I try to focus on communicating the benefits of my offering, not how they are produced. If someone wants to know how, and teaching them has a benefit for me, I have them sign a Non-disclosure agreement, and then I teach them. If my techniques are really unobvious and a search reveals they are unique, I then file for a patent under provisional status, and stamp the product with "patent pending" for a year. This is the practice I was taught in my course on technology management, courtesy of Boeing.