Establishing and running a business is an extremely tricky task to pull off successfully, hence the fact that over 20% of businesses fail within the first year of their life. However, before one can even become concerned with ensuring their business not only survives, but thrives – one must first ensure all the legal requirements of their business are in order.

All states in the US require that each business has a registered agent so that the state has an official contact in every company. Whilst it is typically legal for someone to act as the registered agent of their own company, this is not usually optimal. Registered agent services are third-party individuals that assume these responsibilities for a business.

How Registered Agents Services Help

A registered agent is an individual or business that is designated to receive legal and other documents on the behalf of another business. Other documents it is responsible for receiving include tax and regulatory notices, subpoenas, and process and official government notices (including any communication from the Secretary of State).

All formal business entities, such as LLCs and corporations, require a registered agent; sole proprietorships and general partnerships do not though. All states require that businesses formed within them have a registered agent so that the state has an official contact within each and every company.

Registered agent services are preferable over doing it yourself for several primary reasons. Firstly, registered agents are required by law to have a physical address in the state they are operating in. Owners who live out of state will be unable to satisfy this condition therefore. Secondly, registered agents have to maintain business hours, which circumvents one of the core benefits of becoming one’s own boss: being able to set one’s working hours.

Top Registered Agents

ZenBusiness

ZenBusiness is a solid option as far as online registered agent services go. Since their company was founded in 2015, ZenBusiness has already established a plethora of ways in which it stands out from the pack.

In terms of customer feedback, ZenBusiness is essentially the industry standard. About 97% of the 6000 reviews available online describe their experience with the company using positive rating scores.

Incfile

Next on the list for top registered agents is IncFile, a company that can save you a little bit of money compared to Northwest, without sacrificing too many features.

Since 2004, IncFile has become one of the most popular online business formation services, serving over 500,000 business clients in that time.

IncFile can’t compare with Northwest when it comes to customer support, but their service department is still quite good when compared with most other registered agent services. Their helpful reps can help you solve the vast majority of issues you might run into as a registered agent customer.

LegalZoom

LegalZoom is one of the industry giants in online registered agent business service, the name of their brand has become synonymous with power and industry leading quality. Having served nearly 4 million people and businesses since they began to offer legal services online in 2001, they have acquired a level of experience few other companies in this field can match.

What sets them apart from the rest on this list is the 100% satisfaction guarantee LegalZoom offers – it’s one of the best in the industry. Anyone who is unhappy with their services for any reason can apply for a refund of all fees paid, at any time within 60 days of your initial payment.

Northwest

Another widely popular registered agent service, Northwest Registered Agent is this article’s favourite overall. Having been founded in 1988, Northwest has since become one of the most famous service providers across the US.

For the price of only $125 per annum for registered agent service, it of course isn’t the cheapest option available that provides this service, but their price is still far cheaper than competitors such as CSC and National Registered Agents, Inc. Furthermore, customers requiring service in multiple states will find particular utility in Northwest, which offers volume discounts that only improve their rates further.

Final Thoughts

On balance, whilst it is possible for businesses to act as their own registered agents, it is highly advisable that they hire a third party to do so due to their numerous benefits.

For more suggested reading regarding this topic, please see the aforementioned link.

Establishing a business in the US requires that a legal entity be chosen. There are five options available to prospective entrepreneurs: limited liability corporations (LLCs), corporations, S corporations, general partnerships and sole proprietorships. Each of these business structures has their own individual pros and cons that make them favourable for different situations.

That being said, for most entrepreneurs the most viable option available to them is to register their company as an LLC. Such a structure exists as a separate legal entity to its owners, meaning they cannot be held personally liable for the LLC’s debts or legal liabilities. On top of this, LLCs benefit from pass-through tax deduction as they are not subject to ‘double taxation’. Services such as ZenBusiness and Incfile can help prospective entrepreneurs get their LLC set up quickly and cheaply.

ZenBusiness

ZenBusiness makes the process of filing for an LLC far easier and cheaper for entrepreneurs. With ZenBusiness, small businesses can prepare and file their own formation documents, eliminating the need to involve lawyers or other expensive professionals to complete the work.

It can be extremely difficult to pursue the Do-It-Yourself route and carry out the multitude of legal steps necessary to start a business, if not only due to the mere number of tasks, but the sheer difficulty involved in all of them. This is especially true when considering the requirements of each state vary, in terms of business licenses, requirements and forms.

This means that going it alone necessitates a laser focus on attention to detail, and therefore a significant amount of time in order to devote this attention (each state can take a long while to approve an applicant’s formation documents on top of this as well, bear in mind).

