Steps to Incorporate your Business Easily
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Hosted By Matt DeCoursey

Full Scale

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Kent Rockwell

Today's Guest: Kent Rockwell

CEO - Universal Registered Agents

Ep. #855 - How to Easily Incorporate Your Business

In this episode of Startup Hustle, Matt DeCoursey and Kent Rockwell, CEO of Universal Registered Agents, discuss how easy it can be to incorporate a business and how to get set up for success from the get-go.

Covered In This Episode

Importance of Incorporating a Business

So you’ve been thinking about starting a new business. Or maybe your side hustle has turned into full-time focus and now you’re wondering, what’s next? Perhaps, you’re thinking of incorporating your company; there are several reasons why you should consider incorporating your business.

  • Incorporation protects your personal assets against legal challenges your company may face. 
  • A company can offer income-splitting opportunities such as paying dividends to shareholders in a corporate structure. 
  • A corporation can perpetually exist even after the business owner’s death or when ownership changes. 
  • It comes with additional tax benefits – businesses can spread out tax losses and deduct business expenses during tax season. 

How to Incorporate a Business

While some states process incorporation differently, these are the main steps to note.

Get Started with Full Scale
  1. Select a business.
  2. Choose a location.
  3. Decide on a business entity (LLC, Inc.).
  4. Get a Tax ID number.
  5. Set up a bank account for business expenses.
  6. Secure permits and licenses. 

What does a Registered Agent do?

A registered agent is a company or individual that acts as the official point of contact for LLCs to receive service of process at a location in a state, and other legal documents and communication from the state.

URA is an excellent example of a registered agent who assists companies in receiving proper notification for their service of process and tax due dates and ensures that they are always in compliance with state laws. 

Listen and Grow as Successful Entrepreneurs

Highlights

  • Corporation of a business, what are the different types? (2:30)
  • What you need to do when incorporating a business (5:58)
  • Why you should avoid being a sole proprietor (7:45)
  • Why are LLCs attractive? (10:05)
  • What is a Registered Agent and why they are important (11:10)
  • What’s an Independent Director? (15:50)
  • LLC vs Corporation. compliance issues (18:16)
  • The difference between the Business Entity Name and “Doing Business As” name. Things you need to do before setting up your business. (22:50)
  • Top tips in incorporating a business (27:05)
  • Keep 51% of the company if you can to keep control or have partners who can help you maintain that control (32:12)
  • What’s a TAX warrant? (33:01)

Key Quotes

Clients should consult with their attorney before forming a business so that the attorney can tell them the type of entity that best suits their needs.

Matt DeCoursey

Really, the attractive piece about that is you can file an LLC and you don’t have to really disclose a lot of details about the business to the state or on a public type of basis.

Matt DeCoursey

URA’s goal is to help make your job easier so you can focus on what you do best which is running and growing your business.

Matt DeCoursey

Sponsor Highlights

Today’s episode of the Startup Hustle is brought to you by Universal Registered Agents. With over 30 plus years of legal industry experience, URA’s goal is to make your job easier, so you can focus on what you do best – running your business.

Setup your new business and maintain business compliance with the help of our friends at URA. Visit Startup Hustle’s Partner webpage to earn 20% off your selected registration or services package when you sign up with the code STARTUPS.

Rough Transcript

Following is an auto-generated text transcript of this episode. Apologies for any errors!

