How to choose your business type

This project guide helps two Sky’s the Limit members work together through three meetings as they collaborate to choose your business type.

Before this meeting:

Make sure that you’ve had an intro meeting. If you need help navigating your first meeting, visit this Guide to Your First Meeting.
Review: Understanding Your Reasons for Starting a Business

In this meeting:

Discuss what your business does on a daily, monthly, and yearly basis. Identify the reason why your business exists. What problem do you solve?
Discuss your goals and motivations your business. Are you trying to make a profit? Fulfill a social, religious, or educational mission? Or is it a combo of the two?

After this meeting:

Google it. Try to find other businesses you modeled yours after and see what their status is.
Note any agreed-upon next steps.

Before this meeting:

In this meeting:

Talk through each of the main business entities in the article.
Which ones sound most like what you are trying to accomplish?
Try to determine the pros and cons to your business for each of your top options.

After this meeting:

Sleep on it. This is a big decision with legal consequences. Make sure you feel good about your final decision.
Note any agreed-upon next steps.

Before this meeting:

In this meeting:

Based on the business type you’ve chosen for your business, determine what you need to do to apply for that type of legal business structure.
Go through the application together and create a list of what information you will need to gather before you apply.

After this meeting:

Apply for the business type.
Be sure to mark your project complete, update your business tracker, and start a new project!

How to start a social enterprise