How to Start a Business 2023: Step by Step Beginners Blueprint to Plan and Launch your first successful LLC, Sole Proprietorship, and Startup including Groundbreaking Strategies for Lowering Taxes

By Nicholas Regan

No matter how little you know about starting your own business, you can build one from scratch by following a few simple strategies. 

 

Being your own boss, having complete control of your income, and making all the important decisions at work – this is a dream for many who are eyeing entrepreneurship as their ultimate life goal. 

 

But while becoming an entrepreneur may sound deceptively easy, that certainly isn't the case. 

 

In reality, only 40% of startups are actually able to push through the initial difficult years and finally start making profits.  

 

That said, becoming an entrepreneur is an incredibly rewarding experience, as it opens the doors to promising opportunities and allows you to make some serious dough. 

 

What's even more encouraging is that you can have it up and running in no time! All you need to do is follow the proven path that many successful entrepreneurs have taken.

 

With this guidebook by your side, you'll feel confident in every step you take toward creating your own startup business. 

 

Inside, you'll discover:

• What you need to know to start your own business in the post-pandemic era – everything from your business plan… to financing… to marketing 
• A no-nonsense review of the entrepreneurship world – discover the truth behind owning your own business
• How you can save big time on your taxes by turning your hobby into a business 
• A detailed breakdown of the startup costs you'll encounter – licenses, permits, machinery… and everything in between
• The #1 reason why most entrepreneurs choose LLCs over other business structures
• The critical components of a business plan – and their importance in ensuring a smooth launch from Day 1
• How a solid marketing plan can help your business grow by leaps and bounds
• The most promising exit strategies to harvest maximum benefits and pay minimum taxes
• Common (and often catastrophic) mistakes newbies make that stall their business growth – and how you can avoid these pitfalls

And so much more!

 

There are no overnight successes on the path to becoming an entrepreneur – the journey to entrepreneurship is a long but extremely rewarding one. 

 

No other feeling can surpass the joy of being your own boss… and with the right guidance and information, you can turn your dream into a forever reality.  

 

So… what are you waiting for?

 

If you want to break into one of the most rewarding ways of making money, then scroll up and click the "Buy Now" button right now.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nicholas Regan
• Release date: Oct 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215029305

Book preview

How to Start a Business 2023

Step by Step Beginners Blueprint to Plan and Launch your first successful LLC, Sole Proprietorship, and Startup including Groundbreaking Strategies for Lowering Taxes

Nicholas Regan

Copyright © 2022 by Nicholas Regan

All rights reserved.

It is not legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited and any storage of this document is not allowed unless with written permission from the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

As a way of saying thank you for your purchase, I wanted to offer you access to this amazing book for free: Entrepreneurial Drive

Access the course here: https://tinyurl.com/2u3dpess

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This guide takes you through the characteristics of a gritty person, the habits that gritty people develop, and shows you what you need to do to build your grit to leave your old life and become a successful entrepreneur and turn your dreams into reality.

Contents

Introduction - LLC Startup 2022

1. Celebrate Yourself

2. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The Whole Truth About Entrepreneurship

