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Playing Business
A mistake I myself have made as well as many other smalltime entrepreneurs is that we have wanted to appear like a business to early. Symptoms of this are things like:
- Incorporating
- Renting office space
- Buying a fax machine (You know a business needs one)
- Fancy stationary
- Fancy graphic designers
- Multiple fault tolerant high availability servers
- Human resources officer (If you’re a startup and have one these you really are on the slippery slope)
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n srinivasan on December 13th, 2005 9:25 am
I agree.
Performance has not anything to do with the trappings one acquires at a great initial cost.
But there is a catch too. Unless you have all these paraphernelias at many doors you dont gain access.
So it is like catch-22!
qurioux!
nzpers@blogspot.com
J Wynia on December 13th, 2005 9:39 am
I agree with most of your list, except one. Forming an LLC or chapter S corporation is just a good idea. I can form an LLC in my state for $70 and a single sheet of paper. I can still run all of the finances through my personal 1040, etc. BUT, the business is now its own entity, can have a unique name (legally) and my house, car and personal bank account aren’t on the chopping block if my very first customer decides to sue me. I own several LLC’s and S Corp’s and only 2 of them have even a single employee that draws a paycheck. None have an address other than a UPS Store and all share the same phone number and fax number. Basically, as soon as an idea is worth more than $100 and likely to be worth putting 6+ months into it, I form a company for it.
Frank Ross on December 17th, 2005 12:48 pm
I’d have to scratch the fax machine off this list of unnecessary things. Purchasing a fax machine early had nothing to do with how we wanted the business to look. There were simply a lot of faxes to send. Suppliers to get setup with, establishing bank accounts, merchant accounts, licensing, etc. The supplier setup is an ongoing thing in our business so getting the fax machine early on made sense. Taking our faxes to Fedex-Kinkos or The UPS Store did NOT make sense. I’ll agree that getting a fax machine just because ‘a business should have one’ is indeed silly, but often it just makes ‘dollars and sense’ to get one for the business.
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