Back when I worked as a lawyer, I answered cold calls from prospective clients who just had their Big Idea. I’d teach them how to take that idea and start their own business. After many years of helping inventors and working for international corporations, I should be able to start ...

Ideas are funny things. Sometimes, they hit you like lightning. Other times, you find them only after hours of hard thinking. But when you have a good one, you know it in your gut. This is absolutely true for ideas for starting a business. But, almost always, other people won’t ...

If you’re reading this blog chronologically, then you’ve already looked at your business idea with a critical eye and decided that it is worth pursuing. Now, you’ll need to look through the types of business entities and decide which one you should use for your business. Why would the type ...

People usually don’t think of a side gig or an occasional contracting job as a real business. But they are. They are usually sole proprietorships. In the previous blog entry, we went over the four most popular types of business structures: the sole proprietorship, the partnership, the LLC, and the ...

I recently wrote about the concept of limitation of liability for LLCs and corporations. In those articles, I defined the concept in a general way. For those of you who are very new to business ownership, let me explain the concept in a more concrete way. It always helps when ...

I bet, by now, you’ve been obsessing over what to call your new business. After all, having the perfect business name is important, right? That’s OK. We all do it. You might even have landed on one or two names you really like and are wondering when you can officially ...

Before we go further, I want to take a detour and talk about a mistake often made by sole owners of businesses. The mistake can have serious consequences but is easy to avoid. You just have to do a few things early and make a habit of it for the ...

In our journey to start a small business, we’ve examined the business idea itself and think the idea is good and financially sound. We've thought about what kind of business entity we should operate under, and we’ve decided on the name of the business. As a part of finding a ...

Starting a new business is hard work. It’s full of research, and, if you’ve made it this far into our blog, you’ve done your share already. So far, you’ve looked at the viability of your business idea, thought through what type of business entity you want to operate as, and ...

When you start a business, there are a million things you have to do before you can open your doors. Sometimes, you can do a few of these things simultaneously. Other times, you have to do them in a specific order. Opening a business bank account is one of those ...

Starting a new business is a lot of work for one person. Maybe you can do things faster if you find a freelancer or contractor to help. But what types of jobs are appropriate for them? When should you do the job yourself instead of hiring out? Where do you ...

Before your business opens its doors and starts to take in money, you’d first have to spend money to set up the business. You need money to buy equipment, build your widget, set up a website, and maybe even pay a lawyer to form a corporation. Are there startup cost ...