3. Get Off Your Hobbyhorse

4. Do You Need a Legal Structure for Your Startup?

5. C Corps, S Corps, and LLCs, Oh My!

6. Why Do So Many Entrepreneurs Choose LLCs?

7. The Taxman Cometh

8. Your Step-by Step Guide to Your Own LLC

9. Don’t Let This Happen To You (Part I)

10. Prior Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance

11. Budgeting Made Easy

12. Marketing Your Way To Your Goals

13. There Are No Bootstraps, So Hold Out Your Hand

14. The Leap of Faith

15. Don't Let This Happen To You (Part II)

Final Words - LLC Startup 2022

Introduction - Taxes for Small Businesses 2022

16. What to Do With All This Money?

17. The Particulars of Federal Payroll Taxes

18. What Uncle Sam Wants from Your Income

19. The States of Taxation

20. Other Taxes That Affect Business Owners

21. Minimizing Sole Proprietor Taxes

22. Use Your LLC to Legally Pay Less to Uncle Sam (And Others)

23. Corporations and Their Tax Reductions

24. Which Tax Should My Business Elect?

25. Additional Tax Minimizing Items

26. Stocks, Bonds, Mutual Funds, and Taxes

27. Exit Strategies

28. Don’t Make These Common Mistakes

Final Words - Taxes for Small Businesses 2022

Introduction - LLC Startup 2022

You’ve probably heard of the Great Resignation that started during the coronavirus pandemic, wherein many corporate employees took stock of their working lives and decided they didn’t want to spend the rest of their lives in the job they had at the time. As a result, 4.4 million new businesses got their start in 2020 - which is about 50% more than the annual average of the preceding ten years.

Whether you consider yourself a member of the Great Resignation, and whether or not the pandemic was for you what novelists call the inciting event - you’re now ready to make the leap into entrepreneurship. But, as many business owners can attest, that leap can be a little scary in addition to being exciting.

Even if you had a previous job where you felt bored to death, you were familiar with the boredom. Routines and ruts are comfortable places to be, and you’re about to face the unknown. This isn’t comfortable, but can definitely bring you significant rewards that your old routines can’t.

Fortunately, you don’t have to do it alone. This book will give you the information that you need to make smart decisions. Having a business structure such as a limited liability company or LLC is the foundation for a successful enterprise, but you’ll need some additional fundamentals too. We’ll discuss them in this book as well, but remember that you don’t have to take all these steps by yourself.

There are a lot of resources that are available to business owners, and plenty of service providers who can take over the necessities that you don’t like to do or aren’t an expert at. No one is an expert at everything, especially when it comes to business, so don’t feel bad for not knowing everything. However, you do need to understand the basics, even if you may eventually delegate these responsibilities to someone else. This understanding is necessary, if for no other reason than making sure that you do not get taken advantage of.

You’ll discover that your mindset is important to your success. While this may sound like some kind of New Age or spiritual belief that isn’t in your own belief system, there’s actually hard science behind why you need to tend to your mind while you’re building your business.

Although we want business owners to be successful and we champion everyone who has the guts to take that next step into the unknown, we’re not going to sugarcoat it. Unless you are the personal friend or relative of an extremely powerful influencer, chances are you’re not going to hit the big leagues right away.

This book will give it to you straight - the good, the bad, and the ugly of owning your own firm. That way you’ll have the best chance of making your company sustainable over time, because you won’t be surprised by any of the typical issues that present challenges for startups. You’ll also learn the difference between a hobby, a side hustle, and a company. For example, the IRS doesn’t allow you to take tax deductions for a hobby, but you can for legitimate business expenses.

Right now, you may or may not have an idea how you want to structure your business: whether it will just be you, or you and an assistant or two, or whether you’re partnering up with someone, or planning to hire a team. Even if it will be just you, it’s still important that you form a business entity such as an LLC. You’ll find out why it’s so critical, as well as some of the other entity structures that businesses use and what kinds of businesses they’re best for.

Many entrepreneurs choose LLCs, and you’ll learn why that is. They’re not just for small companies, so if you’ve got growth plans for your company you don’t necessarily have to make any changes just because you get bigger.

A major reason people choose LLCs is due to tax flexibility. You’ll also discover the taxes that you’ll be responsible for one way or another. To paraphrase George Carlin, Uncle Sam loves you and he needs money!

While some consultants make it sound like creating the LLC is difficult and arduous (and should only be done by someone who charges hundreds of dollars an hour), it’s really just a step-by-step process that we’ll go into. While you may still end up hiring someone to guide you through it, you’ll know what you need for each piece, which should help bring down the cost significantly.

Speaking of reducing costs, you’ll also learn some of the common mistakes people make when they create an LLC, which can be costly to undo. Through reading this book, you’ll learn what to do and what not to do. Hopefully, there will be no undoing of errors necessary because you’ll be able to get it right the first time.

