Palm Beach Gardens 6/7/2012 5:34:55 AM
News / Business

How to Form a Cyber Age LLC

If you want to form an LLC in California, it has never been easier or more affordable. The first step is to choose your business name. You should try to come up with something original that doesn’t hit your product head on. For instance, if you are selling shoes, try not to use the word shoes in your business name. Get creative. Also remember that your business name may also become your website address.

In fact, the Internet has had an amazing impact on doing business. It gives you outreach to millions of customers without having a huge marketing budget. SEO has performed miracles for small business owners, and if you are going to form an LLC in California, having your own website will get your business off the ground immediately. 

Once you’ve selected your business name, you can conduct an internet search to see if anyone else is using it. In the old days, it was so much harder to check for name exclusivity. Now, all you have to do is use your search engine. 

Thanks to the Internet, you can find a legal group like Form-A-Corp to file your articles of organization with the California Department of State. They even have a rush service that will help you get around the long wait times associated with California due to the budget cutbacks and fewer clerks. It now takes at least twice as long to process requests through the Secretary of State than it did before the recession. You should also know that you must pay a stiff fee of several hundred dollars to the State of California during the first quarter of your LLC’s existence.

The state of California requires you to file an operating agreement which now can be handled by a legal expert for you. If you want to form an LLC in California, it will help you to determine which members of your LLC will be able to contribute to your company and when you plan to hold your regular business meetings.

The business software available to small businesses now makes it so much easier to schedule business meetings using emails and calendaring and to do bookkeeping, which is so important when you are required to handle your own taxes.

In California, your county will have its own business license requirements. The easiest way to comply with these is to get online and find the website for your county. It will usually have a tab for business licenses that will give you all the information you need. Each county will require a small fee for the local registration, plus there is usually a fee to publish your company name in a legal publication within one month following your registration with the county.

The IRS website has made conducting and forming your own business easier. For instance, if you want to form an LLC in California, you will be entitled to receive an employer’s identification number or EIN from the IRS. You can do this directly from the IRS website by filling out a form or have a service like Form-A-Corp.com file this for you. An EIN will qualify you for group health insurance and also allow you to take advantage of corporate tax breaks.

If you will be hiring new employees, it’s so much easier now to register with the California Franchise Tax Board and the IRS. The IRS website can supply the forms to verify U.S. citizenship or Visa status and withholding allowances. The State of California can also help you with worker’ compensation insurance if that should become necessary.
Your LLC requires you to file annual or semi-annual returns with the IRS, and the IRS website can help with this.

There are legal websites like Form-A-Corp.com that can make forming your LLC almost effortless due to their years of experience. Once you form a relationship with a company like Form-A-Corp.com, they are there to help you through the steps of owning your own business. The rewards of managing your own business far outweigh the filing and compliance hassles, and becoming a cyber-age entrepreneur is just plain exciting.
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