The Winning Essay: Spring 2016 This article was submitted by Tina Nguyen, winner of the Spring 2016 Business Plan Scholarship. You can read more about her below the essay. I started a FIRST Robotics team at my high school during my junior year. With the majority of teams using at least $15,000 per year…
The Top 5 Startup Costs You Should Include In Your Budget
You are a visionary. You like to start things. You live and breathe potential and opportunity. But you still need a budget. No small business owner jumps out of bed in the morning excited to pour over spreadsheets and budgets, but if you want to continue jumping out of bed on your own schedule —…
Best Productivity Apps – 29 Experts Give Their Top Pick
We polled 29 top small business experts and asked them for the best productivity apps recommendations. Below is what they told us. We also include our recommendation for best productivity app at the bottom of the list. Spoiler Alert! It’s Insightly 🙂 Let’s get to the list! 1) Abigail Mason, Hey Abigail One of my favorite productivity…
The 10 Largest Business Plan Competitons
Top Five in Total Cash Prize Money (2014) 1) Would you go to Buffalo, New York to get a million dollars for your business? 43North – Total Cash Prize Pool: $5,000,000, Grand Prize $1,000,000 Winners must start the business in, or relocate their business to Buffalo, New York within 3 months of the business plan…
How To Help The Poor Become Business Owners (An NYC Success Story)
How would you help poor, immigrant New York City residents, with no college education, and perhaps poor English communication skills become entrepreneurs? This is a question that BOC Network has been answering for 17 years. BOC Network and its sister organization, BOC Capital, provides advice in over 18 languages to small entrepreneurs in New York…
LegalZoom C-Corp: How To Form A C-Corporation With LegalZoom
Unless you are planning to take your company public we generally recommend forming an LLC instead of a C-Corp. LLC’s are more flexible from a tax standpoint and require less ongoing paperwork than C-Corps. You can read more about this in our article on how to choose a business structure. For those that wish to…
LegalZoom LLC – How To Form An LLC With LegalZoom.com
LegalZoom.com was founded in 2001 by a group of attorneys as an online service to handle common legal matters. Creating your LLC with LegalZoom is a simple process that, depending on your state filing fees and the attorney fees in your area, can save you hundreds of dollars vs. using an attorney and a few…
Business Partnerships: How to Choose The Right Business Partner
In the last article in our series on how to start a business, we looked at how to come up with the perfect name for your business. In today’s article we are going to continue this series with a comprehensive overview of how to choose the right business partnerships. To make sure you have covered all the bases,…
Freelancing Guide: How to Become a Full Time Freelancer
Freelancing is on the Rise The world of employment is changing. Many companies large and small are trying minimize their number of full-time employees. Instead, they are hiring more part-time employees and freelancers. The benefit for companies is two-fold: They can adjust their workforce to meet the needs of the company on almost “real time”…
How to Name a Business – The Ultimate Guide
In the last article in our series on how to start a business, we discussed how to test your new business idea. Once you have tested your new business idea and decided to move forward, the next step is how to name a business, the topic of today’s article. To make sure you don’t miss anything, use this handy…
How to Test a Business Idea in 3 Steps
In the last article in our series on how to start a business, we walked you through the 5 steps for coming up with a business idea. Now that you have your idea don’t make the mistake that many failed businesses make, and launch your business before gauging the demand for your product or service. In today’s article we…
Business Idea Checklist
Here is a handy checklist you can use as you read through our article on how to come up with a business idea.
