Tag Archives: entrepreneurs

U is for… U.S. Small Business Administration

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Welcome to the U.S. Small Business Administration edition of the ABCs of MyCorp; a very important component of the small business community.

What is the U.S. Small Business Administration and what exactly do they do?

According to SBA.gov, the USSBA was founded on July 30, 1953. Even from their early days, the USSBA has been dedicated to aiding small businesses in the three Cs: capital, contracts and counseling.

They make all sizes of loans available from helping a business with their debt to just raising capital in general. They focus on federal procurement; their Office of Government Contracting works with other federal departments and agencies to set goals and “reach the statutory goal of 23% in prime contract dollars for small businesses.”

Additionally, they assure that small businesses have a voice in reviewing Congressional legislation and testify on behalf of small business. The chief counsel of this office is decided on by the president of the United States.

As if all of this weren’t enough, the USSBA also offers counseling for entrepreneurs and small business owners. They walk them through how to be the best business owner they can be and they do this face-to-face or internet counseling all for free.

Since 1953, the U.S. Small Business Administration has proven itself to be a great asset for small businesses. Check out their website and see what they can do for you!

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S is for S-Corporation

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For this week’s post we will get to know one the incorporation options a bit better and learn what it has to offer a new entrepreneur: the S-Corporation!

First off, what is an S-Corporation?

Well, an S-Corporation (also known as the S-Corp) is a special type of corporation that draws its designation from subsection S of the tax code. To start an S-Corp, a small business owner starts a C-Corporation in the state where it is headquartered, then files for S-corporation status with the IRS. While an-S Corporation is similar to a C-Corporation, it has different income and self-employment tax regulations. 

One of the biggest and best differences between an S-Corporation and a C-Corporation is the pass through taxation. Like an LLC, an S-Corporation does not pay taxes at the corporate level. Any income or losses are reported only on the personal income taxes of the business owner’s. As a result, this avoids the issue of double taxation that affects C-Corporations. Since net losses are also passed through, the individual shareholder may be able to reduce his or her tax liability by offsetting other income with any S-Corporation losses.

Though, there is an important caveat to keep in mind: any shareholder who works for the company must pay him or herself reasonable compensation. Basically, the shareholder must be paid fair market value, or the IRS might reclassify any additional corporate earnings as “wages.”

If pass through taxation sounds good to you, consider the S-Corporation for your new business. And no pressure, if you end up deciding you’d like to stick with a regular C-Corporation after declaring your business as an S-Corporation, you can easily drop the S-Corporation status with the IRS.

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P is for Protecting Your Personal Assets with a Professional Corporation

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The name of the game this week is “Professional Corporation,” which happens to help protect your personal assets. That’s right, we have a triple “P” ABCs of MyCorp post, so buckle up for some serious alliteration.

A Professional Corporation is one of the more common types of entities for business owners to choose. The paperwork is a bit on the extensive side (especially compared to an entity like a Sole Proprietorship) but all that paperwork is well worth it because, as our title suggests, a Professional Corporation protects your personal assets.

A Professional Corporation does this by separating you (and your personal assets) from your business. This means that if your business were ever in deep trouble and owed some big time money, you wouldn’t be obligated to hand over your house or other assets.

This can make accounting trickier than if you opted for a simpler entity but, like I said, the protection makes it well worth it. You’ll also be paying taxes based on what you choose to pay yourself from your business. This means more money towards growing your business, and what business owner doesn’t want that?

So if you’re doing some entity shopping, be sure to keep the Professional Corporation as an option, especially if you’re looking for something protective.

 

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Last Minute Tax Organization Tips!

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With only 11 days left until April 15th arrives, small business owners and entrepreneurs everywhere are scrambling to get their federal and state taxes filed and sent along to the IRS with California doing the most scrambling of all. CohnReznick recently reported in one of their company newsletters that for LLCs and Corporations in California that fail to file their tax returns on time, they may wind up paying a $2,000 penalty as issued by the California Franchise Tax Board.

Don’t endanger your overall tax position – take our CEO Deborah’s tips into consideration when it comes to getting your taxes prepped and sent on their way. Best of all, these tips can be applied to the years to come beyond the 2013 tax year and once they’re in place will make filing taxes in the future much easier and more organized.