After you’ve learned all the details involved in LLCs, we’ll move on to the business plan. For some reason this often strikes dread into the heart of a budding business owner - but we promise it doesn’t really have to be that bad!

Building a business plan does require you to do a little homework - but that homework is specifically designed to help you be successful. For example, you might need to research your competition and hone in on what makes you different. If you don’t do that, you’ll have a much harder time successfully launching your company.

We also go into detail on a few of the components of the business plan that tend to trip people up, like the financial projections and marketing plan. When you understand how to generate them and why they’re important, they’re not huge hurdles to get over. Instead, they’re smart factors in your growing business.

You’ll also get information about the resources that are available to you. If you are the kind of person who has trouble asking for help, you’re going to need to conquer that issue very quickly! No one, not even the Bezoses, Musks, and Gateses of the world, built their companies all by themselves. Involve yourself in a community and you’ll end up with a lot of problem-solvers on your side.

Becoming a business owner does require a leap of faith, and you can’t wait until you have everything down perfectly. By that time, the market has already passed you by and so your work product, whether it’s a good or a service, just has to be good enough for you to launch it. You’ll refine it over time, and we’ll discuss how you can do that.

Finally, you’ll learn about the common mistakes that new entrepreneurs make. Forewarned is forearmed, and you’ll be able to look back and reality-check the plans you’ve put in place to make sure you’re not committing any of these errors.

We’ve got your back! We are business owners ourselves, and giving back to the community is important to us. We were able to find support when we needed it, and this is one of the ways we pay it back. Or maybe we’re paying it forward, at this point! We’ve made some of these mistakes so you don’t have to and will break everything down into easily digestible steps.

Some new entrepreneurs are good at budgets and projections but bad at marketing, and for some, it’s the other way around. We’ve designed this book so that you will get what you need either way, and we’ll be cheering you along on your journey.

As we’ve found, owning a business can literally be life-changing. So why wait any longer to embark on the life that brings you purpose and meaning? Let’s get started so you can start making those changes!

Chapter 1

Celebrate Yourself

Congratulations! You’re just getting started on what could be one of the most fulfilling journeys that you’ll ever experience. There will be ups and downs, so start off on a positive note. If you understand why you’ve begun this odyssey and hold on tight to your why, overcoming the obstacles you’ll find on your path gets much easier.

What is your why?

Take a moment to reflect on your reason for launching your own business. There are two basic types of motivation, known as intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic motivation happens when you’re doing something for its own sake. For example, learning more about a subject because you find it interesting is an intrinsic motivation.

On the other hand, learning more about a subject because you want to get good grades, or because it’s required for you to get a certification or promotion at work is an extrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivations are things that you do to avoid punishment or earn some kind of reward; they are external to you. Making a lot of money is an extrinsic motivation, as is winning praise or respect from others like parents, relatives, partners, or neighbors - anyone who isn’t you. Competing in a race or contest is motivated extrinsically.

When you launch your own business, at least in theory, your ability to earn money is unlimited. If you’re working for someone else, you’re limited to how much they agree to pay you. This may be one of the reasons that you decided to launch your own company. If you believe that making a lot of money is your why, you’re probably not going to be very successful. The problem with extrinsic motivations is that when the going gets tough, extrinsic motivators don’t help you keep going.

It is the intrinsic motivation that helps you reframe the problem from I can’t to How can I? If you came up with an extrinsic motivation when you thought about your why, such as making more money or having a more flexible schedule, you need to dig a little deeper. Ask yourself questions like, why do you want to make more money?

If you keep coming up with external reasons, keep digging until you find a why that’s internal to you. For example, maybe you want to make more money because it allows you to have an impact on your community by increasing financial literacy, which is important to you because you were poor growing up because your parents didn’t know anything about finances.

Maybe you want to make money so that you can create a foundation to bring clean drinking water to the whole world. Or you’re on a mission to undermine the surveillance state, and you need lots of money to fund research and development.