00:00.00
Matt DeCoursey
And we’re back for another episode of Startup Hustle. Matt DeCoursey is here to have another conversation to help your business grow all right? So you wanted to start a business. Maybe you already started none, and you realized that there’s a lot of complexity when it comes to the setup of your business and doing it properly. Do you need to be an LLC? Do you need to be a corporation, do you need to do a lot of different stuff. Exactly what we’re going to get into today now before we get too far into that. Are you thinking about starting a new business or expanding the current one? If you are then it’s essential to get it set up and maintained properly. That’s exactly what the folks’ universal registered agents do LLC nonprofits, no problem. Learn more by clicking the universal registered agent’s link in the show notes and speaking of universal registered agents with me today. I’ve got Kent Rockwell, the CEO of universal registered agents, legal services, and if you.
Want to learn more about what they do or set up a new business click that links in and the show notes, but without any further ado, Kent, welcome to Startup Hustle. Great. Thanks! Thanks for having me great to be here. Yeah, I’m looking forward to talking to you. You know this is one of those topics that, on the surface, might not. Seem like it has a lot of dazzle and fireworks around it. But you might find that without getting this stuff set up properly. You’re going to have some unwanted fireworks in your life. But I want to talk and want to talk all about that. But first I’d like to get a little bit. About your backstory, and you know what? What brought you to starting and grow in the business that you guys have at universal registered agents. Great. Thanks! So yeah, I’ve been basically in the registered agent new formation business.
All of my career. Um. Through a couple of different companies now, we formed universal registered agents about seven years ago, and we do from new company formations to working with existing companies to expand in additional states, and then we also work to get them out of states if they’re no longer doing business in those states. Okay, so when we talk about the quote incorporation of a company. Not I mean the vast majority of us businesses are not technically incorporated. They may have other types of legal standing or formation entities should we maybe start talking about some of the different types.
05:04.18
Matt DeCoursey
Setups are sure. Yeah, most of the new companies we see now are LLCs coming on board, and those usually are the most attractive form of a company set up, and it usually gives people the most anonymity when forming their business. There are different tax ramifications from that as well. But generally, LLCs are what we see. Um, we do see a lot of Corps, which is you don’t pass through taxes on to the shareholders. But you know for the general entrepreneur. We’ll see them generally form an LLC. Okay, and that’s that. It has a lot different from incorporating a business and creating an actual corporation. It’s the same process. It’s just the type of business that you’re coming out with and and and generally, we like to um. Have our clients at least consult with their attorney before forming a business and you know, giving them all the details as far as the type of business what they want to achieve with setting up that company and then let the attorney tell them the kind of entity that best suits their needs and then we can take it from there and. Form the business. We generally recommend that they um that they appoint a registered agent or commercial registered agent, which could be us or any other registered agent company out there, but that gives them further anonymity and and and doesn’t have themselves as the registered agent. Yeah, and for those of you listening. This is a part ah ah of a more comprehensive series about setting up a business, and thank you for participating with us and sponsoring the series because I think that this kind of stuff is really important, especially for entrepreneurs that have never done it. You know you’ve heard me talking. So if you want to go back and catch the beginning of the series that started on May second, 2022, where we did the episode setting up a business that was me and melody Ashby, the next episode was shit. You shouldn’t do this when you start a business with myself and Tricia Meyer. That was her title suggestion. She had a whole series about some of that stuff on YouTube then Matt Watson and myself did the new business checklist, and that was just Matt and I going through some of the things that we have learned are important when setting up a new business and here we are. Talking about incorporating your business and stick around, folks, because in one week we’re going to talk about protecting your time, effort, and data still associated with a new business setup. So it.
10:20.22
Matt DeCoursey
