In Breaking Free, I make a big point of how important it is to incorporate your business.

It makes sense for a couple of reasons. First, because it protects you from personal liability, and second, because it offers you some great tax advantages.

For today, let’s just focus on the personal liability part.

Incorporating your business protects you from personal liability, because it essentially separates you from the business. When you incorporate, your business becomes like another person. This other person has it’s own bank account, it can own things like property, and it can take risks. Even if that “other person” (your business) goes completely bankrupt or gets sued, YOU (and your personal assets like your house, car, savings) are safe.

This is important because many new businesses fail, but you as the entrepreneur don’t want to fail. You want to pick yourself back up and start your NEXT business which will be even more successful. Failure is a necessary way to learn, so we want it to be as painless as possible.

Of course, I have to admit that what I wrote above is a a “best case scenario”. When everything works like it should, then yes, you PERSONALLY are protected. But there are certain situations where your corporate status doesn’t help you out, and every business owner should be aware of them!

You see, setting up a company gives you so much protection from liability, that unethical people in the past have tried to take advantage of it. They have created a “shell corporation”, in other words a business just for the purpose of liability protection, to help them get away with a crime.

Of course, the law had to be modified to weed out these people and make sure they were appropriately prosecuted. But in the process, the requirements for honest small business owners became TOUGHER. Some extra steps are now required to make sure your corporate status stays intact.

By the way, whenever a court decides to waive the corporate protection and actually prosecute the owners behind the company PERSONALLY, they call it “piercing the corporate veil”. (Lawyers always like to come up with fancy names for things.)

Following are the top five ways to protect you personal assets then starting a business. Make sure you do these correctly, and you can be sure that even if your business experiences a colossal failure, or gets sued out of existence, at least your personal assets are safe and you can start over.

1. Never Engage in Fraud or any Criminal Act

   If you commit a crime, the corporate veil isn’t going to protect you one bit! Never sell a product you know is defective or doesn’t work, misrepresent something in your advertising, forge any signatures, or pull a bait and switch (offer a great deal to get people in the door only to tell them it is out of stock so you can sell a substitute.) Run your business HONESTLY and with INTEGRITY every day, and it will pay off in the long run.

2. Never Misrepresent Your Corporate Officers or Members

   Don’t ever lie about who is involved in your company. When it comes time to ask for investors, or get people to support you, you may be templed to exaggerate about who is actually working with you. If they haven’t actually SIGNED your operating agreement, then they aren’t your partner.

3. Make Sure Your Follow All Corporate Formalities

   If you are going to claim you are a company, then you’d better act like a company. That means you have to file all important documents and keep them on file (your operating agreement, articles of incorporation, and DBA for example). You also have to keep detailed financial records. In Breaking Free, I provide samples of these documents and show you exactly how to create them yourself. This will literally save you thousands of dollars in legal expense because you won’t have to pay a lawyer to create them for you.

4. Keep Your Business and Personal Assets Separate

   The business has to have it’s own bank account. The money in that bank account is not YOUR money. It belongs to the business. In fact, if you decide one day come along and take some money out to buy yourself a Hawaiian vacation, that is called embezzlement (a crime)! Many first time business owners (especially if they are the sole owner) don’t understand this concept. The money in the company is not theirs. The company is like a separate person, and all assets must be kept separate.

5. Never Treat the Business’ Assets as if They Were Your Own

   Don’t deposit your personal checks into the corporate account. Don’t use company money to finance your personal life and hobbies. Don’t lend the company car to your buddy for a weekend excursion. Don’t set up a cot in the back of the office and start living there! Again, the business and yourself are two separate people. Treat them accordingly.

With these five basic steps, you will be well on your way to protecting your personal assets in the event your business goes under.

Many successful business people, from Donald Trump to John D. Rockefeller, went through periods of ups and downs in their life. Not every company they bet on was a success. But they managed to survive and lived to fight another day because they where smart enough to INCORPORATE correctly. They followed the above five steps to make sure they wouldn’t lose their corporate status in the event of a lawsuit. They made sure that their PERSONAL assets were safe, even if the COMPANY went bankrupt.

To learn how to incorporate the easy way (no legal fees or confusing paperwork!) and to discover the tax benefits of incorporating, check out Breaking Free (the book).

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