Whatever your why is, make sure you write it down. You could even, if you want, create a mission statement that spells out your purpose and the values that will get you there. It may sound silly to do this now, but as a beginning business owner you’ll find a lot of tasks that need to be done, and you can get very busy working in your business instead of working on it.

There will be days, weeks, or even months where you feel like you’re just putting out fires. Having your mission written down in a place where you can easily find it is an easy way to keep reminding yourself why you chose this path. Make sure that you’re constantly reminding yourself of why you need to figure out answers instead of giving up when it gets tough.

Mindset is the key to success

We get it - sometimes people see or hear the word mindset and think we’re about to take a detour down the woo-woo trail and get lost in a sea of affirmations or mumbo-jumbo that doesn’t have anything to do with your purpose or business. However, the truth is that being a business owner requires certain habits for your mind that may be new to you - and they are backed by science.

The subconscious mind makes a lot of decisions - potentially up to 90% of them. Even those of us who consider ourselves logical thinkers have a lot of activity going on in the subconscious that we’re not aware of, and very often all those lists of pros and cons and advantages and disadvantages are run after the fact, which allows the conscious mind to close the loop on those decisions.

Therefore, it’s important that your subconscious is aligned with your conscious mind when you want to accomplish launching your own business. You’re probably familiar with the fear of failure, and that might be a conscious fear that you have, but many people also, at the layer below their conscious mind, struggle with the fear of success.

That may sound very strange! Yet someone who was brought up in a household or a culture where successful people were belittled, or cut down, might be subconsciously worried about how their family and friends will react if they make it big. Will they lose friends and family? They may be afraid that they will become so out of touch with reality that they’ll alienate people without knowing it.

If you have a fear of success, or any other fear that you’re not aware of, you could end up reaching a plateau in your business, or failing outright, because you have a limiting belief about the world that’s holding you back from achieving success. Being aware of what’s going on subconsciously and working to remove those blocks helps you achieve the mindset you need to be successful.

Characteristics of the entrepreneurial mind

If you’ve worked for other people, you will need to make some changes in the way you think. Even if you haven’t and this is your first job, there are a few traits you’ll need to either have or acquire in order to make your business work.

You might not always know what the next thing to do is, and sometimes (for a brief period) it’s OK to complain or feel bad about something that doesn’t go right. After that brief period, if you need to do it all, you’ll have to pick yourself back up and solve the problem. These traits are all necessary for you to be able to handle the challenges that come your way.

Responsibility

As the business owner, the buck stops with you. If you have a team or a board of directors, you can certainly consult with them, but ultimately all the responsibility resides with you. If you can’t perform the job that you need to do consistently, and keep showing up, you can’t expect anyone else under you to do so.

Abundant thinking

For all intents and purposes, the supply of money is unlimited. (However, time is not). After all, there are a handful of hundred-billionaires roaming the earth right now, not to mention regular billionaires and multi-millionaires too. This means there’s enough for all of us.

A scarcity mindset turns you inward so that you protect what you have. You miss opportunities because you’re so busy guarding your assets that you’re not looking outward to see what else is there. Being abundant, by contrast, allows you to keep your eyes open and to help others without constantly being worried about what you’ll get in return.

People notice when you seem to be in it only for yourself. That’s why no one trusts sleazy used-car salesmen, because they always seem to be focused on getting cars off the lot and not whether it’s a good buy for you. By contrast, when you’re a giver, people notice that too and respond positively.

Independence

You’ve got to listen to yourself. There is a lot of advice out there, and not all of it will be applicable to you. If you are not at your best at 4:30 am, you need to be able to ignore the so-called gurus who claim that’s the only time business owners should get up so they can tackle the day. If you’re at your best at 9 am, getting up at 4:30 is not going to do anything for you.

You’ll also find that many service providers will tell you the best social media platform to be on, or the best way to market your services. If you hate being on camera, a social media channel that requires you to upload videos three times a day is not going to work for you. And if your audience doesn’t like reading, no amount of blogging in text format is going to work either. If your gut tells you something isn’t right, you need to be able to listen to it. There are brain cells - neurons - in your gut, so don’t ignore it!

