Company Formation

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Company Registration

Companies House Logo

Naturally forming a company involves a well thought process and extensive study needs to be done to set up a business that would best address your interests and is a healthy future prospect.

There are three main types of cocmpany:

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1)     – Private company limited by guarantee – In this particular type of company, the liability on each member in case of a wound up is calculated on the basis of the amount each member has subscribed to.  This will usually be £1.00.  A company limited by guarantee is a not for profit company typically used by community organisations and charities.

2)     – Private unlimited company – There is an unlimited liability on each member of the company.

3)      - Private company limited by shares – The most common type of company in the United Kingdom.  The liability on each member of the company in this form is estimated by the number of unpaid shares the member hold in the company.

One of the biggest advantages to company formation and especially the registration of a limited company is that it provides the owner/s with protection against any sort of personal liability if the company goes into debt or becomes insolvent. What this effectively means is that it provides you with added cushion when you are applying for credit in order to develop the business without risking your (the share holders’) personal finances or assets.

Incorporating a business will ensure that if the business faces serious loss or any other kind of upheaval, you are only accountable for any personal shares that you may hold in the company. In addition to this, limited companies may offer tax benefits and easier access to finance.  It is however common for banks to request  personal guarantees against finance against finance.

Companies House is the executive government agency responsible for companies. Any person is eligible to set up a company. One person can form a company and there are no restrictions on the nationality or residency of directors and shareholders. However, in case of a Public or Unlimited Company, there is a minimum requirement of two for the number of shareholders.  The formation of a company begins by registering which may be done either in personal or via a company formation agent.  If you are using the services of a company registration agent  the process is very quick and easy. The formation agent will take care of the whole incorporation process by obtaining from  you the proposed company name, registered office, details of directors, shareholders and share capital.  This is typically done through an online incorporation questionable.  The information is then sent and securely electronically to Companies House.   If you are looking for a company that is a few years’ old, readymade companies are also available from most well established company registration specialist.

Before you are about to begin the company formation process, it is important that you have a legitimate application. It is important to check the availability of your proposed company as the application will be rejected by the registrar of companies if there is a name too similar on the register.   Similarly if you wish to incorporate a Public Limited Company you must submit the details of two directors.

Following issues should be taken into account before and during the  Company Formation process;

Company Name – It is important that you have a company name which can be spelled and pronounced with ease. In addition to this, it should be timeless, professional and should not be considered to be offensive in any other language across the world. It is also important that the company name does not contain a sensitive word or expression as defined in the Companies Act.

Web presence of your company – It may be prudent to check the availability of your company name in domain format e.g. “yourcompanyname.com.  For most business web presence is essential if not crucial.  It is possible to have  a small very functional website created for a very low cost.  It way even be possible to use the free web 2.0 content management systems such as WordPress or Drupal. Today consumer is more likely to search for business services online.  There are many firms, including company formation agents,  which design websites and host them. You may consult and work in collaboration with these companies. Keep in mind that the requirements of your business are adequately addressed in the way that you want.

When starting out it may be a good idea to use a virtual office your instead of laying a large investment on office, furniture and telephone lines.  Such is very useful at keeping initial business start-up costs down.  Virtual office will allow your new company to have a real correspondence address, telephone answering service where a professional trained receptionist will answer your calls in your company name  and take a message.

Finally, it imperative to ensure you keep the Companies House up to date regarding any reportable changes such as change office registered address, resignation and appointments of shareholders.

Offshore company formation

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Offshore Company FormationWHY INCORPORATE OFFSHORE?

1. Low or Zero Taxation: Offshore company registration in places such the British Virgin Islands BVI offer businesses the advantage of zero tax on the income derived from their operations outside the jurisdiction of incorporation. Popular jurisdiction for International Business Companies (IBC) that are offshore include the BVI, Belize, Panama, Seychelles, Dubai and many more.

There are also companies incorporated onshore which provide low tax advantages such as Hong Kong and Ireland.  In such countries corporation tax low or some which are not required to pay taxes on gains on revenue  generated from activities outside the jurisdiction. These low tax onshore companies do, however, have to adhere to all statutory filing of annual returns, company accounts and tax returns.

