by Kate McClanaghan, www.voiceoverinfo.com

Often I am asked, “Should I incorporate? Or maybe I should LLC?”

Good question.

At SOUND ADVICE, we recommend you LLC, rather than INC, if you do either one. The object behind doing either is to legitimize your expenses and write-offs for your small business as a professional talent.

A Limited Liability Corporation (LLC) may costs a little more up front, but it’s not as costly at tax time as an INC (S-Corporation, for our purposes) incurs corporate taxes.

We recommend you check out LegalZoom.com to learn more and whether this may be something you could benefit from. http://www.legalzoom.com/llc-guide/limited-liability-company-edu-center.html

Also, an LLC may be infinitely more valuable to you in the long run because there’s less maintenance throughout the year and less paperwork to set it up.

So, even though incorporating (as an ‘S’ Corp or Sole Corporation, also known as a Sole Proprietorship) may only cost about $150 to establish, and you can operate multiple businesses through dba-ing (doing business as) under either LLC or Inc.

You can set either up by downloading the paperwork from your local Secretary of State’s site on-line as well.

According to notorious ‘Sound Advicer’ and now Ace-Voice-over, Kimberley Reid, “Had I to do it all over again, I would have LLC’d, rather than Inc,” she told me.

Certainly either way you legitimize your expenses in this business, including workshops, coaching, demo production, promotional mailings, headshots and the like.

The next question is your corporate name.   We suggest you establish your own legal name as your corporation, such as ‘Joe Talent, LLC’ or ‘Joe Talent, Inc’, as the case may be.  Here’s why: if you call yourself ‘Excalibur, Inc’ it may conflict with some unrelated business that may already be in operation and may even link you to some inference you may not want any association with, such as Excalibur brassieres or Excalibur escort service.  (Yikes.) That would be rather awkward, now wouldn’t it?  Additionally, it’s likely to pose a problem when it comes to depositing payments made out to your name alone if your Corporation is in your name.  Can you imagine insisting at each session your checks be made out to ‘Lady HOTnTOTS, LLC’? It may take repeated attempts to get that billing straight and only slow up the process of getting you paid which is counter-productive. Why? Because it’s ultimately something of a non sequitur when you mix businesses. Besides you may find explaining the origin of your corporate name to the next producer that hires you may prove to be a bit more confusing than you had initially anticipated.

So, study up for yourself on legalzoom.com, and if you find this is the way you want to go… you can make it legal right then and there!

Here’s to the future success of your small business—YOU! 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 9th, 2009 at 12:08 pm and is filed under Sound Advice Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.