ZenBusiness makes this whole process of monitoring these tasks, as well as many others one will be faced with as a business grows, infinitely easier. Features vary depending on the pricing plan selected, but some of ZenBusiness’s most notable services include: a name availability search, registered agent services, DBA registration, operating agreements and understanding the changing requirements of state compliance.

Incfile

Incfile provides a very comparable service to ZenBusiness, but is renowned in the industry for offering it at an economical price, one of the most affordable available in fact. Included in all of its packages, which start at $0 plus the state fee, is a full year of registered agent service for free – after this it can be included in the package for an annual fee of $119, which is still cheaper than most.

Another strong benefit of using Incfile is that they offer unlimited support, by either email or phone, and provide a tool for tracking an order in real time – this tracker provides information on the order right up until the completed documentation is delivered to a customer.

Furthermore, Incfile includes many other features that makes its service extremely convenient and useful. For example, they offer the ability for their customers to store their formation documents online, in addition to a dashboard that can be found in the same place to keep an eye on deadlines and reminders relating to compliance.

Final Comment

On balance, ZenBusiness and Incfile are both useful services that allow business owners to enter the US market by establishing their business as an LLC. This business structure in particular is extremely advantageous for any new business as owners benefit from reduced taxation since they do not have to pay taxes on the business profits in addition to their personal income, only the latter. Add onto this that business liability is treated as distinct from that of its owners, and becoming an LLC can really help people enter the US market.

In this way, ZenBusiness and Incfile are useful for this purpose as they make the process of becoming an LLC much simpler and cheaper. While it is possible for business owners to apply for LLC status by themselves, the process is extremely technical and difficult so it is advised against.

To read more about this topic, the aforementioned link will take you to a website where the features and advantages of each will be discussed in more depth.

For startups and young businesses (e.g. newly formed corporations), there are many important facets to ensuring that the business not only survives, but prospers. Some of these include careful planning, sensible budgeting and the appropriate management of one’s corporate resources.

The most central component of a successful business, the one that separates it from those that merely survive, is a solid business idea. Business ideas generate causes for investment, sales and profits – with profit comes the scope to invest further into the product a business offers, allowing it to grow.

For tech businesses, producing the business idea required for their success as a company needs an intimate knowledge of the trends of the industry they operate in. Given the percentage of startups that fail in their first year, this concept cannot be taken lightly. Thankfully, this article is here to provide a summary of this to help you in deciding what business idea to go with.

Computing That Prioritises Privacy

How long has the world been concerned with the issue of “privacy”? It doesn’t seem too long ago now that people were clamouring to fill out their details on Facebook, and yet now it is frequently avoided for its exploitation of the same data. Privacy still remains an important issue because a great deal of business models rely on a lack of it in order to work.

Tech businesses spout lip service about being concerned for the privacy of their users, yet continue to sell such information. This allows any vendor under the sun to continue to bask in their access to people’s personal data everywhere, at any time they require it. It’s a commodity vendors can buy and sell whenever they deem it necessary.

What is referred to as “privacy-enhancing computation” is a growing trend in the tech world that you would do well to capitalise on. In a world where people so desperately crave privacy, companies that are prepared to give it to them will undoubtedly be successful as a result of the necessity they will have established for themselves.

AI Engineering

Both machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) have been incredibly pertinent topics in 2020, as their presence continues to penetrate into products of all industries. The artificial intelligence industry (i.e. that relating to hardware, software and other services) is expected to have grown to a massive valuation of $156.5 billion worldwide by the end of 2021 – a 12.3% increase since two years ago.

This trend in technology is quite literally massive. It has greatly encouraged IT mega-trends such as hyper automation – the idea that anything that can be automated, should be – to grow. This has in turn responded very well to the pandemic, which only acted as an accelerant to the adoption of the concepts of digital and intelligent process automation.

Data Fabric

If there has been one requirement to ensure the effectiveness of operation and strategy in business, it’s data. Increasing the availability of data has been an important goal of many around the world, one that is close to many people’s hearts due the difficulty that has historically surrounded being able to access the correct data when needed, across several platforms and applications.

Data fabric is defined as a concept of design that acts as a consolidated layer (hence fabric) of data and other connecting processes; it makes use of both machine and human abilities to access and consolidate huge amounts of data for analysis. Such applications identify data across a plethora of applications and associate it with other data it considers connected in order to reveal novel business relationships.

Analysis of such data is how businesses identify both their problems and solutions; it is core to the functioning of businesses across all industries. The fact that data is so paramount to the ability of almost every business to thrive, companies that provide services to clean, integrate and present data in a structured manner will always remain in demand. According to Gartner, the use of data fabrics “can reduce data management efforts by up to 70%.”

