This is the first in a series of posts that will be discussing business succession planning. Something that small business owners should be considering is what happens in the unlikely scenario of a long-term disability or death of the business owner? Business succession planning is...
On a daily basis, any small business owner has to think about finances, legality, relationships, insurance, customers, vendors, suppliers. It is almost impossible for one person to be able to manage all of those aspects all of the time. But a business doesn’t have to...
Often when I’m advising small business owners I tell them that they need to assemble a Management Team. After telling me they can’t afford a management team, many of my clients ask: What does a management team look like? Who would be involved in that...
As a small business lawyer, I am often asked, “Do you write plain English contracts?” If I am feeling particularly snarky and I know the person well enough to be snarky, I might shoot back with “well, I don’t write contracts in Spanish, Latin, or...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JHF-CVDY6Q&feature=youtu.be When it comes to make better decisions in business or in life, we could all do with a better model of looking at decisions. The "all or nothing" model, the danger of hindsight bias and the often toxic regret of decisions leads to regularly poor...
Non-Compete Agreements are everywhere. Most non-competes I see are not only poorly written (a style problem) and probably unenforceable against the employee (a drafting problem). Most employers take a one-size-fits-all approach and have all employees sign the exact same non-compete. Employers wanting employees to sign...
I want to take the opportunity to address a couple common misunderstandings between legal entities and tax designations. One common question that we get is if I should form an S corporation. The answer to that question, actually, is that you can’t. Let’s step back and look at this...
I recently had a client with an interesting problem related to timekeeping practices. If you employ non-exempt (hourly) staff, in order to calculate their pay you need to have the number of hours that they worked in a pay period. A lot of folks use the good old...
We have another payroll issue that has been discussed by other bloggers, and the Department of Labor has issued an opinion on this. Believe me, if you want a cure for insomnia reading the Department of Labor opinion letters is a great option. In order to avoid you...