2. Anonymity: In most cases, registrars in offshore jurisdictions do not disclose information regarding directors of the company, investors such as shareholders and the list includes beneficiaries. Thus it is possible that the underlying principal shall perform all tasks pertaining to the offshore company while maintaining anonymity. In order to secure the directors and in particular the beneficial owners of the offshore company, Nominee directors and shareholders are often used.

3. Asset protection: Considering the international business context offshore company jurisdictions have strong asset protection and law suits originating outside the country are usually futile.  Offshore jurisdictions are renowned for their asset protection laws which favour the offshore companies. To further protect the company’s assets, an offshore company may also opt for offshore banking facilities.

4. Reporting is made easy: As there is zero tax to pay the governments of the offshore jurisdiction do not usually require the filing of company accounts.  The well know exceptions are Dubai and Hong Kong.  In general terms reporting requirements of these entities are minimal. Offshore IBCs do not have to file annual reports or accounts. This is replaced with local authorities charging a flat annual license fee which is very modest when compared to the expenses incurred on reporting and taxation in case of onshore jurisdictions.

5. Operating Costs and Fees: The advantage of lower reporting requirements is coupled with offshore companies having low fees of operations and as well as low maintenance costs. The fee associated to conformity and account preparation followed by auditing expenses is considerable in case of on-shore companies.

Onshore jurisdictions have to buy or rent premises whereas the cost of registered office in case of offshore companies is significantly lower and usually included in the incorporation fee. This cost may further be brought down by setting up a virtual office at the registered office of the company.

The ultimate web presence guide for SMEs

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The Benefits of a Small Business Website

Investment in effective web presence in not just financial but time.  Owners of small and medium size enterprise will notice that having a great web presence is more about investing your time than money.  To put the value of the commitment into perspective, it is important that we outline certain benefits that small business website can offer. Many small businesses do not understand the importance of a website and believe that it is something which is not of great significance or would contribute very little to their cause. However, if your website is designed well enough, it has the ability to create new business opportunities and help you reach a broader customer base.

Current Consumer Trends

Technology and most importantly Internet has become a part of our lives. It is something which is her to stay.  Indeed as time goes by more and more people more will get involved. The internet continues to evolve and offer more ways for us to learn, research, shop and consume information. Nielsen and Webvisible conducted a study in 2009 which revealed that approximately sixty-three percent of the people search online whilst setting up a business.   Conversely  only  forty-four percent of SMEs owned a website during this period. Consequently many entrepreneurs were missing out on a potentially huge market.

Generating New Leads

Connecting to the world out there through the Internet will open new doors and help you small businesses establish new leads. The internet will make it easier for you to reach out to the customers but helps customer in their search of your products and services. Previously an ad would have made the customers call you but as of today they can simply fill in a form on your website and the relationship starts building right there. Naturally, attracting a large customer base would only be possible if you make it simpler for your customers to get in touch with you online.

Reaching Local Customers

Search engines have made it possible to contact local businesses. Google in particular helps you even more. If you look for a particular business on Google, it’ll give you the results based on the region you live in. This provides an opportunity to people owning small businesses to create their own website which will help them reach a large customer base in the domestic market.

Building Customer Loyalty

Having a regular blog helps customer to be updated about your business. This increases the customer loyalty towards a business and keeps you on top of the list when they are looking for a products and services you offer. Blogs also provides a great opportunity to enter social media. Customers can follow you through Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn and other social networks. This will enhance your customer relationship and online following.

Extending the Brand

After you have set up a website for your business, you will be able to reach new customers and would have the chance to focus your investments in fresh marketing campaigns. You may practice advertising your products online using display advertising, sponsorship or pay per click services such as Google Adwords. It helps you reach customers you wouldn’t have if you did not have a website.

Planning Your Small Business Website

Prior to starting your small business’s website, it is important for you to know how to develop it, what to expect and what needs to be done. You should budget it out and should decide what amount you want to invest in it. After doing that, draw up a strategy to set up your website in  a way that is maximises the chances of realizing your objectives.

Identifying Your Goals

Just like any other business activity, you should be clear in your head about the goals that you want to achieve. The goals tend to differ with the kind of business that you are in. After identifying your goals, you should execute a business strategy which will help you achieve these goals. This would include how to set up your website, what should be made prominent and what methods should be used to measure the results generated.

