Do I register LLC?

As a disclaimer, this is not legal or financial advice, and these are just thoughts of sellers with several years of experience.

We are not going to get into definitions of LLC (Scorp, Ccorp) and tax advantages, as ya’ll can google them or look up on IRS website. Let’s focus on business aspect of things.

1. Easy LLC registration – if you are one person show, or have a few easy-going partners, setting up LLC is relatively inexpensive with your state government commission of incorporation. Please see tips for doing it.

2.  Liability Exposure – keeping your personal finances and LLC separately may limit your legal exposure if something God forbid happens. In other words – limiting exposure to your LLC’s assets and not your personal.

3. Not sharing your identity – this is one of the major reasons for many folks. Unless you want the whole world to know your name, your address, when dealing with vendors, customers, you want to have an LLC. When you register LLC and have a registered agent it is not easy to figure out for a random person who owns the LLC.

4. Professionalism – when dealing with the vendors whether you purchase via Alibaba for PL or local vendors here in the US, they like when you are a business and have your company email (yes, LLC and corporate email are too different things, but they are related here).

5. Tax treatment choices – having LLC does not mean you are taxed as LLC. You can still be taxed as sole proprietor, or partnership (2+ members), or you can even elect to be taxed as S-corporation). Obviously talk to your CPA at some point how you want to set it up.

6. Amazon account (rumors) – when opening accounts with Amazon, we heard (don’t have any proof) that people with registered legal businesses have better rate of success getting approved.

How do I register LLC?

Here is some generic guidance on how to register LLC for small business owners:

Path 1: If you want to be your own registered agent (i.e. when people google your company name they see your name as registered agent)

1.      Find your state commission of incorporation (for example, if you are in VA - www.scc.virginia.gov)

2.      Register with them, and select what form you would like (i.e. LLC in this case).

3.      If you have questions, feel free to call them (but these are self-explanatory).

4.      Pay the fees (it used to be $100-200 but you need to check with your state), and you are pretty much done.

Path 2 - more confidential: If you don’t want to disclose your name as registered agent… spoiler… it will cost you whooping $70-$100 more per year 😊.

1.      Google ‘registered agent’ in your state… you will get plenty of hits.

2.      Contact them and designate them as your registered agent (i.e. pay the fees and get information from them for state commission of incorporation).

Then you pretty much follow steps in Path 1 above:

·        Find your state commission of incorporation (for example, if you are in VA - www.scc.virginia.gov)

·        Register with them and select what form you would like (i.e. LLC in this case). Don’t forget to put your registered agent when filling out form online (because you just paid for this, right? 😊 )

·        If you have questions, feel free to call them (but these are self-explanatory).

·        Pay the fees (it used to be $100-200 but you need to check with your state), and you are pretty much done.

Since this article has two topics there are two conclusions. 1) Do I register LLC? -It’s up to you 😊 2) Is it hard to register LLC on your own and save some cash for future business? -No 😊