Month: July 2016

 

Direct Incorporation might be your one-stop shop for incorporating your business, but what has to happen before you give us a call? There are a few steps to take before you decide to make that final leap and start the incorporation process:

1. Make sure you’re choosing something you love

As Real Estate Investor Brandon Turner says, “Don’t start something you won’t want to do in five years. Because if you are successful, you’ll still be doing this in five years.” That’s pretty self-explanatory. If you’re doing something you hate, it’s going to make you apathetic about the success of your business, and make every challenge that much harder to overcome.

2. Pick your business partner(s) if necessary

Unless you’re planning on operating solo (and there’s nothing wrong with that), make sure you find the right person or people to partner with for your business. You’re going to be working with them every day, and if you don’t mesh well, it could not only make your workweek worse, but your business worse as well.

3. Learn as much as possible

Creating a company takes a bit of research. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know anything about starting a business, because in this Information Age we live in, there are literally thousands of ways you can teach yourself. The book Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore has been referred to as “the bible for entrepreneurial marketing,” and there are some awesome online training tools for learning the necessary skills to start a business.

4. Choose a business location

Unless your business will be hosted completely online, finding a place to set up is not something to be taken lightly. It’s important to consider the marketability of your product in that location, the local competition, the potential for employees, the safety and the zoning regulations of the area, and the tax options around you. Some entrepreneurs choose to incorporate in Delaware because of its low incorporation and franchise fees; there’s also Nevada because it has no profit tax, personal income tax, or franchise tax. But there are many things to consider when deciding whether you want to incorporate out of state or not.

5. Start marketing

You want people to know about your business as soon as possible, or you’ll be spending valuable time waiting for people to find out about your business when you could be earning revenue. Starting out with social media sites is a fantastic way to spread brand awareness—and don’t be afraid to ask friends and family to share your page. The worst case scenario is they’ll say no, but the best case scenario is an exponential increase in followers and potential clients. It’s important that you make yourself super available to your new Facebook/Twitter/Instagram “friends” (and you really should treat them as friends, because building relationships is essential for a small business), by responding frequently and personally to any questions they might have.

6. Get financing

Obviously, your business can’t function without some startup capital. You can get this in a plethora of ways: small business loans, startup incubators, crowdfunding campaigns, and more. Figure out the best way to fund your business, so that you’ll be ready to incorporate.

Once you’ve taken these steps, we’ll be able to help you with everything else, from deciding which type of corporation to set up, to trademarking, to website and logo design. You can get started by visiting directincorporation.com or calling 1-877-281-6496 today.

 

 

 

The notion has been repeated by countless news outlets and research studies in the past five years: Entrepreneurs are happier than non-entrepreneurs. Some reasons for this are autonomy and flexibility in their jobs, but one of the biggest reasons is the feeling of having a personal stake in one’s career. Jane Park, founder of Julep, writes, “For me, the most powerful thing about being an entrepreneur is my effort to believe that tomorrow can be better than today. I know for sure that I’m more engaged and connected.  And [feeling like I’m making a difference] is what makes it exciting to wake up everyday.”

According to Manta’s Small Business Wellness Index, 94% of small business owners say they are happy they are a business owner, and 93% say they are happy with their personal life. Also, 52% of small business owners work 40 or less hours a week, and 27% take 4 or more weeks of vacation per year.

According to a study by the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, Wharton grads running their own businesses “ranked themselves happier than all other professions, regardless of how much money they made,” and “Grads running their own businesses also rated themselves higher than any other profession when it came to work-life balance.” While some might think that the business graduates comfortably working six-figure jobs would be happier than those dealing with the process of lifting up their own companies from scratch, it appears that money was not, in fact the determining factor of happiness. Most of the entrepreneurial happiness actually stems from people feeling like they are choosing to do what they want to do, instead of being forced to work for a company that they don’t necessarily believe in.

Yet according to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor 2016 Global Report, “On average, 42% of working-age adults in the [researched] economies see good opportunities around them for starting a business, more than half of the working-age population in the 60 economies feel they have the ability to start a business, but a little more than one-third of them would be constrained from starting a business due to fear of failure.”

The fear of failure is a fairly common reason for not starting a business, but entrepreneurs are incredibly important to the U.S. economy.  Small businesses employ 57% of the country’s private workforce, and also make up 99.7% of all companies in the U.S.  Approximately 68% of revenue from small businesses is reinvested in the community (as opposed to 33% from large corporations). Starting your own business could end up being the best thing you could do for both your community and for your own well-being.