Important Information Pages

Visitors to your business’s website will look for precise information such what you offer, pricing, product and service delivery methods and the location of your business.  In addition to your product and service page you should have a core set of pages such about us page giving a background information on your business and a contact page detailing your contact information and physical location. These pages will take care of questions such as who you are, how to contact you and where you are located. In addition to this, it is good practice to have a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page.

Part 2 – coming soon

Web design for a new business

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Web Design – A Step by Step Guide

If you are not comfortable with using the Internet, acquiring and managing a website could be daunting task.

Domains, Hosting, Blogs, and SEO – may all appear to be a little confusing for those who are not experienced internet users. We therefore believe that this guide shall come in handy for you to get some web design knowhow.

Step 1. Choose a Domain Name

A domain name is a unique identity that your website possesses. It could be virtually anything as long as it is unique and is not being used by anyone else. A domain name can easily be registered online through companies known as domain registrars.

During the domain registration process it is important to remember to keep your domain name short and simple so it’s easy to remember as your eventual goal is to ensure that customers are able to relate it to your business and remember it with ease.

Optimisation Tip: Your domain name should have the keyword that you want to optimise. For example company-formation-online.com

Step 2. Decide what the website should achieve

Similar to any other communication means that you use, you should be clear as to what you want to achieve with its use. You should determine if your objective is to instigate sale enquiries or do you aim to sell directly to the customers online? If you are new into the business, it is sensible to keep things simple as you may face budget constraints. Remember there firms offering discount web design services so shop around. Once your business starts flourishing, you may expand and build upon your website.

It is recommended that you evaluate your overall goals when you are taking decisions regarding design and functionality.

Step 3. Decide on a look

Just like when you are in the planning stage of your business, you plan to target a specific audience. Similarly, the same kind of planning and forethought should go into the design of your website, and deciding what type of audience you will target.

This will help you determine what the customers expect, not only terms the website, but from your business as a whole. For instance, a website for a play school should be fun looking whereas if you have a business that deals in computer accessories, should have a more formal look. It might prove helpful if you walk through a few other websites in the same business as yours and remember that even though flashy websites look impressive; make the key areas of your website prominent and easy to access. Take a look at the graphic design capabilities of of the firm or developer constructing your site by viewing their portfolio of previous work.

Step 4. Decide on content

Content is king and functionality is its queen. People visit websites to seek information or obtain a product or service.  If your website does not have the content users are looking for or they are not able to understand your order system they will go elsewhere. You should be certain of the information that you want to get across to the customer. If your business deals in selling products, putting up pictures is helpful. However, keep in mind that the pictures should be well placed, clean, crisp and relevant to the content or products and services on your website.

Make sure that the content that you have on the website is original and preferably write it on your own as no one knows your business better than you.

Step 5. Decide on the extras

It is not necessary to spend a major portion of your start-up budget on the creation of your website.  First build the foundation and make site upgrades incrementally as your business starts to make an income.  The main exception to this rule is logo and brand design.  Supporting promotion and flash animations can be added later.

Social media and search engine rankings

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Technology has evolved and with it comes changes in the way business is being done today. The results of these are often difficult to predict and anticipate. One technology driven Phenomena which has had a profound impact on business is social media. It has been around for some time but social media marketing has now emerged as a vital part Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM) because of its increasing influence in the way in which the content on websites the site is ranked by search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo. Success in social media networking can have significant increase in the web traffic.

It all began with content sharing on Facebook and now the practice has expanded to Google Plus as well. Talking of the past, a webmaster could have gotten away with a decent SEO strategy coupled with a certain amount of automatic social book marking of the content on the website, in today’s market the focus of any business wishing to secure good traffic to their website is to develop unique and interesting content which would attract the interest of people using social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+and  LinkedIn.

Social media first attracted interest from the SEO community but has now developed into a multi discipline industry.  Social media now offers an efficient  means of staying abreast of industry news in the users particular niche and inter connecting with like minded people.

The days of writing good interesting content, obtaining some links and increasing in search engine rankings are over.  It is now necessary for any SEO “worth their salt” to market web content at social media networks.  This approach has produced better content targeted at people and not search engine spiders.  Failure to meet the content needs of this ever increasing and sophisticated social crowd will lead to lower online visibility and search engine traffic.

The Google Panda algorithm change has also meant sites not being regularly updated with fresh content and social network engagement will decline in the Search Engine Results Page (SERPS).

