4 ms·

Starting a business in the United States is a little like pulling your own teeth while getting your fingernails trimmed with a wood chipper. The fact that it s

Starting a business in the United States is a little like pulling your own teeth while getting your fingernails trimmed with a wood chipper. The fact that it still ranks fourth overall just indicates how much worse most of the rest of the world is. It's amazing to me that so many nations (the US included) seem to want it to be so difficult for people to succeed in business.

whakojacko 16y ago
to be honest, it ranks 8th in actually starting a business. The 4th ranking is the overall doing business ranking, which takes other factors into account.
- apotheon 16y ago
  Good point. Thanks for pointing that out. Still . . . that's within 5% of the top of the list, which is shocking given the obstacles to entrepreneurship in the US.
jsolson 16y ago
I set up a Georgia LLC in the course of an afternoon. State registration, federal EIN, bank account. Income for the LLC is treated as personal income for me (it's a single member LLC that's disregarded by the IRS), so even taxes aren't that complicated. Perhaps I'm doing something very wrong or very illegal, but nothing I've read seems to suggest that. What did you find to be so much more painful?
- apotheon 16y ago
  In my area, it takes no fewer than three different licenses just to set up a consultancy that doesn't even sell products (pure service oriented business) -- and that doesn't address any of the issues aside from licensure (tax ID, ensuring your business name is not a trademark infringement, et cetera). The worst thing about it, though, is not the complexity of it. The worst thing about it is that, because one has to check everything at local, state, and federal levels, and because each of these levels is often very poorly organized where the "end user" is concerned, it took me an afternoon just to find out about all that stuff. In fact, some of it I stumbled across by accident while looking for something else, and was surprised to find it. I'm pretty much positive that I missed some things before I gave up. It requires a lawyer to be even reasonably sure (as opposed to completely sure) you aren't doing something illegal. If I have to choose between paying for a lawyer I can ill afford and wondering for the first three years of starting the business whether I'm going to end up in court for doing it wrong, the process of setting up a business is not easy enough. edit: There is a difference between "setting up" a business on paper (so you can claim to have one) and being able to start actually conducting business without running the risk of pissing off government.
  - jsolson 16y ago
    I agree that there is a difference. On the other hand, once you have the business legally established (the easy part), you can conduct business as that entity. You might piss off the government and the liable for fees/penalties, but you're not going to invalidate the actions of the business by doing that. Perhaps I'm just being naïve, but I figure if the rules are difficult for me to find it's also fairly unlikely that I'll get caught for not following them. Or, I suppose, I feel like by the time it becomes a serious risk I'll have grown to the point where lawyers become a necessity anyway.
    - apotheon 16y ago
      One can conduct business in violation of the law anywhere. When it's done intelligently, we call the result "black marketeering". When it's done stupidly, we call the result "jail time".

whakojacko 16y ago

to be honest, it ranks 8th in actually starting a business. The 4th ranking is the overall doing business ranking, which takes other factors into account.

apotheon 16y ago
Good point. Thanks for pointing that out. Still . . . that's within 5% of the top of the list, which is shocking given the obstacles to entrepreneurship in the US.

jsolson 16y ago

I set up a Georgia LLC in the course of an afternoon. State registration, federal EIN, bank account. Income for the LLC is treated as personal income for me (it's a single member LLC that's disregarded by the IRS), so even taxes aren't that complicated. Perhaps I'm doing something very wrong or very illegal, but nothing I've read seems to suggest that. What did you find to be so much more painful?

apotheon 16y ago
In my area, it takes no fewer than three different licenses just to set up a consultancy that doesn't even sell products (pure service oriented business) -- and that doesn't address any of the issues aside from licensure (tax ID, ensuring your business name is not a trademark infringement, et cetera). The worst thing about it, though, is not the complexity of it. The worst thing about it is that, because one has to check everything at local, state, and federal levels, and because each of these levels is often very poorly organized where the "end user" is concerned, it took me an afternoon just to find out about all that stuff. In fact, some of it I stumbled across by accident while looking for something else, and was surprised to find it. I'm pretty much positive that I missed some things before I gave up. It requires a lawyer to be even reasonably sure (as opposed to completely sure) you aren't doing something illegal. If I have to choose between paying for a lawyer I can ill afford and wondering for the first three years of starting the business whether I'm going to end up in court for doing it wrong, the process of setting up a business is not easy enough. edit: There is a difference between "setting up" a business on paper (so you can claim to have one) and being able to start actually conducting business without running the risk of pissing off government.
- jsolson 16y ago
  I agree that there is a difference. On the other hand, once you have the business legally established (the easy part), you can conduct business as that entity. You might piss off the government and the liable for fees/penalties, but you're not going to invalidate the actions of the business by doing that. Perhaps I'm just being naïve, but I figure if the rules are difficult for me to find it's also fairly unlikely that I'll get caught for not following them. Or, I suppose, I feel like by the time it becomes a serious risk I'll have grown to the point where lawyers become a necessity anyway.
  - apotheon 16y ago
    One can conduct business in violation of the law anywhere. When it's done intelligently, we call the result "black marketeering". When it's done stupidly, we call the result "jail time".