Get Incorporated and Situated
So by now, you are on your way with a business plan in hand and newfound free time to start your company. The next step is to hire a lawyer and other professionals because in order to operate properly there is a tremendous volume of documents to be processed properly and on time. This unavoidable bureaucracy could easily paralyze any business.
It is critical to have a great lawyer who will expedite your paperwork and bail you out of some of the complexities in business. At first, you may find that hiring outside counsel hourly is too expensive for your small business. In this case, you should try to have a multidisciplined lawyer, a generalist with a business edge, directly on your team. This person can perform many management and legal functions and serve as “General Counsel,” if she is qualified.
In our experience, we have found that over a long period, an early employees’ stock in a successful company will become worth much more than their hourly wages. With this in mind, the lawyer on your team could get paid predominantly with incentive pay like stock options and therein agree to accept lower nominal wages, which would help finance the company by not draining the bank account in the early years. You could apply this same incentive-heavy recruitment strategy when hiring an accountant or other professionals that you may require.
Furthermore, you can attempt to help defray other ordinary cash expenses for any vendor or partner by offering any of a wide variety of incentives that directly correlate with your own success. Having an aggressive lawyer and other professionals aligned with your financial best interests cannot hurt you, unless you overpay. You should interview a number of professional vendors and choose the ones you favor. From that short list, determine if any of them are interested in your alternate payment arrangement. Certainly, the more past successes you’ve had, the more likely they are to bite.