Concluding Statement

This list represents some of the big tech trends that business owners cannot ignore in the upcoming year. For more information about this, or how to get started with your own corporation, please refer to this website.

Russia may finally shed its reputation as an energy exporter as it pursues a policy of minimizing reliance on hydrocarbons and diversifying exports. In 2019, the government launched a national project called International Cooperation and Exports with the goal of boosting non-resource and non-energy exports 70% by 2030.

Moscow is quickly closing in on that goal: the capital city’s non-resource and non-energy exports jumped to USD 20.13 billion in the first eight months of the year, an increase of almost one-third year-on-year.

Moscow-based exporters sell goods to 180 countries around the world with a presence on every continent. Kazakhstan, the United States, Belarus, and Germany are all major importers of goods from Russia’s capital. Growth in exports is driven by industrial products, which account for approximately 90% of local companies’ non-resource and non-energy exports, and by agro-industrial products, which reached USD 2.36 billion in the first eight months of 2021, up 7.4% year-on-year.

Local government support – both financial and logistical – is an important factor fueling export success. Financial support traditionally comes in the form of subsidies, grants, and preferential tax treatment, but a wide range of other support measures is also available. In Moscow, exporters can access the Mosprom Center for Export Support, which provides individualized assistance to local exporters by compiling research on target markets, assessing a product’s potential for export, and organizing business missions to find potential buyers.

Finding a niche

Personalized business missions are a better way to find potential partners than events like industry trade shows. During a mission, each exporter meets with the companies it matches with on as many parameters as possible. Why is that important? Distributors, dealers, retailers, and other buyers all have their own criteria for new products. Those criteria can cover anything, from quality to price to region. For example, a distributor that works with stores selling sustainable clothing will not pick up a brand that doesn’t use environmentally friendly materials. If your products don’t meet the requirements, then talking to that distributor would be a waste of time.

Trading business cards at an industry event cannot even come close to the effectiveness of a business mission, where supplier and distributor know enough about each other ahead of time to be ready to talk. The Mosprom Center’s experts present manufacturers’ products to buyers in advance of business missions and verify their interest before the dialog starts.

Business missions also save manufacturers time because the third-party organizer selects a list of relevant buyers. That means that business owners don’t have to study the market and weed out distributors and customers who aren’t a match for whatever reason.

Overcoming barriers

Business missions are also a good way to get around the problem of poor brand recognition. Foreign buyers are often unfamiliar with Russian brands, so they can be reluctant to reach out. An intermediary with experience presenting Russian brands can get a foot in the door and offer assistance during negotiations.

Business missions are also an effective format for dealing with language and regulatory barriers. In some Latin American countries, few people speak English, and it can be difficult to find interpreters with a good command of professional terminology. Specialists with a deep understanding of the local regulatory environment are also helpful. As an example, a Mosprom client recently signed a contract with an Argentinian mining company. During negotiations, they discovered that the proposed contract did not detail the parties’ rights and obligations. Instead, it was a general-use document that, among other things, assigned all liability for any problems to the supplier. The legal experts at the Mosprom Center noticed these issues and drafted a contract that satisfied both parties.

Tapping new markets

Some business missions are set up for specific suppliers, but others are organized to promote foreign trade in general. The Mosprom Center’s experts keep abreast of market conditions in a range of countries to identify needs that local suppliers could meet. When they saw several Eastern European countries planning large infrastructure projects, including two sections of railway in Hungary, they concluded that there was demand in the region for the materials and equipment used in such projects. Moscow-based companies sold USD 2.5 million in equipment for railroad infrastructure projects to Hungarian clients in the first five months of 2021, up from USD 1.68 million for all of 2020 and nothing at all prior to that.

“In the first ten months of 2021, the Mosprom Center’s specialists organized 13 business missions for 86 manufacturers and helped 29 exporters attend international trade shows. Target markets include Latin America, Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, and Africa,” says Alexander Prokhorov, head of Moscow’s department of investment and industrial policy.

Virtual format

Almost all of Mosprom’s events for exporters migrated online over the past year. In 2021, 12 of 13 business missions were held virtually, and local exporters found them to be just as effective for closing deals as pre-pandemic offline events.

Mosprom helps companies adapt their presentations for specific regions, researches the competitive advantages of local companies’ products, and facilitates locate and vet potential partners.

Last year, the Center’s experts helped 13 local exporters remotely attend a trade show in China using virtual reality technology to staff a group stand from Moscow. Visitors to the stand put on virtual reality headsets to enter a private conference area where they examined the companies’ products and discussed terms.

The Mosprom Center also offers local companies an online assessment of their export readiness called ADEPT 7, Russia’s first online tool for predicting whether or not a product will do well in a specific target market. Companies can use the tool from their own offices.