As a small-medium business CEO, you’re forced to wear many hats. You have to handle sales, marketing, product or service development, building out operations, hiring and managing a team – the list goes on and on. Even though there’s a lot to handle, for most…
Penny Wise and Pound Foolish: Pay $10k or Lose $10 Million? I once had a client who came to me during an exciting time in his business. He started his company only a few years earlier and it quickly reached escape velocity. He was doing…
Company Set-Up The so-called corporate documents legally required for a company range from simple boilerplate templates – which can be sourced from places like Legalzoom or Clerky – to more nuanced documents that need to be custom drafted by a business lawyer. Company Founders &…
Minimum Documentation Required: LLCs & Corporations What is the minimum documentation requirement for each of these entities in order to give the business owner legal protection for their business and have the appropriate paperwork on file? LLCs: The Napkin Contract For LLCs, the requirements are…
Three-Headed Monster: Your Finance Team First you might ask: what is a lawyer doing talking to me about finance? The answer is that the point of this blog series is to identify key areas of business risk and de-risk them. Not having the proper financial…
Intellectual Property Primer: The Four Buckets Another key area to de-risk in your business upfront is intellectual property (IP). This is often a confusing concept for many company owners, so I’ll attempt to demystify it here. First, what is intellectual property? Simply put, it starts…
IP Registration In some cases, you obtain ownership over your IP as soon as it comes out of your head and you put it into the world in some sort of fixed format. But you still need to formally register your IP with the appropriate…
Licensing Another area to think about for de-risking your small business is licensing. Ask yourself, other than paying taxes, how else might your company need to interact with the government (whether local, state or federal)? Regulation. In other words, what standard does the government impose…
I wrote the De-Risk Your Biz Series during the second half of 2023. I note the date for reference since I know some of the information in the Series will become outdated. But the concepts, the frameworks – those should hold up for a while….