1) Make sure you have your documents prepared.

It’s never a good idea to walk into your tax preparer’s office with piles of paperwork scattered all over the place or worse, with nothing ready at all. Prep your documents several months in advance so they’re ready for April 15th.

2) Stay organized over the course of the year rather than waiting until last minute.

Tax season is the last place you want to fashionably late to – by keeping all of your documents and paperwork organized with a bookkeeper or safe within a cloud storage system, you can ensure that you won’t be going on a frenzied hunt for receipts.

3) Respond quickly to a notice and demand to file.

You only have 60 days which can go by pretty quick! Set up a reminder service (like MyCorp’s IncGuard) to keep you on track – this system sends monthly reminders about annual reports, quarterly tax returns, year-end notices, and much more!

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5 Ways to Make Sure Customers Open Your Emails

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Many of us spend a lot of time focused on how the wording in important emails affects the way they are received. From email marketing messages to business inquiries  it’s important to ensure the emails we spend time writing are actually read. In order to have the best chance of getting customers to open and read an email, you’ll need to develop and use these five strategies to get your email seen.

1. Check Your Display Name

Your email display name is the most recognizable thing about your email, and catches the eye immediately when the recipient receives the email. In order to stick out from the message crowd in your crowded inbox, you must ensure your display name is set up correctly.

  • Always use your full name – including your surname.
  • Avoid using generic mailboxes, email addresses or unhelpful ‘From’ names in the sender name field.
  • Include a clear signature so that your recipient can easily check which company you’re emailing from if they don’t recognize your name.

2. Word the Subject Line Wisely

Along with the first paragraph of the email, your subject line is crucial in getting your recipient to act. A properly worded subject line has three purposes:

  • It grabs the reader’s attention within a split second.
  • It describes the action you want the reader to take.
  • It makes the message easier to refer back to, or search for.

When writing your subject line, try to accurately summarize your request and convey the importance of the email’s contents within as few characters as possible. A good way to do this is to ask a question in the subject, or start the email subject line with the action you want the reader to take (for example, ‘Reply needed:…’). You may also wish to refer to the recipient by name to give your email an extra personalized touch.

Many email clients also display the first sentence of the email as a preview. Use that sentence in conjunction with your subject line for maximum impact. Also, avoid using any phrases that could potentially look like spam, or trigger an overzealous spam filter. The more specific your language, the better.

3. Use Smart Scheduling

Researchers have studied the best time to send emails, and have tracked response rates on each day of the week. GetResponse studied 21 million messages and found that engagement was higher between 8-10 AM and 3-4 PM. Messages sent during those periods enjoyed a slightly higher open rate.

However, you don’t need to be an expert to understand the psychology behind this technique: simply focus on sending emails when you’re most likely to get the recipient’s undivided attention.

  • Look for patterns in your recipient’s emailing habits. If they tend to deal with all of their mail in the afternoon, that’s your best bet for a quick reply.
  • Don’t send emails when people are likely to have run out of steam. For example, some experts advise not sending emails on Thursday or Friday afternoon when most people have already started to ‘switch off’ before the weekend. Figures from MarketingGum back this up; they found that messages sent on a Thursday had the lowest open rate, and very few emails were opened on Friday afternoon.
  • There is an exception to the Thursday/ Friday rule. According to the same MarketingGum research, you may get a good response on a Thursday or Friday if the contents of your email relate to a weekend task.
  • You’ll need to take into account any timezone differences in order to get maximum engagement at the right time of day.

4. Don’t Send Any Further Emails… Yet

The key is to make the task of opening, reading and responding to a message as quick and easy as possible. Sometimes you may feel that you missed an important piece of information and need to send a second email to update the recipient. If you can avoid this, it is better to wait until the recipient has replied to your first email. Too many ‘urgent’ emails can dilute the attention given to the conversation. If you insist that every email is urgent, it can confuse the recipient and make it difficult for them to decide which message is most important.

5. Keep Up the Conversation

Once your recipient has responded, return the favor. If their email requires a response, send it as soon as you’re able to. Not only will this reinforce your reputation as a good communicator, it will inspire confidence in your recipient. They’ll know that you’re reliable and quick to respond to their questions – so, in return, they’ll be more likely to respond to yours right away.

