Mistakes to Avoid When Starting Your Own Business

Welcome in to Judica County Radio. Coming up today on the program, your host, Josh Whitaker and Joe Hamer. Managing partners, Whitaker and Hamer law firm. The power behind this program will get into the top ten list of legal mistakes that people starting a business are making.

You don't want to miss it. I'm Josh Whitaker and Joe Hamer. Managing partners, Whitaker and Hamer law firm. Practicing attorneys here in the great state of North Carolina.

Offices conveniently located in Raleigh, Garner, Clayton, Goldsboro, Fuquay-Varina, Gastonia and in Moorhead City. I'm Morgan Patrick, consumer advocate. If you've got a legal situation you're facing, well we understand.

It can be frustrating. You can get answers to those questions by calling Whitaker and Hamer at any time. 800-659-1186. That's 800-659-1186. Leave your contact information briefly what the call is about and an attorney with Whitaker and Hamer will be in touch. You can email your questions to this show, info at judicacounty.com.

We've got a top ten list of legal mistakes that people make when they're starting their business. We'll get into that, but first of all guys, welcome back and hope you had a great week. Yeah, Morgan. So far so good. How about you, Joseph? It's terrible. Eeyore is not here.

Eeyore. The week's been alright, man. Today though, I don't know what it is about today.

I started my day, this is always bad. We always record these things during the week, so you might be listening to us on our podcast. You might be listening to us on the radio on the weekend on a Saturday or Sunday, but we usually tape this during the week. And I woke up today thinking it was Friday. It is in fact not Friday.

So far from Friday. So if you're listening to this, I always imagine when people listen to this show, because I think on most radio stations we come on the weekends, I imagine you're like on your porch or on your deck. Must be nice. In the sun shining, right? And you've just finished mowing your, maybe you've just finished mowing your, I guess it's not really a mowing the lawn type of time right now. Maybe you blew some leaves, you got some stuff done.

You've had a hard day of work and you're sitting down. We're going to give you some legal knowledge, hopefully. That's the goal. But that's not where we're at today. We're not sitting on the porch today.

Yeah, it sounds really good for you that's listening. That's not what we're doing. No, we're hard at work today, but we get a chance to sit down and we enjoy doing it. But we got a top 10 list today and I go on record.

We've done a couple of these and I go on record. Not a big fan of these top 10 list. I love them, man. I'm just going to be contrarian.

I think they're fantastic. But we got one. It's a good way to bring up some talking points, right? So me and Joe, we like to, you know, the biggest, I think the biggest advantage that we have is experience. And so we can kind of go through these top 10 lists and we can kind of point out things where we've seen things go wrong for folks. We've seen things going south. We've had to come in and fix things, right? So this top 10 list, we've done estate planning in the past. We've done family law, but this top 10 list is for all of our self-employed entrepreneurs.

This is the top 10 things that self-employed folks, entrepreneurs, when they're starting a new business or a side business or a side hustle or their third business or their eighth business, these are mistakes people make when they start businesses. So that's what we're going to do today. We can't do it right away though.

No. We can't just jump into it. You got to ease into the show. We got to ease into this show. I say 45 minutes in, we get into it, man.

We just bang it out right at the end. I was telling Joseph, I have three boys and my middle boy had a birthday and he got this present from his grandparents. He got this present where you get a piece of paper and you get these markers and you draw out like, I keep saying a Mario Brothers like screen, but you kind of draw out. Like a track basically, right? Yeah. Yeah. And you draw out like what you'd want to see in a video game and then you take a picture of it and this app makes it playable. And so that's all we did.

So it's like an iPad app, a phone app? Yeah. That's pretty cool, man. So they were, you know, and it's not something like the kids would know to ask for, you know, it's like, you know, they asked for these kinds of shoes or this kind of jersey or this kind of video game or are they, but it wasn't on their list. It's just something that was like off the, but they had like hours and hours and hours of fun doing it. Dude.

That would've been awesome. When I was a kid, I don't let my kid, my kids watch TV or look at screens. They, they can read books and they can do hard manual labor. Sure. Sure.

