Articles Posted in Corporations

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Starting a business can feel overwhelming. Whether you’re opening a brick and mortar store or an online business, there are a lot of steps involved in turning your idea into reality. Creating a business plan and securing funding are a solid beginning; at this point you’ll also need to do a few things to make sure your business is legal.

Steps to Legally Starting a Business: It Takes More Than a Business Plan! 

Picking a name is a fun element of starting a business. A name not only tells potential customers what you sell but it also reveals something of your personality. Before you jump into the next activity on your business plan and start advertising your store front or online business, make sure someone else isn’t already using the name. Fortunately, most states offer a searchable database through the Secretary of State’s Office. Also, be sure to do a national trademark search to find out if another company owns the rights to the name.

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If you are an employer in San Jose, you are most likely aware that on January 1, 2014, the minimum wage increased to $10.15 per hour for your business; California’s minimum wage increase was to $9 per hour. In addition to new employment laws, there, there have been other new laws that affect businesses in 2014, such as the all new California limited liability company act. But one law actually applies to all business entities with an Employer Identification Number (“EIN”), including entities such as corporations, partnerships, limited liability companies, and even nonprofit organizations. As of January 1, 2014, any entity with an EIN must notify the IRS of a change of (1) a mailing address, (2) a business location or (3) the identity of a “responsible party.” A change in a company’s mailing address or business location is pretty clear, but the identity of a responsible party may not be so clear.

If you are not sure who the “responsible party” was initially, check the Form SS-4 application that was filed initially by the organization to obtain its EIN, and it will be the person or entity listed as responsible on that form. Then, look at the instructions to Form 8822-B to determine if your responsible party has changed. The instructions define a responsible party as “the person who has a level of control over, or entitlement to, the funds or assets in the entity that, as a practical matter, enables the individual, directly or indirectly, to control, manage, or direct the entity and the disposition of its funds and assets.” If the entity’s original responsible party at the time of filing the Form SS-4 is no longer affiliated with the organization or no longer fits that definition, then the entity must use Form 8822-B to let the IRS know.

Form 8822-B must be filed within 60 days of the change. If such a change occurred before January 1, 2014, and the entity has not previously notified the IRS in some other manner, Form 8822-B must be filed before March 1, 2014. If you no longer have a copy of the SS-4 Application or remember who was named as the “responsible party,” you may wish to file a Form 8822-B before March 1, 2014.

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I spend a lot of time talking to founders of Silicon Valley start-ups about the stock they will receive in exchange for their contributions to their new company, and then preparing restricted stock purchase agreements for the founders. In the last couple of blogs, I have discussed the issues surrounding how founders’ stock could vest.

The concept of vesting is usually intertwined with the concept of repurchase rights. Simply put, for founders’ stock, vesting is where the repurchase rights held by the company disappear or change. In a typical scenario, when a triggering event occurs, a company can repurchase unvested stock for its original purchase price. A company may not, however, repurchase any vested stock or may only repurchase vested stock at the stock’s then fair market value.

What kind of triggering events might allow a company to purchase unvested stock? One common trigger is anything that results in the shareholder not working for the company. Most often, this means a termination of employment.

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Working with start-ups in San Jose, I have often had to counsel founders on the intricacies of business law as it relates to issuing stock. A large part of initial discussions with the founding group involves the funding needs of the new corporation, how shares will be divided, and the best way to provide equity incentives to founders, advisors, and new employees.

As I discussed in my last blog, one of the key issues involved in issuing stock to founders is how to incentivize them to stay with the new corporation. One mechanism discussed is reverse vesting, where the corporation can repurchase a founder’s shares of company stock at their original purchase price when certain events specified in a contract occur.

A typical reverse vesting structure is to allow the corporation to purchase a declining number of a founder’s shares at their original purchase price as time goes on. Typically the number of shares the corporation can repurchase will reduce on a straight-line basis over the course of three or four years.

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Practicing business law in Silicon Valley over the past year, I have seen start-up activity pick up. We are in that part of the cycle where the survivors of the not so great recession have decided that they are better off on their own and have decided to make their dreams come true by forming their own companies.

Because many of these companies hope to become a welcome opportunity for outside investors, their choice of entity is the corporation. From the legal end, the process of incorporation is fairly straightforward and can be accomplished relatively quickly. Founders have a number of decisions to make, such as how much they want to each contribute to the new venture, and who will have which role.

Where a group of founders is involved, one of the most difficult issues, relatively speaking, is the issuance of stock. The first issue involves what percentage of the corporation each of the founders should receive. There are few, if any, rules of thumb as to whom should get what, and the decision is typically made by the founders assessing each of their respective strengths and weaknesses, and their contribution to the new venture, and deciding on a split. If the new corporation never expects to issue any new stock, and each founder will be actively involved in the business with profits being split at the end of each year, there may be little more to do with the stock other than to create a suitable buy-sell relationship.

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It is that time of year again. Every year in the fourth quarter, businesses in San Jose and all over the United States are looking at the quickly approaching year-end and trying to figure out what they can do now before it is too late to save on taxes for 2013. This is especially true for small businesses, where every dollar of deduction is important because it hits the owner(s) directly in the pocketbook. My law firm is an LLP, so all items of profit and loss flow through to the partners. Therefore, this is the time of year that I look very carefully at how much money is available and what my law firm is going to need or want to buy in the next few months. Do we need a new copier? Do we want to upgrade our software? If so, let’s do it in December rather than January and get the deduction this year. With this in mind, here are a few things for business owners to consider before 2013 is over.

