Freedom Countdown

Archive for August, 2009

I’ve put this particular task off for months.  I knew I needed to determine whether I wanted to operate my business as a sole proprietorship, an S Corporation, a C Corporation, or an LLC.  Main main goal has been to minimize my AGI since so many things are means tested these days, along with minimizing my taxes.

I immediately threw out a sole proprietorship because it offers no protection from various unknown liabilities.  I also threw out an LLC, but frankly I don’t remember why.  Now I’m down to a Corporation of some type.  I know C Corps offer significant advantages on minimizing AGI and paying for health benefits and S Corps offer advantages on reduced withholding taxes.

I think I’m out of my league, there are too many variables and I’m just NOT a tax accountant.  So I’m going to take all of my questions to a local CPA and pay for an hour of their time to pick their brains.

In the mean time, I have hired a local high school student and must issue my first payroll check this week.  I don’t want to file multiple payroll tax reports for multiple companies so there has been pressure to get the structure set up and a bank account opened before the first check is written.

I’ve gone ahead and established a new corporation and have a little bit of time before I have to make the formal election for an S  Corp, if that’s the way I decide to go.  Setting it up was incredibly easy.  Everything with my state’s Secretary of State was online and done within 24 hours with a few simple questions.  The hardest part was picking a name.

Next, creating the corporate bylaws, holding the first Board of Director’s meeting (with myself), and issuing a resolution to use a local bank were all very simple due to a book I checked out from the library about forming a corporation in my state that included a CD with fill-in-the-blank forms for the official documents for all of this.

Finally, I visited www.irs.gov to get my Employer Identification Number (EIN) online in a matter of minutes for my newly formed Corporation.

Two days, $300 in filing fees later, and I have a real company and I should never have put it off so long.  It was painless.

I need to find the drumbeat for my new business.  What’s that you say? Well, in Six Sigma Lean, the goal is to operate a process, like a factory line, in a consistent, efficient, error free manner so that one item comes off the line every set increment of time.  Like 1 candle per second, that’s the drumbeat of the candle production line.  Every second of every minute 1 candle is made, boom, boom, boom, just like a steady drumbeat.

As a part time business owner, I find myself rushing to get orders placed, then waiting for the merchandise to come in, then rushing to process the merchandise.  Or letting the accounting pile up for weeks, then cramming for hours to get caught up.  Or blogging.   There’s nothing steady about any aspect of my business and it contributes to an overall feeling of being out of control.  Things that were manageable when I began the business are totally unmanageable as the business has grown.

My options all revolve around becoming more disciplined in my activities.  Perhaps, I do accounting every Saturday morning, or divide my orders into smaller orders and place them every Monday and Wednesday so that there is a steady drumbeat of merchandise arriving every week. This becomes especially important if I hire someone to work with me because I’ll need a predictable amount of work for them to do.

It’s weird, but it just might start looking a little more like a job and a little less like a dream.  Hmmmmm.

A friend mentioned that she set up a feed to my blog and I realized that I had no idea how she did that.  I didn’t remember setting anything up.  But sure enough at the very bottom of my blog is a little RSS.  Why in the world is it all the way down there?  Seems like it needs a more prominent position.  I’ll have to change that at some point.

I decided to learn more about setting up feeds and the first article I found, included feeds plus several other must have plugins.  I already had about half of them and am working on the other half.  It’s a great article for WordPress beginners so check it out.

Getting my inventory and workspace organized has finally risen to the top of my priority list.  I started about a month ago moving everything related to my business out to the barn, as we lovingly call outbuildings where I live.  That was the easy part.  The internet access was much harder.  I don’t have DSL in my rural area and rely on the  wireless internet provider from hell.  They are the only provider that works with my day job’s remote access requirements so I’m stuck with them until Obama brings me DSL or cell phone signals get stronger.

My first solution after hours of research on the internet, and a worthless conversation with a clerk in a Best Buy, was a range expander.  The theory is that it can pick up the wireless signal from my router at the edge of it’s range and extend it on into my barn.  The only problem was that the end of my router’s range appears to be in the road somewhere, hardly a spot to mount a range expander.

The next step was to find a stronger router.  I actually tried to make a homemade antenna based on an online video to boost the power of my existing router.  When this didn’t work, I bought the highest rated router I could find with two antennas.  After messing around with it for a week to no avail, I finally called the internet provider from hell and they came out, spent about three hours trying out a variety of things and decided we needed to hardwire the barn with an ethernet cable directly to the rooftop wireless antenna.

But…. they don’t bury cable or suspend it overhead between two buildings, they just lay it on the ground.  So we had to find someone willing to dig a trench in 105 degree weather.  A month later it’s all done and working great,  but it was every bit as troublesome as I had thought it would be.

Next step, hire a high school student to help me clean things up, get them organized, and do the shipping tasks I dislike so much.