Math, math problem. I'm kidding, man. My kids, my kids like the games. They'd love that. That sounds sweet. That sounds like a good way to occupy them for an extended and prolonged period of time.

So yeah, but they had that. I'm jealous, man. If you were my dad, you know, so I would, I would enjoy playing on that. You didn't play with it with them. You, you just, you too cool. No, no, they were too, they were too, too far into it.

I didn't even get a turn in your own house. So they, they all had that, but that's, uh, that's fun, man. That's a good, that's a good time. You telling me that story, man, has perked me up. Cause I've put myself in their shoes back in those days, man, when you didn't have anything to worry about, but, uh, but what kind of fun you were going to have, you know?

God, those were the days, man. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, that's a care in the world. But I can't believe how close, you know, we, um, you know, Thanksgiving's coming up. Christmas is coming up. It's going to be 2024 before we know it.

That's crazy, man. Where's the time gone? It'll be a good time. Uh, you know, at the beginning of the year, January, everybody's usually a little on the slower side. It's a good time to, uh, revisit your estate plan, do maintenance on your estate plan.

Yeah. I mean, you should do that every month. That's my recommendation. Call us every month, just in case. Every, every December, every December, instead of thinking about Christmas. I got my biweekly paycheck, so I'm calling you to revise my estate plan.

You can come sit down with me and Joe and take a look at your estate plan, your, your trust or what have you. But, uh, in all seriousness though, yeah, annually is a good time period, man. And like you said, during that slower period where most people slow down a little bit.

I mean, I guess you're still hectic, you know, you got a lot of, you're probably doing some traveling, bouncing around, but there's going to be a period where you can reflect and, uh, yeah, man, it's a good time to get your affairs in order for sure. They need to make a Christmas special, a cartoon Christmas special. That's just about like the main character, like going to meet with their attorney. God, that sounds awesome. Like a ratings winner. I like it. Yeah.

Super popular, man. It would be killer. I'm not very artistic. Maybe we could fire up.

We hadn't fired up the AI chat bot GPT. What's the one that makes art for you? I played with that one the other day. There's a few different ones, but, uh, man, you know, it's crazy.

Photoshop's got the new generative fill. Have you seen that? I saw a commercial. It's unbelievable. Have you played with it?

Yes. It's unbelievable. It's really unbelievable.

It's unbelievable. We should be using that for something. We should be using it for this idea, man. Yeah, we can use it. We'll figure out something to use it for, man. Um, but yeah, but yeah, that's what we do around the holidays. We think about estate planning and we get real geeked out because everybody's slow in January.

Everybody's got nothing better to do. You've got a couple of days off from work usually. That's what most people I think need to need to be doing. That's what I'm going to do.

Yeah. Forget enjoying time with your family and, um, doing fun things with your kids. You should think about the end of your life and how to plan appropriately for it. That's a, in all seriousness, it is a, it is a good thing to do and it's a good time to do it. And, um, and yeah, no better time, man, going into that new year, go ahead and knock it out and you're good for the year.

Don't even have to worry about it. It's, uh, it's almost bowl season too. Yeah. Yeah. Like chili bowl season. No, like, uh, like football bowl season. Yeah. Yeah. And basketball, college basketball's back.

That's really good. That's always fun. Um, this is a good time of the year cause there's a lot of different sporting events. Me personally, that I like to watch. Um, I can't, I don't know if I can speak for you, Joshua, but I really dig this time of the year in terms of you got NBA, college basketball, NFL, college football, hockey.

Those are the main ones for me. So I went to, uh, I went to one of the early NC state games. It was, uh, you know, it was fun.

It was good. We look good. Yeah. Who'd you guys play? Uh, it was the Abilene.

Abilene. Uh, they got a solid squad this year, man. Yeah.

You're saying that in jest, but no, man, they have a solid team this year, not as solid as Arizona. Ooh. Yeah. Arizona. Arizona. I've never heard. Is that a school?

Is that a place? Who did Arizona beat? Carolina or Duke?

I don't know. Maybe Duke. It was a good game, man. Caleb Love beat Duke. Again. Yeah.

