Welcome to this resource I call the Business Lifecycle. What I found working with businesses is that they all tend to go through a similar “lifecycle” in their business. They go around and end up yearly with a filing with their state. The filing stage is the place where you'll do most of your corporate filings, and occasionally when it comes to things like copyrights and trademarks, you may have federal government filings with the US Patent and Trade Office. You may also end up with filings with various internet bodies for your domain name or other internet issues that may arise.
What you'll find from this Business Lifecycle is that there are various stops along the way. At each stop, it's a good idea to check in with your attorney and other valued members of your TEAM (Trusted Experts, Authorities and Mentors). They'll be able to help you with each step and to make sure you're all set to go to the next one. So before we dive in, let's take a quick look at what these steps are:
- The first will be to choose a name for your business;
- Once we've got that name figured out we're going to look at who should be the owners of your business;
- Once we have the owners laid out we're going to look at what form, meaning what legal type of business you should set up;
- The next step is a very important one, which I call setting your lineup, which is essentially putting together that TEAM to help guide you with your company;
- Once we've got everything in place, it's time to file with the local government or your state. These filings don't have to be complex in fact they're often quite easy;
- But once you've filed with the state we move on to the next step which I find very important, which is your corporate agreements;
- Once we have our agreements in place, you'll likely need to put to put together corporate resolutions. These will be short documents that give you as the owner of the business certain powers;
- When we have our agreements in place and our resolutions in place, we may need to consider whether we're going to hire employees. You may not be ready to hire employees, but it may be a good time to look at various independent contractors that can help you out to run your business;
- And once we get to the end of that year, you're probably going to have to have an annual meeting. We'll go through what it takes to have an annual meeting, and why it's not as expensive as an Amazon meeting where you need to rent out an entire building and have thousands of people present.
So those are the basic steps of your business lifecycle. Now let's get started and dive in with choosing a name for your business.
Next Steps
If you're ready to get started and want to get going today, let's set up a Legal Strategy Session to make sure you've got a plan for starting your business. For more information on starting a business, please download the Business Lifecycle report to see what else should be on your radar.
