Being A Business (or Making Things Official)

I’ve been running this blog for a pretty decent amount of time so far. I’ve gotten packages delivered to my house with my address and the name as “Finding My Inner Bombshell” with no issues. I haven’t made any money on this blog so I haven’t had any issues with checks coming in with the blog name. But I’ve known for a while that it would be smart to create a fictitious business name for the blog, I just never got around to it.

I also started a production company a while ago. I really haven’t done much with it, but it will be listed as one of the production companies for “Single Parent Date Night”. I had another project in mind for my production company, but it fell apart when another project with the same concept came out and had a lot of positive press. But many people produce their own work so having my own production company is a good thing for me. Again, I haven’t made money in my production company name, but I figured creating a fictitious business name would be a smart thing to do.

A few weeks ago, I found out that with one of my day jobs they will not be able to pay us as individuals anymore. It’s a long story, but basically we all needed to have a business that they could pay us through. We had the option to create a sole proprietor or a LLC, and after doing research (and realizing how expensive a LLC would be each year), I decided it was time to make both the blog and my production company official.

Fortunately, there is so much stuff online about how to create a DBA and it’s not a horrible process to have to go through. I had to submit some paperwork to make sure that neither the blog nor the production company names were taken already (neither were but I had a moment of wondering if I had screwed up for not doing it sooner). Then there was some paperwork to fill out online and I got a bar code to bring with me to the county courthouse to pay and complete.

The county courthouse was a pretty easy step and I was prepared with all my paperwork and money (possibly over prepared because I did more forms that was required) and I was out of there quickly. Another step I had to do is to get my DBA announcements into a newspaper for 4 weeks. Fortunately the county website lists dozens of eligible newspapers and their prices so I went with one of the cheapest ones (that actually price matched so it became the cheapest one) and my announcements will be in the paper soon.

This is all very professional and official, but because it was so easy for me it’s a bit hard to believe that I’ve officially created 2 businesses for myself. I’ll be setting up a business banking account in the next few weeks (I need that for the day job) with my DBA names on it so I can start being paid as my blog or production company if I ever make money off of either.

This was a step I had to do to keep my day job, but I’m glad I was forced into doing this. I needed to do it eventually and I didn’t have a good reason to do it so I was procrastinating. But it was really a simple process and it’s pretty much all down so I’m officially a business owner now of 2 different businesses! I think that’s pretty exciting!

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