In today's world of billions of people with billions of individual needs and trillions of dollars to spend on quadrillions of options, there's economic potential for practically everything. Selling water balloons, or painted rocks, or stocks, or cars, or antique aircrafts is easy and profitable these days, especially with the introduction of the Internet to the global economic market place. The problem, of course, is that increased economic involvement also means increased competition. If you want to really make it in the modern business world, the first step is simple: you have to make yourself a corporation.
Incorporation is simply to form a business or corporation. Under United States law, a corporation is essentially a fictitious person under law, and can own holdings, be taxed, or be sued just as an actual human being can. Corporations can be a number of entities besides simple businesses – non profit organizations, government entities or even governances of new towns and cities can fall under the classification of ‘corporation’.
Like the person a corporation is designed to be, all corporations must also have names. Under corporate law, that name consists of three basic parts: it’s ‘distinctive element,’ it’s ‘descriptive element,’ and it’s legal ending. When combined, these parts form the moniker by which a corporation or business will be legally recorded as. This name will also be the name under which trademark services and registration will take place.
When a new corporation is under construction in the legal processes of the country’s fine legal system, a lot of thought and effort goes into the name. The name of a corporation is the name by which it will be known in general, and goes a long way towards saying what exactly the company is and does. First impressions are important, and often the first impression a possible customer will receive is when he or she reads the name of the corporation in the phone book or on an internet search engine.
As was said previously, there are three parts to a corporate name. The descriptive element is optional, and simply says what the company does – “lawn service” or “technical repair” or “tea pot and ceramics expert”, for example. The distinctive part is the only required part of the legal name, and is usually some word - you could use your own name, for instance, like “Greene’s” or “Smith Brothers” or something similar. You can also use any word, like “Jade” or “Raven” or “Moss Mountain.” You could even make up a word: “Zacka” or “Yahoo,” for instance.
The legal ending describes what sort of business it is – “incorporated,” “corporation,” and “limited” are all examples of legal names, and are abbreviated as “inc.”, “corp.”, and “ltd.”, respectively. Put it all together and you get “Greene’s Lawn Service, inc.”, “Moss Mountain Technical Repair corp.”, and “Zacka Tea Pot and Ceramics Expert, ltd.”. It’s as simple as that.
One basic benefit of incorporation is purely legal: you can use a corporation to protect your personal assets. In a sole proprietor or general partner business, the owner or owners are personally responsible for every business cost, including liabilities and loans. In a corporation, though, stockholders and officers are generally not held liable for their company’s debts and other obligations or liabilities. They’re not held liable for any more than the amount they’ve invested – if a stockholder only invested $500 in a company, he or she cannot possibly lose more than that.
Another benefit of incorporation is that it makes transferal of ownership very easy. If you run a business but aren’t incorporated, selling it will mean selling each individual possession and asset of that company. If you’re incorporated, the corporation owns those assets, so you can sell the entire corporation as a single clean entity without all of the extra hassle and paperwork.