All this leads us to the question, what should you do to improve your website from a fresh content and social media viewpoint?

1)    Put in practice a content creation strategy – You should ensure that the content on your website is updated regularly. Even though your SEO must be doing it already, but today’s market requires fresh and interesting content and thus it is important that you give the user what they are looking for.

2)    The content that you have should be useful – In a nutshell the content that you have on your website should be of high value to your business. This effectively means that it should depict what the business does, who your potential customers are, what the visitors are looking for and most importantly how would you deliver them.

3)    Share your content – Developing unique and accurate content is important. However, sharing it is equally crucial. You have to ensure that the content is not just placed on the website but is shared and re-shared via social media networks which would open up new doors for your business and attract potential audience which is most likely to benefit from the content that you have provide.  Putting out good content will generate more traffic to your website and more importantly new backlinks, retweets, facebooks likes – all of whom are ranking factors in post Panda Google.

Creating great content is not easy but in today’s socially orientated  internet, it is an essential component to online success.  For businesses who do not have in-house content creation capabilities it may make SEO a more extensive and time consuming but the choice is outsource or loose your rankings.

Starting a business: first things first

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Many would be entrepreneurs have a great business idea but don’t know just where to start.  This guide is to help you execute your business ideas and turn them into reality. The steps outlined in this guide will should help you evaluate if the idea is likely to be a success and whether or not it is a viable proposition. Following steps are important:

  • Carry out extensive research
  • Studying the results of the research and start evaluating them
  • Document and map out your findings
  • Communicate it to the people
  • Design a website
  • Conduct a follow up research

Before you invest any money into a business it is very important to carry out an extensive market research to determine the size of the market for your business and the major current players in that market place.   This will enable you to evaluate the market potential and information on your major competitors and prospective customers.  More importantly it will let you evaluate your unique selling points (USPs) and those of other in the marketplace.

In carrying out the research it is important to discuss the procedure as many involved people as possible.  This will give you a diverse range of outlooks and perspectives. It is also wise and prudent to carry out secondary research surveying the target market from another angle. Thorough research prevents pitfalls and mistakes and will add value to your business by helping you;

  • Establish a market for your products and services
  • Harnessing better knowledge of your customer base,
  • Getting an insight of your competitors and build a USP

Start making calls

Once you have conducted a fair bit of market research, next step is to choose the set of people who would supply, manufacture or resell your products and services or, in other words, effectively everyone with whom you intend to do business on a regular basis with. Ask for proposals and negotiate keeping in mind your business’s goals and requirements. Following this, you should be able to develop a pricing structure, predict future cash flows and profit margins. This may be summarised as follows;

  • Establishing contacts
  • Analyses financial details of the business
  • One off start-up costs
  • Sales forecast and cash flow projections

Mapping it out

To have the best of success make sure that you are able to draw a realistic budget for your business and in accordance with the plans that you have set out for the business together with forecasts for revenue.

The plan should include a marketing strategy detailing where will you conduct your business and how you will reach your market.  It is recommended you map out the first year strategy and a five year marketing plan.  A lot may change in five years but the fundamentals are likely to remain stable and this will give you a blueprint to measure you performance and help you stay on track. Planning in this way will help you stay organized your plan documents could come in very handy if you need finance from a bank further down the line.  Remember the bank may require you to present your business plan and marketing strategy documents.

  • Draw the business specifics
  • Preparation of business documents on an annual basis

Telling people

Aspiring entrepreneurs usually pick one of these two options while setting up a business; either to share their ideas with everyone or just keep it to themselves. Unless business is unique enterprise which has never been done before or you are in the process of obtaining patents it is advantageous to share your ideas and plans with as many people as you can.

This is because any of these people may help you enhance your plan or offer financial or moral support. Keeping your friends and associates informed could well prove to be rewarding as any of these people have the potential of becoming key business contacts.

Setting up a website

In modern era, with the advent of internet ,perhaps the easiest and the most convenient way to get your business out in the public domain is by designing a website. A major advantage of using a website is that it allows you to gauge your customer base and the demand that you’ll attract without having to commit to huge sums of capital or time. In addition to this, it can serve as an effective public relations tool to communicate your message.  A website also enables you carry out your tasks from anywhere and at anytime of the day. You do not have to be a technology expert to do this.