I would I find it interesting that you mentioned having everyone consult with an attorney now, I probably should disclaim I’m not an attorney, are you I am not either I have an ag background. So yeah, so we’re not giving you legal advice here now when it comes to what you guys do and you can go to the letter u the letter r and a dot com to learn more but so you’re basically streamlining the process of the setup and and and I think attorneys want that right? and a lot of times the attorneys will turn it over to us or a company like us to actually form their company once they get through the consultive stage and onto the actual formation. Ah, better faster cheaper right? right? So what are you know, just so we kind of understand what the services you perform are like what are some of the actions and things that need to be done that you take care of? Right? Well, the none thing that we’ll do is they’ll call us and say they want to like incorporate something in Kansas or Missouri, and then what we’ll do is. We’ll go out and do what we call the name availability checks. So we actually go out to the state and make sure that that name is available for the client. Once it is we can go ahead and reserve the name for the client and it depends on the state but a lot of times. There’s ah, a minor cost to do that but that will hold your name for a period of you know, None or sixty days while you figure out exactly how you want to structure the business and actually form it. But then you know you can reserve the name with the state. Then you can go out and actually get your domain name and your email and all of that set up as well. So once you have all that, we can go ahead and help you prepare the state forms, and depending on the type of entity you choose, we will help you fill out the form. Um, we’ll go ahead and make sure that everything’s correct and then we’ll go ahead and file it with the state and that involves a lot of times working with the department of commerce or a number of different things and also the federal government like getting sent I mean maybe if you are really early in the setup process. You might not even have. An employment identification number you need is one of those in the state too. You do you’ll need to you know once you form your company. You’ll need to get to know obviously a bank account and the banks will require the actual articles of incorporation. They’ll require a number and um, and then you’ll have basically everything you have to to get your bank account set up, and one of the things we’re talking about in some of the earlier episodes about business setup and I also really addressed in my book Million Dollar bedroom is a lot of people start a business which means by default you’re a quote sole proprietor.
15:38.40
Matt DeCoursey
Which is really the worst setup possible like that’s you have you are subject. You’re putting yourself in a direct line of sight for well you’re not separating yourself from the business and I think a lot of people don’t get that and so at what point is it a good time to begin setting up either incorporating or. Create a corporation and all see whatever it is, it I mean is it right? away. Is it later down the line mean we recommend it early on and the the sooner the better and like you said, um by having yourself incorporated. You do protect your personal assets and so. You know someone wanted to come and after you for whatever reason in the business. Um, if you aren’t incorporated. Then definitely, you’re at risk and the other thing that you’re at risk is um if you if you don’t file your annual report and each state they’re they’re named differently but but generally they’re called an annual report that you have to file once a year Ah with the state to keep your business active as well. I have to admit I’m um, often that company that gets the letter that said that I needed to file the annual report which costs like $20 but then I forget about it so that it costs me None right? So you got to pay the penalty lies to get back in a good standing and correct and by the way there’s I’ve had weird things occur in the past by and this is kind of my fault for not keeping up or using a service like yours where you’ve. We moved addresses with one business and it wasn’t forwarding stuff so we hadn’t filled out it like a goofy annual report and then all of a sudden I like was getting some pretty angry correspondence from the state later about things and yeah I recommend avoiding that these are distractions and. Okay, so yeah, when it when it comes to and once again, we’re not offering legal advice here just maybe more so experience and and doing reps like what what what has been so attractive about Lllcs because when the first business I started fifteen years ago we actually made a corporation and that seems to not be as seductive or appropriate for a lot of businesses that are like LLC like you mentioned earlier seems to be the way of the the world now from any early-stage right? And the. Really the attractive piece about that is you can file an Lc and you don’t have to really disclose a lot of details about the business to the state or on a public type of basis. So you are required to form an operating agreement or to provide an operating agreement but you don’t have to file that with the state.
20:56.60
Matt DeCoursey
