Starting a company, trademarked my logo

[fullgrownbear]

Just a question for a few of you business guru's.. I have now trademarked my company name and the company logo. Are there any other steps I need to take besides getting a business tax license through the department of revenue?

More details to follow in the weeks to come. I will post a picture of my logo as things get closer to being finalized.

Also - I was thinking of using prostores.com to sell the product. The plus of using prostores is it comes with a shopping cart, and easy to set up web page.

The only thing is, I'm not sure how trendy of a webpage you can create. I would like to have a splash page (entry page with the logo) at first, and then have a simplistic but trendy design.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance

[GixxerCarrie]

I would check the small business website. Their website is very, very, helpful.

I don't know what product and/or service your company provides but depending on what it is you will want to decide on whether to be a LLC, Corp, possibly partnership, S Corp, or Sole Proprieter. (tax implications are different for each as well as legal ramifications/liability).

[Bashed]

I agree with Carrie, you would want to seperate your business from your person and form a company. From a financial as well as a liability point. Talk to a lawyer, when I set mine up, they did the license and files the company all in one deal and it only cost me about $400.

Bash

[SaShWhO]

whtchyiu sellin?

[thatmofo]

I am not sure about prostores.com's shopping cart setup, but make sure that they have the functionality you need for the product you are selling. I helped a friend of mine with his shopping cart and it was a PITA to configure it for how we had to sell his product. Find a good support forum if your shopping cart setup will be highly involved.

Also, when you get your site, make sure you are aware of your guaranteed uptime and when they perform maintenance. I had one site where they would do maintenance during the time I wanted to complete all of my site udpates and they would never send out notifications of their scheduled/emergency maintenance.

What bashed said is extremely important: "seperate your business from your person and form a company".

[rforsythe]

Ok so to get a tax license, you will need a business filing (I am not 100% sure one comes before the other as they may not be linked, but both should be done). Google the Colorado Secretary of State website and go there, you can actually form your company online now and it's not terribly expensive. Let's say you are forming an LLC; you just enter the info on their site, pay I believe $50-60, and you have a company. From there you need to go get a sales tax license in whatever city your company is registered in, which basically just involves filling out paperwork and giving them more money, to have the ability to give them more money later on. Beginning to see what owning a business is like?

Depending on what you do or sell you may need to involve a lawyer and take other things into consideration, but this is how you get started. If you intend to get a bank account for this company (highly recommended) then you will also need to file for an Employer ID Number (EIN, also called TIN) with the IRS. I believe this is free, and it can be done on their website as well.

I've done this dance a few times and am no expert, but can certainly help out more if you need it, just lemme know.

[konichd]

If you setup an LLC James the license through the state is $50. You definately want to setup an LLC to keep your business seperate from you're personal assets. Also you will have to setup your taxes through whatever city you're in, also if you want to pay monthly, quarterly, or yearly. We use Quickbooks and it makes things nice and easy for the most part.

Wade has done a lot of research into this when we started out two companies, feel free to give him a call and he can answer any qeustions you have 720-219-8433

[Wolfeie]

Please be clear, and I recommend that you do speak with a lawyer to validate the wonderful free advice you get here, that a LLC (~$35 and you can do this yourself on the Internet) does not "separate" your personal assets from your business. If you screw up and get sued there is no protection from the plaintiff coming after your personal assets. If you incorporate (~$1000 and you want either a qualified accountant or lawyer to complete this one for you) you have some additional protection of your personal assets.

There are very different tax implications between incorporation and LLC. For example, profit you make as an LLC is taxed at your "personal" rate plus "self employment" taxes (you file LLC income on your 1040). Inc.'s are taxed differently and separately.

It really depends on your product, its liability risk, and what you think your profit potential really is that should be driving your decision between LLC and Inc.

Good luck!

[MetaLord 9]

Not so sure on prostores (not really that familiar with it), but you might wanna check out "Google Checkout." It's Google's eCommerce product that is basically a shopping cart feature that, I believe, you can drop into the website that you create. The plus side to that is that, since it's Google's product, that if you optimize your description of your product and your page, you could rank very high in Google searches and sometimes just your product will pop up towards the top of the search results.

I'm not designer, but I do work to optimize our company website so that Google can easily read and rank the site. Lemme know if you want me to take a look at it