Did you know an effective and experienced business attorney increases your company’s profits and the likelihood of success for your company?

After more than four decades of service to the San Diego and California business, science and tech, real estate and medical / healthcare communities , I am consistently asked two questions by business owners and entrepreneurs at our first meeting:  Why should I spend money on an attorney, and how is that going to increase my profits?

It is not surprising that many business start ups and entrepreneurs are not as concerned with protecting their new business assets (or their own home and money) as much as they are concerned with locking in the right name for their business and getting things going.  As the son of a small tool and die owner, and after running my own company for several years, I clearly understand the goal to preserve all available capital for getting a business up and running, and to keep overhead as low as possible.

That’s exactly my point.  You can’t simply download a form from some website, file a few papers with the State of California and be in business.  If you want to get through that critical first year, and keep the money you make, there are several critical business decisions that need to take place before you sell to your first customer.

Effective business owners pour their hearts, time and money into their new business.  They are the risk takers who are willing to go after an idea or pursue and opportunity.  I genuinely respect that. An experienced business attorney increases your company’s profits by helping to structure your business for success from the outset, while protecting all you are about to invest into it.  The Watkins Firm has helped to launch thousands and thousands of companies over the years.  Odds are, we’ve done work in the industry you’re about to enter.  We can help you make important connections and take steps to get a strong, fast start out of the gate.

So let’s protect your family, and all of that hard work and effort you are about to pour into this new venture.  Setting up a company isn’t simply about being able to transact business in the State of California (although that is a part of it).  The most important objective is to protect you, your home, your money, your personal assets, your spouse (if any) and your new company from anything that might come up in the short or long-term future.

California is desperate for revenue, and if you don’t understand your responsibilities as a business owner or employer, ongoing corporate governance and compliance, tax reporting responsibilities and the importance of well crafted contracts, you may lose your business before it ever really gets going.  The biggest questions when starting your company usually aren’t “is this going to work?” and “what type of entity should I select.” The greatest challenges arise out of the personal relationships between business owners, the company and their customers, suppliers and ultimately with their own employees.  One critical issue you will often face fairly quickly after establishing a profitable business is “how can I bring in more money to be able to expand this company?”  Successful business owners are always walking the line between accounts receivable and cash flow.  You may have a lot of contracts and orders, but if you can’t fill them and keep the company running in the mean time what’s the point?

An experienced business attorney increases your company’s profits and sets you up for short and long-term success. I take a personal interest in you and your business.  We discuss everything about your business before it even starts:

• Who is involved and what are their roles?
• How will additional investment be brought into the business?
• What happens if someone isn’t pulling their own weight, or if one of the principals die?
• How do you protect your personal home, assets and spouse from liabilities arising out of your new business?
• What business are you in, and where are your customers?  What products or services are you offering and how do things work here in San Diego as a California business person?

Where is this company going?  What are your goals? What do you see down the road in 3 years?  5 years?

Pro-Tip: “The corporate veil is an important concept to understand, especially if you’re going to be doing some big business, you’re going to have big liability or you could personally not have big liability. And also it is wise to structure your entity right up front so that it can be sold down the road if the right opportunity arise. You can have an entity that can be sold in whole or bring in investors. If you do everything right, you get to do all these things. If you get a big opportunity and you didn’t set your company up correctly, then the person who’s got the investment money will say, ‘well, this person’s not professional. This person’s not really serious about doing business.’ And you’ll miss it all because you didn’t pay attention in the beginning when you formed a company.

One of the biggest mistakes that those forming new companies make, especially at the outset, is they don’t pay attention to the corporate documents. They don’t pay attention to the LLCs operating agreement. They don’t pay attention to the shareholders’ agreement. And they take some incomplete, boilerplate default paperwork and then down the road they get into a dispute, they’re making some money and now there’s real issues that would’ve been easy to address back at the beginning.

When we bring in an LLC, we’ll charge $1,500. You can get it done online for $500, maybe less. All you’re getting is access to someone’s form file. But what we do is we create that relationship with you and we go through and tell you why we’re doing this and how it could impact you and why we’re filling this form out and what your options are and all those things that don’t take very much time, but it puts your mind in the right frame to know why I have this company and what each document does.

And the same is true for your tax ID number or your, if you’re a doctor, a tax ID number is, is your same number you use to go contract with providers insurance to get you paid and all these other little things. You’ve got a relationship with a lawyer who’s probably represented exact same companies like yours. And you can ask basic questions about vendors, about contracting, about how I sign my documents, how I sign my name, my articles, my bylaws. We give you a menu, take this, I wouldn’t do that for your kind of company. We go through them all, tell you what they mean and then three years later you got somebody investing with you and they say, oh, I’m going do ‘this’ or ‘that,’ and you will be able to say, ‘no, no, we already have that written down and spelled out.  You’ll remember that they can’t do that to you because you spent a little time with your lawyer forming your company.” – Dan Watkins, Founding Partner

The decisions you make today will affect the short-term success of your company and make a large impact on the amount of money you are able to make, or the amount that the State of California or some other creditor can take from you if something goes wrong.  We will work together to cost effectively build the type of company that will free you up to thrive.  We will protect all of the sweat, hard work and money you pour into it so that you may keep as much of the money you earn as possible, while building a company that is an asset in and of itself.

We invite you to review our podcast Episode 34 – Business Formation as well as the strong recommendations of our clients and contact the Watkins Firm or call 858-535-1511 for a complimentary consultation today.