But the state can require you to provide that so you do need to have one done as part of the the formation process and there are boilerplate operating agreements out there. You can Google them and they’re not that extensive. But. If. You’ve got a lot of different components to the business and you’re gonna kind of keep that private. That’s one of the advantages to the llc. So let’s talk about I think there’s I admitted before we started recording that even at my old age and and vast experience I’m still. Hazy on what to you get the term. Do you have a registered agent. So let’s talk about that. What exactly is a registered agent and why is it important and do everyone does everyone need one. Well the the reason that you’d want to have a registered agent is it is required when you’re forming a company. And a lot of small businesses will select themselves as a registered agent or whoever formed it or the president of the company and you can do that and we don’t advise it. Um, you know. The main I guess the main responsibility of the registered agent is to receive service a process and so that you have a physical address within the state if someone wants to serve process. It’s a place that the state requires you to to active location to do it. So. If you select yourself as a registered agent and you’re getting served. Um, you’re going to have the sheriff walk into your place the business you know with a summons or complaint and it could be just a garnishment as small as that but you know you’ve got employees in there and they’re wondering why the sheriff is walking into your place of business and it just creates more kind of a. A strange environment and if it’s served on the registration. You know that it’s an address there. They accept it. It’s scanned and it’s forwarded on to the client which would have solved the problem I mentioned earlier from moving from one address to another because you know it’s None thing to forward your mail but a lot of stuff doesn’t forward. Yeah, doesn’t I mean a lot of it like all the like basically all of the Irs type stuff and state stuff I don’t know why it feels like that should be the None thing they forward, but they don’t ah you talk about the some people like oh the sheriff would never come. Well look when you have employees what Kent’s referencing is so just say you have 20 employees and your business grows to that point and one of them has a divorce and they’re not compliant with paying their child support.
25:52.54
Matt DeCoursey
That’s why the sheriff would come by to serve you papers and let you know they’re garnishing that employee’s wages I’ve had that happen with employees and you get I mean they and not the sheriff didn’t come by on that one I got a letter exactly and a lot of it is served through the mail. But. But you know a lot of times we’ll see companies move and you know the last thing they think about is changing the registered agent and yeah and that’s one of the most important pieces and three months later down the road. You’ve missed a lot of important mail and state-specific information and it’s just. I’ve found over the years in my experience that it’s better to have a commercial registered agent as part of your incorporation process. So so going back to my own experience and getting that garnishment letter I wasn’t really like it took me a minute at first and I opened it and it said you know it was like wage garnishment I was like. Shit yeah, and then I looked at it I saw it wasn’t for me but I had to you really kind of figure out how that worked and whatever. Do you guys advise on that stuff as well? After that. Part of when we do receive process. Will you know we have everything automated so we’ll go in and verify that it’s our client and if it is our client then we’ll go ahead and accept it and make sure that the client is then notified. But if it’s not then we’ll reject it and it goes back to whoever served it so actually you sometimes get notifications for people that aren’t your client we will get served on. Clients that are not ours and then you know we’ll identify that it’s not our client and we’ll send it back. So you know I moved into my home and this is a little off-topic from that and the guy that lived I’ve lived there for 8 years I still get letters from the is for this guy and I mean like. Years later for their business and they’re like literally trying to do things like it’s like annual reports and now I think about it I haven’t received one in a little and a little while but and they’re affordable and you send them back and it’s like you know, no longer at address or whatever they just keep coming and coming and. If the client’s net or the business is not getting that mail and they don’t know they need to file something then you know they can lose their corporate status within the state. So dong Sheng if you’re listening change your address with the Irs or get a registered agent gent. Maybe. Ah, http://uragents.com so setting up a business and maintaining compliance isn’t easy. That’s why it’s important to have expert help along the way that’s exactly what you’ll find when you visit universal registered agents dot com there’s a link for that in the show notes it’s also the letter u the letter the letter r agents dot com for all your business.
31:00.18
Matt DeCoursey
Setup and maintenance needs that can help you with corporations and nonprofits wherever you’re located in addition to helping you create the right kind of entity universal registered agents can also help you with registered agent service which is what we were just talking about. And a wide variety of corporate services as well as helping meet the needs of independent directors. So what’s an independent director. Um, you know it’s it’s not the traditional thing. You’d think of as just an independent director sitting on a like a board of directors and and. Primarily where we work is with large commercial transactions. So like if there’s ah, a mall or a multi-unit like apartment complex generally loans in excess of about $30000000 the lender will require an independent director and our sole purpose is to be there. And anonymities purposes that if um, you know the company or the entity