Poll: Do you have your own company?

Maybe my point was taken away because I didn't provide an insightful reply to the original comment?

In that case, one of the reasons why I switched to a day job (after spending about the years in-between, during and after college working on small business ideas) was because I didn't have a strong enough business to sustain myself with the lifestyle I wanted to have.

It was awesome at first, and I was able to direct my energies to really improving things here at my workplace, but in recent years, with the job morphing to such a degree that I'm no longer primarily a developer (more management at this point) the fun level is no longer as high as it used to be.

I completely separated from having my LLC for the first few years after I started my day job, but then a few years ago I started a side business selling software on my website (under the sole proprietor model, due to the $800 minimum tax I didn't want to have to pay again for LLCs in California) and so far that small business has been semi-profitable and keeps the hosting bills paid.

Recently though, with those changes I mentioned above with my day job no longer being quite as fun as it used to when I was more free to do development work, I've looked towards contacting local businesses via snail mail and seeing if they have any business problems they need solving (anything repetitive/time-consuming for their staff, which I feel would be ripe for some sort of software automation or process to be put in place) so that way I'll have some more interesting problems to solve and get some insight into what problems our local businesses have (the # of software developers in the area is close to nil).

I'd like to eventually build up something significant where I could hire a few people and maybe earn enough to maybe switch to being a full-time entrepreneur, but at the moment the day job pay is just too good to leave (all of my savings goes to long-term accounts I can't tap, such as a 403b, life insurance savings account, and Roth IRA, so I don't save too much each month...plus there's the credit card debt and personal line of credit I'm still paying off).

Now I feel lucky I was able to experiment much more (some with my money I earned through the business, but also with parental money, mainly my mom since she was awesome enough to believe in me and provide me that opportunity) while I was a late teen/early twenty-something and make mistakes I've learned from. Profitability is a big factor now whenever I'm trying something new.

People downvote for completely stupid reasons here. If you think that was bad, see what happens when you question the collective wisdom of a bunch of boys in San Francisco barely out of college who think they rule the world. Not that I'm bitter or anything... :)

But back to your situation. There's a question I like to ask everyone, stolen directly from Babylon 5... "What do you want?" You need to be able to answer that for yourself, honestly, and then work toward that. Is what you do now working for you? Why or why not?

I put in two decades in the software industry before I realized that what I want is total independence, by owning my own company, setting the direction, making sure it's as good as I want it to be. The enterprise is secure, and often challenging, but I'll never get rich and I'll never feel in control, not that way. On the other hand, after two decades of career gone, I don't have a bunch of spare rounds in the clip the way the average kid getting processed through a startup accelerator does.

I wound up here backwards. I didn't start with "I want a startup" and then cast around looking for an idea (the problem with so many startups is mediocre, timid ideas). Instead, the idea came to me, and I realized that it would best be done through a startup. And a startup fits my sense of how to live a lot better than the enterprise work I've been doing.

Luckily, the idea itself comes from those decades of experience in large-scale software development and its problems. Without all that real-world experience, I wouldn't even know of the existence of the problem I am trying to solve.

So back to you. What do you want? What kind of life do you want to lead? What sort of impact do you want to have on the world? Answer that, and build toward that.

In Florida we call this lapse, "administrative dissolution for failure to file an annual report". Alternatively, in Florida when you file articles of dissolution with the State it is called "voluntary dissolution." Each one has its own quirks, for example, if you are administratively dissolved the State grants a grace period reserving the name should you file a late annual report or reinstate. After the grace period the company name will be up for grabs, and someone could take the name, but you would still be able to reinstate the company providing continuity. If you voluntarily dissolve, Florida has a period of time you can revoke the voluntary dissolution, but after that grace period the old company if effectively gone and can not be reinstated.

Off the top of my head I could not point you to any resources that would suggest letting it lapse is the right thing to do. Most attorneys by default will over look these nuances anyhow and always suggest the right thing to do is voluntarily dissolve. However, in private corporate legal practice I have seen the following scenarios where the voluntary dissolution has been problematic:

1. If the company was not wound down properly, and assets are still in the company name, generally those assets may not be transferred out of a dissolved company, and if you do transfer assets out it would be legally invalid. In such circumstances it would be better the company lapse, so it can be reinstated to transfer the assets lawfully;

2. Another example I have seen first hand is in litigation. In this instance a major oil company was sued by a number of gas station owners. As you can imagine the oil company dragged this lawsuit out for decades. By the time it was over many of the businesses that owned the gas stations sold and then dissolved. Nevertheless, after the litigation they were entitled to large sums from the oil company. For companies who administratively dissolved they could reinstate and have standing to collect their judgment, alternatively many of the business who voluntarily dissolved lost out on their portion of the judgement.

Best to consult an attorney to analyze your specific situation.

Yes, I'm in the Midwest. How do you get started? Dunno. A friend knew someone who wanted some work done, introduced me to him and I guess that was how the first one got done.

I don't pursue it actively. If I see someone online who wants something built that fits my schedule, I offer to do it for them. To me, consulting is just a way to learn about new industries that I can build products for.

My focus is really on getting the product business generating a steady stream of cash instead of the small spurts it's doing right now.

Just to be clear about this subthread between 'will_brown and 'dragonwriter:

They are talking about the reverse of the case most people think about when they think about corporate liability protection. Specifically, they're talking about the way the law handles the case where your personal liabilities spill over into your company's liabilities.

For example: if, unrelated to your work, you hit someone with your car and end up losing a $100k lawsuit, your victim will investigate attaching that liability to your equity in your company. With C and S corporations, this isn't complicated: an attorney pursuing a collection can take your shares to satisfy the liability. This is possible because C and S corporations have mostly straightforward rules for transferable stock ownership.

But due to a quirk in the law, LLCs don't. LLCs are glorified partnerships; they are a way of getting most of the benefits of a corporate form with much less of the pain of forming an actual corporation. As a result, there is no straightforward way for a court to transfer partial ownership of the LLC to a creditor; to do so would be to impact all the other LLC members, who did not agree to partner with the debt collector.

The obvious result of this quirk is that people form LLCs to protect personal assets from collection. An attorney pursuing a collection can attach themselves in some ways to the beneficial interest in the LLC, but they cannot get any decisionmaking power for the LLC, and they cannot get transferable stock in the LLC (which stock doesn't exist). So, as long as the LLC never issues a distribution, the assets housed in it can potentially be judgement-proof.

Since this is a loophole for debtors big enough to drive a truck through, some states have legal precedent that gives special consideration to single-member LLCs to make them easier to collect against, since the whole rationale for them being difficult to collect against is the protection of other innocent partners, which don't exist in an SMLLC.

Now you know, and knowing is half the battle.