Caleb Love. Yeah. Oh, that's where he went. Yeah. He did pretty good.

Good for him, man. It's early. It's early. Yeah. It's early yet. I'm, uh, I'm excited to watch some more basketball though, man.

College professional across the board. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It brings me great joy.

I mean, me, me watching sports is like your children creating Mario levels in the, in the living room. All right. Well, I think we've eased, we've eased into it. So we're going to do our top 10 list. We're going to talk about a lot of mistakes that people make when they first get into business for themselves, uh, self-employed people, uh, starting a business, what mistakes they make, what, what, and they're easy mistakes to fix.

They're they're easy. It's just a, you gotta put some thought into it. You gotta think it through.

And so that's what we got today, Morgan. Okay. So on the program, a top 10 list mistakes, people starting their own business are making take notes.

So you can avoid those. We'll come up in the next segment. If you've got a legal situation that you're facing Whittaker and Hamer here to help, you can call this number 800-659-1186. That's 800-659-1186.

Leave your contact information briefly. What the call is about an attorney with Whittaker and Hamer will be in touch. You can also email your questions to the show info at judica county.com. And again, Whittaker and Hamer offices conveniently located for you in Raleigh, Garner, Clayton, Goldsboro, Fuquay, Farina, Gastonia, and Morehead city, your law firm for life.

We're back right after this. Judica County radio, your host, Josh Whittaker and Joe Hamer, managing partners, Whittaker and Hamer law firm, practicing attorneys here in North Carolina, your law firm for life. That's their motto. Again, offices conveniently located Raleigh, Garner, Clayton, Goldsboro, Fuquay, Farina, Gastonia, and in Morehead city. And if you've got a legal situation, you've got some questions and you need some answers. You can always call Whittaker and Hamer 800-659-1186. That's 800-659-1186. Leave your contact info briefly. What the call is about an attorney with Whittaker and Hamer will be in touch. And as always, we'll give you this way to get in touch.

You can email your questions to the show info at judicacounty.com. We have a top 10 list, Josh. We do, man. We do Morgan, Morgan, man. We do have that Morgan, man.

That is true. We, in the break, we were talking though, we haven't, uh, we, we were, we were not together last week. Um, uh, we had court, we had other things that we had to do, so we were not able to sit down together. Morgan was, was mentioning, asking what, what we'd been up to and, uh, I forgot, uh, I saw the Eagles. Yeah.

Yeah. They were at PNC again. You know, I saw them and I saw them a year or two ago at PNC and it was very sad cause they're all in their seventies, the mid, mid seventies. And at the very end, you know, if you're familiar with the Eagles, Don, Don Henley came out and he said, um, you know, that they enjoyed being there and they enjoyed performing. And if they don't pass this way again, you know, it was good to be here. I thought that was going to be it.

I thought it was going to be it. And then they announced, uh, they announced, they continued their tour, started a new one. I don't know how that works these days, but they came through and, uh, the surprise was Steely Dan and I'm not a huge Steely Dan fan. Maybe you are Joseph, maybe you are Morgan, not, not, I mean, I'm, I'm a fan of all of that classic rock, but, uh, it wasn't Steely Dan, correct?

Right. Name a Steely Dan song besides Peg. I couldn't have named Peg, man. So you got me beat, you got me beat there. Morgan, can you name a Steely Dan song besides Peg? Cannot.

All right. If I heard one, I could be like, that's probably Steely Dan. That's like foreigner. I saw, I was listening to some radio show and they were like, name six foreigner songs. I'm like everybody, when they thought about it, everybody can name like four or five.

That's all they got. But you couldn't, you couldn't get that sixth foreigner song. No. Any who, somebody can Steely Dan was, was not there to the surprise opener was the Doobie brothers. I've never seen the Doobie brothers, but I was, I was excited about it.

The Doobie brothers rocked it. Yeah. They're great. They're great. You don't know they're great.

Yes, I do. Come on, man. Just because I don't know Steely Dan. The Doobie brothers. I know the Doobies.