gets into distress that we would be brought into either. You know, take it into bankruptcy or not and and and so that’s our purpose is solely to decide if it should go into bankruptcy if you know if all the. Right models are there that it should go into bankruptcy. We’ll go ahead and vote for that if not then we won’t vote for it and we’ll generally get counsel to advise us as to which way to go. But that’s the old new role of the independent director. Okay, so so we’ve used the term anonymity a couple times. Let’s chat about that because one of the. And I’m laughing because I wish I had done this if you don’t if you don’t have anonymity I will just tell you right now that you can expect None phone calls after you set up your business both now and forever. Your first three days will start with every credit card processor in the world calling you None times a day and what are some of the other benefits of of the anonymity. Well I mean it just um. And I think for those very reasons that you just spoke of and you just you don’t want unwanted solicitations coming to you? Um, you don’t want um one wanted people coming in your door and you don’t want you to know I like to keep the components of my business private from the world. Ah you know and um. I think that that’s important for everybody that they they want to keep their business private and if you incorporate it correctly, then you’re you’re just you know more insert of keeping that you know different components private. So so now kind of bouncing back to the llc versus the corporation things like what.
36:08.28
Matt DeCoursey
What are compliance issues that could come up with what are some common things that’ll see and we have we understand the annual report? But what are some of the other things that could come up? Primarily that’s it the annual report that you need to file that once a year and that’s where we see most companies falling out of compliances because they forget to file that annual report and you know universal registered agents. We have an automated tax calendar that notifies them thirty days out as far as when they’re in a report is due. A lot of times the states will also notify you. But um, you know you might have someone within the company. That’s an admin who’s responsible for the annual report. But the notice goes to the president of the company president company gets that notice and they just you know ignore it because they don’t want to deal with it and then all of a sudden. They’re not in compliance anymore because that ain’t a report didn’t get filed so that is the most I would say an important part of staying in compliance is making sure you’ annual a report is filed and then and then just you know, keeping up, you know with your bank. You know have a good relationship with a bank. Um. You know that you feel comfortable with and and you know the banks will will also help you stay in compliance with everything and they’ll also require require all the compliance with the state. So you know the banks and the companies working together with the state. That’s that’s really key to keeping your business in compliance moving forward and you know when it comes to opening a bank account. You used the in the post homeland security era. You got to have all this stuff set up or the bank’s not going to even let you in. They were a little looser about that before but there’s a whole lot of things that they’re wanting to prevent that we don’t need to get into here in this episode. But yeah, you’re not, you’re not going down to the bank and starting. Ah, you’re you’re gonna have a tough time opening an account for your business without a lot of this paperwork. So okay, so what about changing your entity type. So one of the things that I think a lot of listeners are hoping for is that they start a business and later they’re gonna so when when you start an l lc you have members. You have shareholders in the corporation that corporations pay dividends LLCs to give distributions and with that comes a k one form which passes the profit or loss on to the individual members of the LLC correct in most cases and.
41:10.80
Matt DeCoursey
And with that though, private equity doesn’t like that setup and usually will push for They don’t want the k one and which I get I get full scale is invested in 6 different companies and I’m here ah in in the middle of may and I’m still chasing k one forms I can’t file my taxes without them and. So what? What about changing entities. Um, you know as companies grow a lot of times they will want to change their their status and ah the best thing I would recommend too is to find a good tax person and and consult with your tax consultant on a regular basis hey is dist still the correct entity type. With my business growing um moving forward and they can give you direction on that as well. The other thing too is if you’re acquiring companies you might um, you know you might be an S-cor you’re acquiring an LLC so you’ve got to kind of figure out how to blend those together and. And um, and before you do that? Always consult with your tax representative to make sure that there’s not going to be tax consequences by you know, merging entity types if you’re making an acquisition. I ran into something similar so the business that I started that I talk about in my book Million Dollar bedroom was actually in Indiana and then we moved I’m from Kansas City and my wife and I moved back here and we wanted to move the business and the way that I thought