochran Cochran & Yale

Effective date: August 31, 2026 

1. Who we are, and what this covers

Talent Fuel is a newsletter published by Cochran Cochran & Yale [LLC / LLP / Inc. — insert exact suffix] d/b/a Talent Fuel ("CCY," "we," or "us"), an executive search firm in Rochester, New York. Reach us any time at info@talentfueliq.com.

These terms cover everyone: free subscribers, paid subscribers, and anyone reading www.talentfueliq.com. By subscribing or reading, you agree to them. Sections 3 through 5 apply only if you pay us.

Subscribing does not make you a candidate. Talent Fuel is powered by CCY, but reading it does not put you in our recruiting database and will not cause a recruiter to contact you about a role. If you want that, tell us — it is your choice. Our privacy policy explains how we keep the two separate.

You need to be at least [16] to subscribe and at least 18 to pay us. We only accept subscribers in the United States.

2. The free subscription

You get whatever we choose to publish for free, however often we choose to publish it. We can change how often we send, change what we cover, put previously free material behind a paywall, or stop publishing entirely. You can unsubscribe any time using the link at the bottom of any email.

3. Paying: price and automatic renewal

A paid subscription costs [$X per month], plus tax if any applies. We currently offer monthly subscriptions only.

Your subscription renews automatically every month, and you will be charged the current price each time, until you cancel. You are authorizing that recurring charge when you subscribe.

PayPal handles our payments. When you subscribe, you set up a recurring payment through PayPal, and PayPal charges your chosen payment method on our behalf. We never see or store your full card number. PayPal gives us confirmation of payment, the name on your PayPal account, the email address linked to it, and a transaction ID. Your use of PayPal is also governed by PayPal’s own terms and privacy policy.

If a payment fails, PayPal may retry it on its own schedule. If it keeps failing, we may pause or end your subscription.

4. Cancelling and refunds

You can cancel any time, online, in about as many clicks as it took to subscribe. Use the "Manage subscription" link in the footer of any issue, or email info@talentfueliq.com with the subject "Cancel" and we will handle it within one business day.

You can also cancel the recurring payment from inside your own PayPal account. Either way works, and you do not need to do both — but tell us if you cancel through PayPal so we can close your subscription cleanly at our end.

Cancelling stops all future charges. You keep access through the end of the period you already paid for.

Refunds: email us within 30 days of any charge and we will refund it in full, no questions asked. We would rather give your money back than have you feel stuck.

5. If we change the price

We will email you at least 21 days before any price increase takes effect, and tell you the new price and how to cancel. You can cancel before it takes effect and never pay it.

If you are charged a higher price and did not want it, tell us within 14 days and we will cancel you and refund the unused part of that period. Price changes never apply to a period you have already paid for.

6. What you can do with what we write

Everything we publish is ours, and it is copyrighted whether it was free or paid.

You can: read it, print it, quote a short passage with credit and a link, and forward an issue to a colleague now and then.

Please do not: republish it, post it publicly, share it with a whole team or mailing list, share your account with someone else, scrape it with automated tools, or use it to train an AI system. If you do any of that, we may end your subscription without a refund.

Want to share it more widely, or reprint something for your organization? Just ask at info@talentfueliq.com. We are usually happy to say yes.

7. This is not professional advice

Talent Fuel is commentary about hiring, talent, and the labor market. It is not legal, employment-law, HR, tax, or financial advice, and it is not a recommendation about any specific hiring, compensation, or employment decision.

Employment decisions carry legal risk that depends on your jurisdiction, your workforce, and your facts. Nothing we write accounts for those, and general commentary is a poor substitute for counsel who knows your situation. Before acting on anything here — particularly anything touching hiring criteria, interviewing, compensation setting, classification, or termination — consult qualified employment counsel or your HR advisors.

Reading Talent Fuel does not create an advisory, consulting, or client relationship with CCY. Your decisions are your own.

8. No guarantees, and limited liability

We publish in good faith, but we cannot promise the content is accurate, complete, or current, that emails arrive on time, or that they land in your inbox instead of your spam folder. The newsletter is provided "as is," without warranties of any kind, to the fullest extent the law allows.

If something goes wrong, our total liability to you is capped at the greater of what you paid us in the past 12 months or $100. We are not liable for indirect or consequential losses — lost profits, lost data, hiring outcomes, and the like. Some states do not allow these limits, so they may not fully apply to you. Nothing here limits liability for fraud or anything else the law will not let us limit.

9. Your privacy

What we collect and how we use it is described in our privacy policy at [LINK]. While you are subscribed, we will send you the newsletter and, if you pay, receipts and billing notices. You cannot opt out of billing emails while you have an active paid subscription, but you can cancel any time.

10. Changes, ending things, and the legal basics

We may update these terms. If the change matters, we will email you at least 15 days before it takes effect. Continuing to subscribe after that means you accept the update.

We may end your subscription if you break these terms, if your payment fails, or if we stop publishing. If we end it without cause or shut down, we will refund the unused part of what you paid.

