Get Incorporated and Situated

Get Incorporated and Situated

So by now, you are on your way with a business plan in hand and newfound free time to start your company. The next step is to hire a lawyer and other professionals. In order to operate properly there is a tremendous volume of documents to be processed and submitted in a timely fashion. This unavoidable bureaucracy could easily paralyze any business if not done properly.

It is critical to have a great lawyer who will expedite your paperwork and bail you out of some of the complexities in business. At first, you may find that hiring outside counsel hourly is too expensive for your small business. In this case, you should try to have a multi-disciplined lawyer, preferably a generalist with a business edge, directly on your team. This person can perform many management and legal functions and can serve as “General Counsel” if he is qualified.

We have found that over a long period, an early employees’ option to accept stock, stock options, and other good quality incentives in a successful company will become worth much more than their hourly wages. If your company is not already successful, or has not already raised considerable funds, then most likely it cannot afford professional salaries anyway. Low salaries and heavy incentives for hard workers is one of the best broad strategies you can adopt in making your company successful. With this in mind, the lawyer on your team could get paid predominantly with incentive pay like stock options, and therein agree to accept lower nominal wages, which would help finance the company by not draining the bank account in the early years. You could apply this same incentive-heavy recruitment strategy when hiring an accountant, computer engineer, or other professionals that you may require.

Furthermore, you can attempt to help defray other ordinary cash expenses for any vendor or partner by offering any of a wide variety of incentives that directly correlate with your own business success. Having an aggressive lawyer and other professionals aligned with your financial best interests cannot hurt you, unless you overpay. You should interview a number of professional vendors and choose the ones you favor. From that short list, determine if any of them are interested in your alternate payment arrangement. Certainly, the more past successes you’ve had, the more likely they are to bite.

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