that I should do it would have imposed some pretty. Shitty tax implications and had ah had a tax attorney advise us on a better way to do that. So and that could have been. Yeah, here’s the thing is after you after you do that stuff. You’ve done. It. You know, like if you close an entity open a different one or do this or that like you don’t want to find out later and like’s it’s hard. It’s hard to put the genie back in the it is and that’s why I said yeah check with your attorney check with your tax person and anytime you’re making a change to the corporate structure. Always consult that before you do it and then you got the best shot at success or not having a huge tax bill at the end of the year that’s unforeseen. Let’s talk a little bit about the business name because I think people get this confused because like Google is alphabet that’s Google’s business entity name. They go by Google which is their Dba doing business as now if you, if you are so if folks are working they go to you, are and this letter u letter r you can type in http://universalregisteredagents.com if you want that if you want to go the quick route you go to you agents dot com now with that if.
46:29.18
Matt DeCoursey
If you’re registering an estate and someone else has your name you can still potentially do business with that name correct correct I mean we were fortunate with universal registered agents to have that available in all but None state. So. The None state that it was not available. We just formed a Dba and and we were able to set it up that way as well. But again that goes back to doing that name availability don’t get too far down the road with your business name and then realize that it’s already taken by someone else and you got to change direction and. You might have already applied for your domain name and your yeah in number and all of that. So. It’s very important to do that initial name availability check when you’re starting or setting up a business actually go the other route first and see if there’s the domain available right. And in some cases so like my business is at fullscale io which the dot io destination is very common in tech but in some cases people I mean I tell people that don’t that aren’t in the tech scene. They’ll be like io. What’s that right. And it’s kind of amazing too because you would be surprised at how unsophisticated a lot of systems are and they won’t recognize the ah io suffix other things that and I have a whole section in this about a Million Dollar Bedroom when it comes to setting up your business is well None off, i. Highly recommend avoiding hyphens in your domain name because you sentence yourself to always being like it would be like universal hyphen agents hyphen right? you know and you know you got, you’re gonna always end up talking about that and then there’s also 1 really funny thing that you ever see these things that people post on Facebook it’s like None signs that that wasn’t well thought out you got to put all of your names together before the dot com and look inside it and make sure you’re not spelling or doing things that. Are really tough to spell translate or sometimes spell other things and I actually use the the example of if you were if your business was compass wholesalers. There is an ass hole in there and. A lot of people get stuff set up and they make signs and they do all this stuff and then they then someone points that out later and don’t realize it yeah, think about that. Um, it’s also you know your situations where you know one word and another word come together and just like I said there’s there’s a lot of stuff like that. So think about what you’re getting yourself into shorter is better.
51:57.88
Matt DeCoursey
Shorter is better and if you do have a long name. Obviously we have a long name and we check to make sure that all the different variations were available and we were able to also secure http://youuragents.com as well as the universal. So if you can abbreviate and and really just. Get all the different variations of those domains when you’re signing up and your registrar will ask you. They’re like do you want http://io.com.this.net if you feel like you need to you know there’s domain squatters out there that if they have they will. They’re hoping. For for traffic and the wrong spots or the wrong places you know it costs a little bit of money to lock that stuff down. But I mean depending on on. Ah you know the more or the better Really yeah, it just just depends on your level of comfort with and shorter is better. Okay, so um. You know when it comes to like like some general advice that we’re gonna give to entrepreneurs or startup founders I mean what? like if I said Kent. What’s some of the best advice that you can give when it comes to easily incorporating your business obviously going to your shop. Would probably be the None right? You know as I said talk to your attorney make sure you’ve got a clear business plan. Make sure you secure the name and and then you know just work to protect your your investment when you’re when you’re getting your business started and ah. The other thing we we see too is as companies expand and hire employees and especially with people working from home today and you know we happen to be close on the state line between Kansas and Missouri so you might be. You know we’re in Kansas but you might have an employee over Missouri. And you don’t qualify the business over there to do business. You know you lose some protection there