Purchase Equipment for Your Business

Make your equipment purchases before year-end. In 2013, up to $500,000 of both new and used assets purchased and actually put in use by December 31st can be expensed. This means you get a dollar for dollar deduction this year, without having to depreciate the asset over its useful life. This is really helpful for partners that want a deduction for every dollar spent so that they do not have taxable profits without available cash for distribution. But this benefit is limited. If you purchase and put in place more than $2,000,000 of assets during 2013, the $500,000 expense is phased out on a dollar for dollar basis. These limits will likely be even lower next year, so take advantage of them now.

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I have always known that Silicon Valley is home to many innovative companies and has a lot of entrepreneurial talent, but I was still amazed to read that start-ups in Palo Alto, Mountain View, Redwood City, Sunnyvale and San Jose received a combined $980+ million in funding in Q2’13. [Source: Silicon Valley Business Journal, July 16, 2013]. As a business lawyer in San Jose, I have seen a number of attempts to make fundraising for start-up companies easier. Recently, a new technique has come into favor.

The new buzz word for start-ups looking for funding is crowdfunding (sometimes known as crowdsourcing). In this type of deal, a group or entrepreneur will receive contributions from a large number of people for a project. The process started with artists raising money for their projects. Their success led for-profit companies to look at crowdfunding to raise money. Websites like kickstarter.com and indiegogo.com are just a few that provide crowdfunding opportunities.

To encourage crowdfunding, Congress passed the JOBS Act a year ago last September. In response, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) released new regulations intended to encourage crowdfunding. One of the new regulations relaxes the public solicitation limitations that had been imposed for certain types of private financing deals.

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One of my clients is a medium sized manufacturing plant here in San Jose. Although not a high-tech business, they have extensive capital assets and specialized skills. The business is being run by the second generation of family members, and the third generation is now being trained to take the reins someday. The family has recognized that many of their competitors are still being run by the first generation of owners, and it does not look like those businesses are likely to transition to other family members. As the owners of the competitive businesses age and want to retire, they will be looking to sell their manufacturing plants. My client wants to buy them. We recently sat down and discussed acquisition strategies. I explained that there are two common ways to buy a business – either you buy the stock, or you buy the assets. What most people do not realize, is that even when you are only buying the assets, you could be liable for up to three times the purchase price in state taxes that should have been paid by the seller.

Most people know that when you buy the stock of a corporation (or membership interests in an LLC), you get all of the assets as well as all of the liabilities in that company. As a result, many of my clients want to buy only the assets of a company as a strategy to avoid the liabilities (known and unknown) that come with a business with history behind it. To accomplish this, we draft an asset purchase agreement that includes lists of which assets we are buying, which liabilities we are buying, and which liabilities we are not taking on. For example, when you buy the stock of a company, you get all of its employees including their accrued and unpaid vacation time. When you buy the assets of a company, we ask the selling business to terminate all of its employees so that we can start over by hiring them in the acquiring company as new employees, without any potential claims for what came before. However, many people do not realize that certain tax liabilities may follow the business of the company rather than the company itself. So, if you buy enough of the assets to be considered as having purchased the company, you could be buying tax liabilities… even if they are on your list of items excluded from the sale.

Each of the Franchise Tax Board (state franchise and income taxes), the Board of Equalization (sales taxes) and the Employer Development Department (employment taxes) has the right to come after the buyer of a business for unpaid taxes in an amount up to the entire purchase price. So, if you pay $100,000 for the assets of a company, you could be liable for unpaid taxes of up to $100,000 to each of those three government entities. Your $100,000 purchase price just became $400,000!

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Small businesses dominate the U.S. economy. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA), 99% of all independent companies in the U.S. have less than 500 employees. As a small business attorney in San Jose, most of the time I am working with clients to form new businesses. However, as we all know, not all businesses succeed. Recently I was counseling a client with regard to the sale of her retail store. She had worked hard building the store into a business that could support her needs, but it was time to retire. Rather than going through the hassle of selling the business as a whole, she decided to simply sell the inventory to a competitor and shut the doors. However, shutting down a company can still be a hassle, and if you forget to do one thing it could result in a big liability later.

So, what does it take to shut down a small company? Here is just a short to-do list of the basic items common to most small businesses. This list does not take into account the added complexities of a business with multiple owners.

1. Talk to your accountant, attorney, financial advisor and any other professionals that may be able to assist you in a smooth closure of your business.

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In this digital age, the courts increasingly have zero tolerance for errors on a UCC-1 financing statement intended to perfect a lender’s security interest in collateral as part of a loan transaction. Most recently, a federal court in Rushton v. Standard Industries, Inc., et al. (In re C.W. Mining Company), 488 B.R. 715 (D. Utah, 2013) ruled that a UCC financing statement that omitted two periods from the debtor’s name was materially misleading, and the “secured party” was therefore not perfected. A lender who thought it was properly secured on a $3 million obligation suddenly found itself entirely unsecured because of this seemingly trivial mistake!

The debtor in this matter was C.W. Mining Company, whose fortunes had slipped, leading to a bankruptcy. Well before the bankruptcy petition was filed a creditor with a security interest in coal owned by the debtor (C.W. Mining Company was a coal producer) filed a UCC-1 financing statement naming the debtor as “CW Mining Company.” The bankruptcy trustee (usually the bad guy in these situations, from the secured creditor’s point of view) brought an action to, among other things, avoid the lien because of this mistake, arguing that the creditor was not properly perfected.

The Bankruptcy Court and the Federal District Court, on appeal, agreed with the trustee. They held that the manner in which the creditor set forth the debtor’s name on the UCC-1 financing statement was seriously misleading, as it omitted the two periods. Of major importance was the fact that the search algorithm used by the state – Utah in this instance – did not pick up the filing in its data base when the debtor’s proper name was entered.

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