Self-awareness and self-acceptance

Are you struggling to accept yourself? Now imagine that you’ve got unhappy customers. Yikes! Even if you’ve got some room to improve (and we all do), you’ve got to be basically OK with who you are in order to put yourself out there. You will not be everyone's cup of tea, and that’s fine; it is critical that you don’t try to be everyone’s cup or remake yourself into someone else’s cup.

Likewise, you need to know what your cup actually is! Leaning into your strengths will make a lot of things easier, but you still need to know what your faults are so that you can compensate for them in some way. Perhaps by hiring a partner who’s strong where you’re weak.

Growth mindset vs. fixed mindset

Basically, you need to believe that you can grow and improve. If you’re convinced that this is the best you’ll ever be, you’ve got a problem. When you know you’ve got room to grow, you’ve also got room to say things like, I’m sorry or I made a mistake - both of which you’ll need for your entrepreneurial journey.

Agility

We don’t mean this in the sense of being able to do a complete back bend, though if your business is training gymnasts that might be necessary! Instead, you need to be able to roll with the changes to the environment as they occur. Those differences could be in your industry or your neighborhood, they could be happening across the globe, or even just in your personal life.

For example, if you own a brick and mortar store and all of a sudden a coronavirus pandemic hits your country and no one is allowed in your store, business-as-usual is not going to work. You’ll need to be flexible: do you pivot to an online store, or start contactless delivery and/or pickup? Do you need to do both to sustain your business?

Agility (project-style)

Again, we’re not talking about being able to lift your leg higher than your ear. (Though if you can, that’s great!) Agility is also a style of project management. Instead of designing and implementing a project that takes 18 months to complete and then potentially finding out it doesn’t work, which is the more traditional way that projects were managed last century, agile projects have a much shorter cycle.

This means that you must build something that is good enough, take it to the market, and then let the market tell you what it wants. You then can take the thing back and revamp it according to the feedback you received, and send it back out to the market. That way you’re not wasting a lot of time and energy designing and creating something that the market doesn’t want, whether that’s extra features or the product itself.

In other words, you need to be able to experiment. You might believe wholeheartedly in what you have, but if no one wants to buy it, you don’t have a business. Instead, build something and market test it, then experiment with what comes back.

Be agile enough to test your product or service and rework it for the market, or you may find you need to sell into a different market than the one you originally planned, because a different audience wants your solution.

Be learning-driven

If you think that your learning is done when you graduate from school, we’ve got some bad news for you! Nothing stays the same for very long, especially in business, and you need to keep up. Don’t be the person who lost her job as a financial planner because she refused to learn Microsoft Excel (true story).

You’ll need to learn new skills and maintain the ones you’ve already got. Learning about completely different things other than your business and your industry pays off too - you could end up with a whole new business product that everyone wants and you’re the only one who thought of it. Learning keeps your mind young and active too.

Be goal-driven and resilient

Wishing for clients, and even hanging out your shingle, won’t help you run your business. You have to be more targeted than that. You need to figure out the goals or results that you want to achieve, so you can plot out how you’ll reach them. As they say in the British army, prior proper planning prevents piss-poor performance. If you don’t know where you’re going, how do you plan to get there?

There will be roadblocks on your way, so the ability to pick yourself up and dust yourself off is how you get results.

Long-term thinking

Running a business is a long-term proposition, so you’ve got to be able to think into the future. There was a time when people still mostly rode horses, even though cars were around. Making buggy whips was profitable for a little while, but then those companies all went out of business when people stopped riding horses as transportation. Don’t be the buggy whip maker when cars are taking over.

This way of thinking also goes for how you conduct your business. It’s a lot easier to retain happy customers and staff than it is to acquire new ones. Making decisions based on squeezing out a few more bucks today will backfire if customers or staff feel like they’re taken advantage of.

Be able to ask for help

Bootstraps are mythical beasts. You don’t know everything there is to know about your business, and you won’t ever know it all. You’re also not the first business owner to struggle with generating customers, keeping customers happy, hiring staff, or whatever your issues may be.

