And I always said I didn’t want to as I did not want to deal with the headaches and management issues.
But, then the Great Recession hits and the career you built over 35 years is gone as you’ve been laid off and cannot afford to relocate or travel for extended periods. After a while you realize the so called recovery is not reaching your part of the country let alone your chosen field.
Luckily, I obtained a brief consulting project involving my field of expertise and suddenly a light comes on…you can go into business doing this and put your 35 years of experience to work for you!
I should point out our small business is comprised of my wife and me where as I do the consulting/field work and she handles the scheduling and accounting. I wish she were much busier!
Having never had the desire to be a business owner and no formal education that might include business we were brand new to every aspect of how to start up. Fortunately this information is relatively easy to find, from a number of sources and with only a few decisions you can be up and running in no time…really?
Some decisions you will have to make are:
1.) A business name or I should say names. The name you choose will have to be researched for matching any other business name and approved by the state in which you plan to start up.
2.) What type of entity your business will be, such as an LLC or a corporation. This is a critical decision for tax and other purposes, but should be a relatively simple decision as long as you have taken the time to understand the differences.
3.) Do you want to deal with the business filing and name research yourself or pay to have someone else do it for you?
For us, we found our state, Florida, website www.sunbiz.org information invaluable. It was, also, clear to understand and allowed us to do the filing ourselves, on line and for only the cost of the fees. I am sure other states have a similar system. By the way, you can choose to file your LLC in another state than the one in which you live. There are reasons for some people to do this, but for us all we needed was to protect our own personal assets and open a simple LLC.
The whole process took less than a day to set up and I submitted our request for incorporation late afternoon and received notice we were approved by 9AM the following morning. With that, Construction Analysis & Consulting LLC was born…and somewhere, my mother smiled.
So, yes, you can get to this point very easily and with minimal effort. However, some of you may need to, also, set up with local governing authority for a business license prior to opening your doors. Your state may take longer to process your request and or the number of filings increase to the point it takes longer to process on a regular basis.
But now the real work begins and depending on exactly what your business is the level of difficulties you will face can vary dramatically. Ours is a very simple and inexpensive business to get started and maintain. However, as is true of most things there are always certain basic problems all small business owners have to face and overcome. We are nowhere near past all of these issues, but we desire to share our overall progress in this endeavor and some of the accomplishments and failures we have and will face.
Good planning should keep you on schedule…right?
Be sure to see my next post, “One of our professionals will get back to you shortly”