so anywhere that you have employees you really should qualify your business within that state and so well let’s talk about that for a second because I think a lot of people get advice. You know what are the what are the plus. Ah as mentioned we’re in Kansas and if. You’re not if you’re not aware Kansas and Missouri and Kansas City are all mashed together and there’s an invisible line that runs through our town I’m going to blow some people’s minds here. The Kansas City Chiefs Play in Missouri it’s shocking how many people I tell that to the we’re hoping to get them to Kansas Kansas cities in Missouri yes, most of it most of it and that creates a lot of hassle and different stuff. But you have some folks that you know end up opening in ah the open they incorporate in Delaware or other states like what are some of the pluses and minuses to you know that as opposed to being well first off, if you.
57:29.66
Matt DeCoursey
In the state of Kansas if you want to as a startup or a new business if you want to possibly participate in some of the incentives or different programs that they have for new business development. You better have your business registered in the state correct right? or they’re going to tell you to bring it back right? Yeah right. So so we’re you want to set up your business. You want to any place you’re doing business in outside of the state. You’ve incorporated and you want to qualify as a foreign entity and the foreign entity just means that it’s in an ah additional state right? and so you’ll you’ll. You know, incorporate your home state. Then if you’re doing business in like Nebraska or Missouri you want to qualify to do business in those states and it’s just ah, a simple qualification form. You’ve got to make sure that you’re in good standing in your home state. You might have to provide a certificate of good standing along with the qualification forms. But. You know we can definitely help you expand into additional states if you need to as well and there again that’s when the importance of a registered agent a lot of times will come in because you’re here in Kansas doing business but you don’t have someone in Missouri to be that registered agent or that physical address. So there again, you need to hire a commercial registered agent in those additional states and so we’ve talked about all the things that that make a lot of things about setting up that. And how to make that easier but here on Startup Hustle so we like to talk about failure a lot too and I’ve if you’ve read my million dollar bedroom or listened to this show for a while you know that we’re I’m not afraid to talk about all the stuff that I’ve done poorly. But do you have? Yeah, we don’t have to throw anybody under the bus here. But do you have any? Any horror stories that you’ve helped people navigate through that you could share I’m trying to think I mean we um we actually had one just recently kind of a horror story come up and again I won’t use names. Sure. Yeah, police state but we had a company that was doing business in 20 or 30 different states. They changed agent over to us and we realized that they were you know participating in some fraudulent activities and and then here we are the registered agent there and we know we don’t want to do business with. Companies like that. So we’re going to end up having to resign as a registered agent in all of those states and you know we like to do business with companies that are above board and you know.
01:02:28.56
Matt DeCoursey
In good standing and do all the right stuff. But once in all, you’ll find where you know they’re not. You know they’re not good players and you know we have to then resign and um, yeah, we don’t we don’t generally see a lot of failures we see. Um. I guess a lot of if you look at the new entity formations and this is kind of bookwork that you set up 50 new companies in a year half of them will be gone after the first year and then another half the none year and then after about 2 years they tend to become more stable and then they tend to. Grow and add states and build the company. So there’s a pretty high I don’t know failure rate or oh we had a great idea and got some friends together and you know we tried it for a few months and it just didn’t really come together so I will dissolve the company so we see a lot of that. Often. Do you run into issues where founders and owners are fighting fairly frequently I think actually we moved into a new office last week and the guy I think was in tears he was leaving. Um, another office in our building and you know he was in a fight with his partner of None ears and they couldn’t get along and they had the company none so nobody really had controlling interest so they had to just dissolve the entity, and ah that is one thing I would recommend when you’re setting up a company and. Keep 51% of the company and if you can as long as you can and keep control or at least have partners that help you maintain that 51% yeah, and you mentioned the shutdown of stuff so that can be that’s. In some cases can be more of a hassle than setting up right? and you know and you talk about annual reports and other things. So I mentioned moving a business from Indiana to Kansas at the time. Help that I had with that hadn’t filled out None simple form that was like the final thing that needed to exit us from Indiana and I’m sitting in Kansas City and I get a phone call one day from an attorney. He says do you want help with the tax warrant that you have and I was like what are you talking about. He goes you have a tax warrant in the state of Indiana I said what’s a tax warrant he says well there might be unpaid taxes or something that was in there now that wasn’t the case but when we exited the stage and didn’t fill out a little form at the end. The states will just assume.