These terms are governed by New York law, and any dispute goes to the courts in Monroe County, New York. Nothing here takes away consumer protections your home state gives you. If any part of these terms turns out to be unenforceable, the rest still applies.

11. Contact

Cochran Cochran & Yale [suffix] d/b/a Talent Fuel — [STREET ADDRESS], Rochester, NY [ZIP] — info@talentfueliq.com

Appendix A — Launch Checklist

INTERNAL ONLY — delete before publishing. Short terms do not mean short compliance.

A1. Cannot be skipped — these are the law

Auto-renewal disclosure next to the subscribe button. Price, billing frequency, the fact that it renews automatically, and how to cancel — visible without scrolling, not behind a link.

A separate affirmative click consenting to the recurring charge. No pre-checked boxes, no bundling with everything else.

Acknowledgment email right after signup repeating the renewal terms and cancellation instructions, in a form the subscriber can keep.

Your own online cancellation path. PayPal lets subscribers cancel a recurring payment from inside PayPal, and Section 4 tells them so — but that does not satisfy your obligation. New York and California both require cancellation through the medium they signed up in. Build the "Manage subscription" link and make it work.

CAN-SPAM footer on every email: working unsubscribe honored within 10 business days, a valid physical postal address, honest From/Reply-To and subject lines.

Annual reminder of the subscription terms and cancellation instructions, sent to everyone in the medium they signed up in.

A2. PayPal setup

Use PayPal Subscriptions, not a plain recurring billing agreement, so subscribers get PayPal’s own confirmation and management screen alongside yours.

Set the payment descriptor to something recognizable. "Talent Fuel" or "CCY Talent Fuel" — not an unfamiliar entity name. Unrecognized descriptors are the most common cause of chargebacks, and chargebacks cost more than refunds.

Decide whether to store the PayPal account name and email that PayPal hands you. It may differ from the subscription email. The privacy policy discloses it; collect it only if you will use it.

Turn on PayPal’s email notifications for failed and cancelled payments so a subscriber cancelling via PayPal does not stay active in Mailchimp.

A3. Cheap moves that cut real risk during a test

Monthly only — no annual plans. Caps exposure per subscriber at one month and sidesteps the annual-renewal reminder rules.

Keep the 30-day no-questions refund. The single most effective risk reducer: prevents chargebacks, defuses complaints before they become AG referrals, makes a damages claim hard to build.

Cap the paid list during the test — [200] subscribers is plenty to validate the concept.

Screenshot the checkout flow on launch day and keep it. Contemporaneous evidence of what subscribers actually saw is worth more than the terms document.

Keep a clean PDF of every issue in one folder as you publish, for quarterly copyright registration.

A4. Specific to a search firm publishing this

Do not import CCY’s candidate or client lists into Talent Fuel. Someone who gave you their address as a candidate did not consent to a newsletter. That is a CAN-SPAM problem and, more expensively, a trust problem with people whose goodwill is the business.

Confirm no recruiting workflow can fire from newsletter engagement. Section 1 promises reading Talent Fuel will not trigger recruiter outreach. A HubSpot lead-score threshold would break that silently.

Section 7 is deliberately heavier than a generic disclaimer. A search firm publishing on hiring is read as speaking with authority, and hiring advice carries discrimination exposure for the reader. Have counsel look at this section specifically.

Ask whether CCY’s professional liability policy covers publishing. Media and content liability is often a separate line from professional services. Worth one email to the broker.

Appendix B — Open Items

B1. Fill in before publishing

Exact legal suffix for Cochran Cochran & Yale — appears in Sections 1 and 11 and in every other document.

Street address in Rochester — required by CAN-SPAM in every email footer.

Monthly price for Section 3.

Privacy policy URL for Section 9.

B2. The one real open question

Whether the CCPA applies is measured on Cochran Cochran & Yale’s total annual gross revenue, not Talent Fuel’s. Because Talent Fuel is a DBA rather than a separate entity, the whole firm is the "business" for privacy-law purposes. The 2026 threshold is $26,625,000 in gross revenue from all sources — not California revenue, not newsletter revenue.

Someone at CCY knows this number. If the firm is over it and does any business in California, CCPA obligations attach to the entire entity, and that is a materially larger program than these documents contemplate. Answer this before launch, not after.

Separately: the NY SHIELD Act applies to CCY at any size, and a search firm holding candidate records is squarely within it. If there is no written information security program, that gap exists today independent of Talent Fuel.

B3. Settled, for the record

Certificate of Assumed Name for Talent Fuel is filed. GBL § 130 satisfied; contracts made as Talent Fuel are enforceable in New York courts.

No separate LLC is needed or recommended for the test. Revisit only if Talent Fuel becomes a standalone revenue line worth ring-fencing.

Trademark clearance on "Talent Fuel" is still worth doing. A DBA filing grants no trademark rights and offers no defense if someone else already holds the name.