Claire Broadley is a creative content writer working for WhoIsHostingThis.com, an independent hosting review website.

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What Investors Want to Learn From Your Business Plan

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Your business concept is awesome and you know it. But you need startup funds and a way to convince investors that they’ll see a return on investing in your business. The thought of putting together a business plan that will effectively “sell” your business concept to seasoned investors is intimidating, but it’s also essential in getting the funding you desire. A well rounded business plan will provide you with valuable insight into your business, its potential for success, and the areas in which you may want to fine-tune your operating model.

Keep It Simple, Shorty

You always hear, “keep it simple, Stupid” or “KISS” and that goes for an effective business plan as well. But don’t be stupid, instead be smart, short, and sweet. Ten pages or less, absolutely. No one wants to read a really long plan.

In fact, ideally I don’t think you need much beyond great financials and an impressive executive summary. Potential investors are going to ask for whatever additional information they’re interested in whether you’ve written ten pages or 100. If you’ve done your homework and put together an impressive, tight little package, then you’re going to be in great shape. No one wants to read a 50 page business plan.

If your motivation is funding, they’re going to ask for the specific additional information they want. Your plan is more likely to be too long (I’ll call it a data dump) than too short. Too short would mean you’re missing critical information.

Do Your Homework, Then Practice Brevity

Just because you’re writing a succinct (and therefore effective) business plan that hits on the critical elements for potential investors doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do copious homework in preparing that nice, little plan. You absolutely should. Especially when it comes to knowing your financials. The easiest and most accurate way to do this is to build the financials from the bottom up. If it’s a new business, then start by determining your addressable market, then what percent of that market you are going to get, how much are they going to spend (lifetime value), and how much is it going to cost you to get them? If you can answer these questions accurately for the first twelve months, year two, and year three, then your financials are going to be in a good, realistic state for potential investors to pick them apart and (hopefully) like what they see.

The Critical Elements of an Effective Business Plan and Pitch

Your plan and pitch to investors should absolutely address each of these topics:

- What market problem you’re solving
- How you’re solving it
- Target market, size, and segmentation
- Your sales channels
- Marketing efforts
- Competitor analysis and your competitive advantage
- Real financial projections
- Key milestones in your business to date and a timeline of expected milestones to come
- Key team members and advisers championing your success

The Pitch: Turn it Into a Narrative

Once you’ve put your business plan together, ensured it’s not too long, and that it covers all of the important bases, then it’s time to start working on your pitch. I won’t go into too much detail here except to say that people (and don’t forget that investors are people too) love a compelling story. If you can find a way to weave the elements of your business plan into a tale that illustrates how your business is going to solve people’s problems, garner their loyalty, and generate revenue then it’s going to be a lot easier for you to pitch to investors. After all, stories engage our emotions and get us to root for the protagonist to win.

Make your business the hero of your story and back that story up with facts and figures to prove your potential for success and investors will appreciate the work you’ve put in and be much more likely to infuse your enterprise with the funds it needs to get up and running.

About Sabrina Parsons

Heir to a business planning kingdom and CEO of the world leader in business plan and management software (flagship products include LivePlan and Business Plan Pro) Sabrina knows more than a little something about planning, pitching, and managing a startup to success. Sabrina took over Palo Alto Software in 2007 (her father was founder and business planning icon, Tim Berry) and went on to not only beat the odds (approximately 70% of family-owned businesses don’t survive succession) but to successfully expand the company’s offering from a shrink-wrapped software company (Business Plan Pro) to a booming SaaS corporation, hosting business planning, pitching, and financial management in the cloud (for more than 60,000 small and mid-sized businesses and counting) via LivePlan (www.liveplan.com).
Sabrina is a graduate of Princeton University and president of the Princeton Entrepreneurs Network. She is also a mother of 3 young boys; involved in multiple business planning competitions; blogs for Forbes Women; and is a passionate advocate for evolving the workplace for today’s modern parents, including instituting and personally taking advantage of Palo Alto Software’s baby-friendly office policy.

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Happy International Women’s Day!

