Internet Marketing and Social Media Consultants

I get asked often about what goes into setting up a new company online. Since I’m going through the process of creating a new company, I thought I would document the process here so anyone who is interested might be able to benefit from this.

I had actually incorporated NetResults here in Oregon last year. I was thinking about having a side business to offer training, but just didn’t have the time. So right now NetResults is set up as NetResults, LLC in the state of Oregon. That cost be about $500 in fees through LegalZoom.com.

I chose an LLC because of the minimum amount of paperwork involved in maintaining that type of organization. There are some tax benefits to being an S-corp, but I learned last year that you can actually amend your LLC with the IRS to be taxed as an S-corp.

I’ll be meeting with my new accountant next week to go over that, as well as explain all NetResults business’s to them so they can help set up the chart of accounts in Quickbooks. At USWeb we used Peachtree, a decision I was never fully on board with. I like Quickbooks for several reasons. First, it runs native on a Mac. Second, most accountants seem to like using it with their clients. Peachtree may very well be better in someways, but for my needs of keeping things simple, Quickbooks seems like a better idea.

I will also be looking for good legal representation, which I get the feeling giving my location is going to be a challenge. I live in Ashland, OR., not exactly the hub of Internet business. But hopefully I can find someone who is capable of understanding the business. Good legal representation is very important. Many companies wait until they need a lawyer for potential litigation before they bring one into their business. That can be a disaster. I decided that this time I need to bring an attorney on retainer from the beginning. I’m hoping I can get away with a small monthly retainer that has some roll-over hours. My personal feelings on legal issues are if you do the right thing, and maintain an attorney, you have little to worry about. If someone threatens to sue you, you just refer them to your attorney and let them handle it.

From an HR perspective, things are pretty simple…I don’t have any. Blogitive production is being handled by a great set of Ruby on Rails developers, and I only have one contractor that actually works on Blogitive daily. We used to have two people working the day-to-day administration of Blogitive, but I’m going through the steps right now to streamline things a lot to make it run off one person. I’ll post another posting at some point about the inner workings of Blogitive for those interested.

Now I need to focus on my communications. USWeb uses Vocalocity for telephones. This is a nice system that allows the company to have a great virtual PBX. Everyone can dial each other with 3 digits, there is a nice phone tree. And you even get to chose your hold music (I made it Left my Wallet in El Segundo, but I’m guessing they are going to change that). But to be honest the service is not as good as it should be. There are a lot of dropped calls, my phone often didn’t ring when people called, and customer service with Vocalocity is pretty lacking. So it’s Vonage for me. I got two Vonage lines, one for Business and one for work. I also singed up for GrandCentral for my personal life. This works great because I can call people from my work line and keep that seperate. But anyone who needs to get a hold of me personally can call my GrandCentral line and every phone in my life rings (which is like a fire alarm going off in my office by the way). When I want to leave the office and still get work calls, I just forward my Vonage business line to my GrandCentral number.

I also switched my email from a simple POP server to Gmail IMAP. This works better with my iPhone. Because my old USWeb email had been around for 11 years, I had to get SpamArrest to block all the Spam to my email, but I think Gmail filters will work well for my new email.

For physical mail I decided to use Earth Class Mail at Remotecontrolmail.com. This is a service that receives your mail, scans the envelope and updates an online system that lets you review it. You can then decide if they shred it, recycle it, forward it to you, or open and scan the contents for you.

This is a great service for a few reasons. First, it doesn’t really cost much more than just getting a mail box at the UPS store. Second, it allows me to check my physical mail as easily as I check email. Third, they recycle a lot more mail than I would, which makes me feel like a good green person. And fourth, it allows me to travel without worrying about checking mail.

The obvious downside is that if someone sends me a big package, they need to forward it to me, adding to the expense.

But on the up side, next month they will have check processing so they can just deposit a check right into your account. That should work well for me, especially with the amount of travel I plan on doing in the next couple years.

So that’s about where I am for now. I’ll update next week when I move a little further. Feel free to ask any questions, and of course constructive advice is always appreciated.