You can't do it alone, and being able to ask for help could be the difference between you banging your head against the wall for months and quickly solving your problem.

Work with, and past, fear and discomfort

Fear is natural, and if you think you don’t have any, you’ve probably got something rolling around your subconscious that you’re not aware of. It’s adaptive - the cavemen and women who were properly afraid of animals that could eat them and devised ways to stay safe or prey on their predators were the ones who survived. That being said, fear can stop you in your tracks if you let it.

A lot of owning a business may not be comfortable, especially if you’ve worked for other people before. Being able to recognize your discomfort and get past it so that you can serve your clients is an important component of success.

Decisive

There will probably be many times when you have to make a choice based on imperfect information, but you have to make the decision anyway. Analysis paralysis is pretty common, it happens when you spend so much time gathering the data that it takes too long to decide which option is better.

At a certain point, you just have to take the plunge and move on. When you’re paralyzed by indecision, you’ll see the paralysis reflected in your results.

Action bias

Taking action instead of sitting around thinking about things is crucial for business. Again, most of the time you probably won’t know what the right action is, but as long as you have some basis for your action - you’ve gathered some information about the consequences of your choices - it’s time to jump in.

There are some occasions when doing nothing is the right thing to do. Not because it’s good to dither around trying to make up your mind and losing time, but because the data you’ve collected indicates that not taking action is the correct action to take.

Taking action based on imperfect information is how many people end up leveraging excellent opportunities. They spotted an opportunity, and they took it. When you end up in your own head too often, you miss out on those potential actions.

2,4,6,8 who do you appreciate?

You will have to be your own biggest and best cheerleader. No one else is going to do it for you. Though you can absolutely hire a sales team if you want, they won’t have the same enthusiasm and passion that you do for your project.

When self-doubt comes, as it does for most business owners at one point or another, you’ll need to recognize it and confront it so that you can then let it go. As a therapist once said to us, if you can’t feel it, you can’t heal it. It won’t go away just because you ignore it, but once you’re done with it, you’ll have to cheer yourself on again.

If you’ve got problems with a significant number of these traits, you might want to assess whether you can launch your own business. However, if you have the funds and really want to be a business owner, you might consider franchising, since most of the problems and challenges have already been solved for you. You also might prefer to go back to your job, or to take a different job in the same field that has better working conditions or pay.

Mindsets specific to entrepreneurs

These are particularly important if you’ve come from a corporate background, or you’ve worked for other people previously. It’s very different running your own show compared to being a cog in someone else’s show. You may need to make some adjustments and think about how you want to be present as the big kahuna compared to being just another fish in the school.

If you’ve never worked for someone else you may have less to unlearn, but you still need to make sure that your mindset game is as effective as you can make it.

Relationships are fundamental

When it comes to business, it’s not what you know but who you know. There may be people who won’t buy from you, but they might be able to connect you to people who will.

For example, suppose you’re a divorce financial analyst who helps couples that are divorcing divide up the assets and figure out the spousal support. A happily married person, no matter how well they know you, is not going to come to you for your services. However, if the happily married person is a lawyer who happens to know all the divorce lawyers in town, they could introduce you to a lot of people, some of whom could very well become your clients.

It’s also important to recognize that most businesses are no longer done on a transactional basis. Very few financial advisors call themselves stockbrokers anymore, and they’ll tell you that they’re in the business of financial advice. They’re not interested in calling clients up every few days to buy this or sell that.

Even brick and mortar stores aren’t as interested in transactional business as they might have been in the past. It’s very expensive to continually acquire new clients, so they’d prefer to retain the ones they’ve already got. That’s part of the reason why stores offer loyalty programs, friends and family discounts, and the like. They know that personal recommendations mean a lot.

People want to know, like, respect, and trust you before they start to do business with you. If you get referred to someone by a mutual acquaintance that you both know and trust, you’re much farther along that know/like/respect/trust continuum with the prospect than if you start off cold.

If you’re an introvert, having