Creating your Business

Well, with a new website design, I decided it was time to visit some old things I talked about a while ago.  I wanted to start at the beginning. Creating your company. This is a step that I think everyone should do. Why do I say that? No matter who you are, you’ve had an idea, or thought that you know enough to go out on your own. With your own company, you can do that. It’s cheap and low maintenance.
What do you really need to get a company started? You need about 3 different “potential” company names. I recommend doing some web searches to see if the name exists, and more important, does the website exist. Your first step should be to make sure your domain name is available. You don’t even need to do anything with it (yet), you’ll want to get it reserved as soon as you know that your company name is “official”.  I used 123cheapdomains.com, but any registration service will work.
Now, once you have found your domain, you’re ready to register your company. There are a lot of websites out there that take care of everything for you. I personally used www.mycorporation.com. I know there are a lot of others, but I can only personally vouch for this website. It was easy, it was reasonable, and it was worth it. I believe when I registered my company in 2006, it was only $300 for the whole process (not including state registration). They even give you all of the paperwork you need to send in to get yourself registered in your state of incorporation. There are lots of options and lots of extra little things that you can buy, but in all honesty, all you need is that federal tax ID. So you can buy the extra services like annual reports, or a stamp with your business name, but from first hand experience, you really don’t need any of it. Just stick with the basics (you can always get the fancy stuff later if you find you really need it.) Now, there is one thing that I will tell you (and you I recommend talking to an account to see what may be best for you) and that’s to decide in advance if you’re going to be an LLC or an S-Corp (or an LLC doing business as an S-Corp, etc...). When I first created my company I didn’t really know anything about it, so I just made an LLC. What I found out is that there are tax advantages to each, depending on your long term plan. I ended up converting (at no charge) from an LLC to a S-Corp, because I had aspirations of more employees than just myself. I also wanted to have a separate entity between myself as an employee and myself as the business owner. I know it all gets complicated, mostly due to taxes. For this reason, I HIGHLY recommend that you decide where you think your business is going. Do you think you will always be the only employee? do you expect to grow? do you want to pay yourself a salary, and leave the rest of the profits in the business (which you can always take out as a distributions... but I’m getting ahead of myself =) ). Once you have a basic idea, talk to an accountant. It’s worth the money to have someone work out the numbers for you and explain the differences. S-Corp worked best for me (and honestly, I believe it’s the best approach based on what I’ve been able to do).
Now, after a couple weeks you’ll get your confirmation of your business name and tax ID. As soon as you get this, buy your domain.
I’ll save the details for that stuff for my next post.
Thanks for reading,
Mike

As always, thanks for reading and don't forget to check out our SAP Service Management Products at my other company JaveLLin Solutions,
Mike