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Today is International Women’s Day – an event that, over the decades, has grown to be a day of empowerment for women all around the world. As gender equality continually keeps extending from the home to the workplace, it is important to support these young women who have been told that they can do anything that they put their minds to. That support is something our CEO Deborah Sweeney is very passionate about:

“As a mother and a business owner, I have met and grappled with the very same challenges that many women face everyday when attempting to balance their family and their career. Historically, women have not had many role models to show them that this type of balance was even possible – the stereotype was either of the business-driven woman who was too busy for dating or a family, or the contrite housewife. Happily times have changed, and both men and women have shown that it is more than possible to successfully run a business while building, and spending time with, their family. As the next generation of business leaders begins to form and come into its own, those of us who have experience striking a healthy balance between our life at work and our life at home need to give back and help show that young women do not need to choose between having a family and a career. If we make the effort to share our successes, and our hardships, tomorrow’s business leaders will be fully capable of continuing our legacy and moving the gender equality movement forward.”

MyCorporation is proud to help men and women all across the United States begin their own businesses, and wishes everyone reading a very fruitful and empowering International Women’s Day.

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Join Summit Journey Coaching for a Coaching Webinar Dec. 19th!

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Save the date! On December 19th at 8 AM PST, success coach Ed Kelly and the gang at Summit Journey Coaching will be providing a webinar on “Why Resolutions Fail but Goals Succeed.”

In this webinar, you’ll find out why resolutions tend to fail but goals succeed in the long run and how you can be at least 75% more likely to accomplish what you want in 2013 by writing down your goals.

Register now (for FREE!) and rise and shine with Summit Journey Coaching tomorrow – they want to help you get started on planning your goals for 2013!

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Making Sure Your Brainstorm Isn't a Brain Fart

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People either love brainstorming, or they hate it. There seems to be no inhabitable middle ground when it comes to that type of group work. But, more often than not, those who hate brainstorming have had to live through session after session of forced meetings, with managers who shoot down any idea that doesn’t fit in with what the executive order has already thought up. What other option remains to a bored employee have in that type of a meeting than to try and beat their high score on Angry Birds?

However brainstorming CAN actually be useful – those in charge just have to structure their sessions properly. So if you’re planning on getting everyone in your department together for a little session, remember to:

1. Keep things nice and cozy.

One of the biggest problems with brainstorming sessions is that they are, well, too big. Size matters, and when you stuff a room with fifty people, there just isn’t much impetus for the sole employee to contribute. Even if they have some huge, money saving idea, they’ll keep quiet because there are forty-nine other people to compete with. People will always take the path of least resistance, and the one that is less likely to embarrass them. So when if you’re in management and you’re calling people together, keep things nice and cozy. Divy things up between groups of about five or six people. The employees that are put into these groups can be more personable with one another and, since they can actually talk to one another, they can build on good ideas to make them better.

2. Give everyone some time to think.

Ugh, the “surprise meeting” – is there anything more middle-management than a company wide e-mail, instructing everyone to gather in the conference room for a meeting? The whole idea is born out of some ill-conceived business school notion that spontaneity is the father of great ideas – don’t let your employees think too much about their ideas, or else those ideas may stagnate. Please, for the sake of everyone’s sanity, don’t buy into that. Give everyone some time to think, to jot down a few ideas. A morning before a meeting, a day, a weekend; you don’t want to stress everyone out. Just give them some time to write something down before the ball gets rolling – it will help them be more confident in their ideas, more willing to share, and better equipped to discuss what they do bring into the meeting.

3. It’s okay if you don’t find a solution to the problem.

Stress can kill innovation – lock everyone in a room and say that no one can leave until a problem is solved, and you can bet your bottom dollar that no one will suggest any answer that either hasn’t been brought up already, or has been used before. The best way to end a meeting is with a solution to the problem that inspired the little office get-together, but if no one can find one then those in charge need to be willing to say ‘Okay, well we can always try again later.’ People can only focus for so long, and their minds will fry if they are forced to churn out idea after idea after idea after idea. You can always re-visit a problem after everyone has had some time to recharge.

Just remember to always thank anyone who was willing to take time away from their work to help solve a business-wide problem. Brainstorming can be thankless work, and if people feel like their ideas are worthless, and thus the whole process is pointless, morale is going to stink and nothing will come of the meetings. But if you keep the groups small, and give your staff the breathing room they need to think and re-think an issue, brainstorming can actually be a positive exercise.

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