01:07:56.14
Matt DeCoursey
You still have the same number of employees and the same number of staff and they weren’t they were sending to our Indiana address and all of that and basically that you know they were the letter was saying that we owed like 75 grand now here’s the thing had I you know my wife’s from Indiana. I had gotten pulled over in the state of Indiana they would have actually maybe taken me to jail and now that was a form away just one form solved that whole problem. But these are the things you’re wanting and hoping to avoid because no one wants to find out about that the wrong way. Right? And that’s also an important reason they have your attorney involved or a company like ours if you’re a resigner withdrawing from a state or moving that’s where you know these professional firms can help you make sure you’ve done all the due diligence to move or get out of that state. Yeah, and that’s I mean these are. Hey I mentioned I’m not afraid to share the the failure moments but those are you know here’s the thing. Yeah, that was that was fairly straightforward to fix but that ruined an after and end for me, you know I had to figure that out. Yeah, if you ever heard the phrase death by a none tiny cuts. That’s how entrepreneurs and founders feel on many many days and weeks all the time. So like my priority is trying to avoid the none tiny cuts because a few hours here and afternoon there a day there next thing you know. Like yeah I’ve compared it to yeah so I have None employees if each one of them wastes 3 minutes of my day then I’ve got a full time job of time being wasted and it’s a pretty challenging. And think that’s you know that’s the key to getting stuff up correctly from the start and and making sure you’ve got all your dots crossed and everything as you’re forming those new entities and doing them correctly. Yeah, and that that probably is a good time for me to once again, give a big thank you to your company which is also today’s episode sponsor. Universal registered agents. There’s a link in the show notes look don’t go. Don’t go and do this stuff yourself. It’s easy to look at it and say oh I could probably do this. You know these are affordable services that pay off. And the long run and it’s little tiny bits of compliance and failure and just not being protected or understanding what you need to do don’t find out about that after it’s already occurred. You know it’s like the idea of insurance. You know, no one likes paying for insurance and.
01:13:10.82
Matt DeCoursey
Until they figure out that they needed it for some different reason so you can set up your new business and maintain all aspects of your business’s compliance with universal registered agents. Their goal is to help make. Your job is easier so you can focus on what you do best which is running and growing your business so connect with them by visiting the link and the show notes universalregisteredagents dot com or if you want to take the shortcut just go letter you universalregisteredagents dot com so can’t here we are at the end of the show I mean what? What do you want to say and ah and I like to? Have a little freestyle moment in the end is there anything we forgot left out or that you you want to add that we didn’t address thanks for having me today I think it’s great to be here I think it’s great to be able to educate people on the need to to protect themselves and to form their companies right? from the start to. Get a registered agent to have it formed in the state that they’re wanting it in and to have a company there that can help them through the whole process of starting maintaining and in some cases taking out of their business in different states as they go through the process of their company. Yeah, this is what I mentioned at the beginning of the show that I was joking like these are the things in the parts of the business that aren’t don’t have fireworks and neon signs and they don’t feel glitzy and glamorous but they need to be done and whenever you’re starting a new business. And we’ve done episodes in the past about this as well as early there are just None things you need to do None sometimes just one time and keep up with and I really recommend that you get help with them because you’re gonna find that in the earliest stages of your business when you should be out either. You know, building something looking for new business growing the business. You’ve already acquired and you’re going to find as the founder and the Ceo or whatever role you’re playing as someone that started the business that you get sucked in to these things that you need to do and you know like it. Might be going and buying a printer and then you got to hook up the printer and then you’re like shit I don’t have any paper. Maybe I need some more to or what are we going to set this thing on how I got to build a table I got to buy a chair. You know all these little things really It’s back to death by a none tiny cuts. So I appreciate what you do and I appreciate it. The topic and hopefully you all learn something from it. So Ken I’m going to catch up with you down the road. Thanks for joining my thanks for having me.