The Doobie brothers did like an hour. And it was, they were like, so happy to be up there, man. It was like, you heard it all on the radio growing up, right? So it was like, It's not even that. My, uh, my mom, my mom's husband, uh, he, we talked about this one time.

We don't call him a stepdad because I respect him and care about him. Um, but he, he had a band. They do a bunch of Doobie's covers and they'd have a Christmas party and they'd all come.

They play, they'd be jamming out. It was a good time, man. So I got some fond Doobie's memories. You didn't invite me to this Eagles concert. We went to the last one together.

We did. We went to the last one. And you were like, you're the reason why they're probably not coming back.

So like, I'm not inviting you to this one. So what it was, it was good times. I really enjoyed that concert. It's uh, you know, for me, the whole thing, not just the, the Doobies, the Eagles brought it too. I assume they did. Yeah. The Eagles brought it too.

And that's kind of cool how they do it. He passed away, but his son's in the band and Vince Gill, I've seen Vince Gill a lot and he's, he's awesome in there too, but uh, he was good last time. Yeah, he was. Yep. Good for you, man.

Sounds like life is going pretty well for you. So I had a lot of fun if nothing else, you know, and nothing else. I got that. That was a good show. That was a good show. I hope we, I hope the Eagles come through again. I hope that's not it for the Eagles. I hope they come through what, eight more times so we can do a top 10 list of the Eagles concerts that we've seen.

I can do that. That would be a good show idea for us, man. I can do that with Willie Nelson. I could rank my Willie Nelson's that thing. It's like 12 or 13.

I think as long as you have Don Henley, he'll be able to plug in, uh, different, uh, musicians to kind of create the Eagles all over again. Why wouldn't you? It was packed out. Was it not? Oh, it was. Yeah, it was.

It was packed. Yeah. The, um, you know, the thing about that though is who Don Henley, you know, is, is a, is an older man, right? I've never been one. If you've ever seen me or you've seen the videos, you, I don't, I don't bother dying my hair. I've got, I've got a lot of gray and, uh, you know, Don Henley, I guess dyed his hair for a long time.

And at some point you just stop. You just, you just make that decision as a guy, like I've dyed my hair for this many years and you don't care. So he's 100% gray. So he looks completely different than he used to, which is the natural way. It's just a shock to the system because it looks like he aged 42 years since the last time. And it was you because you remember him as the old Don Henley.

Well, you think about that, you know? So what this, the past couple of weeks, we've got a new, what, we got a new Beatles song. Did we? Yeah. We got a new Beatles song and we got a new album from the Rolling Stones.

Did we? Where do they release these things? What have I been doing? I don't know, man. God, I didn't know any of this.

I didn't know the Eagles were coming. Yeah. So the Beatles had a new song. I was telling my dad, my dad's in his, his seventies and I was sitting down talking to him and I wanted to make sure I was like, you did hear the new Beatles song. Is it worth hearing? It's not terrible. Okay. So it's, it's terrible. It's if you have to say, if you're just, if your review of it is, it's not terrible. It's not worth listening to, man. It's a, it's worth listening to. Okay.

Yeah. You give it, give it the lesson. I'll, I'll be sure to not do that because you've made me, I will avoid it.

If someone turns it on, I'm going to just plug my ears. I haven't, I don't know more. I haven't listened to any of the Rolling Stones. I would have been meaning to, I have, I haven't, I'm a huge Stones fan, but obviously not. Are you? Are you more?

Apparently I'm not. No, no. But I mean, it's the Stones.

I mean, they probably sound almost the same. Yeah. Yeah. It's got a good point.

Very good point. All right. Top 10 list. Top 10 list.

Our friends starting businesses. These are mistakes that they make early on that can be fatal, right? So top 10 mistakes, wait, wait, wait, wait a second. Fail to the business.

You will die if you run your business this way. All right. The first, the first mistake is, uh, and I, you know, I don't know how I feel about this.

Wait, is this like, okay. You say the first one, the top 10 list implies we started, we were starting at 10, like the least bad one and we're moving up to the worst one. There's like no particular order. There's no particular order. All right.

That's fair. The first one listed. Yes, man. The first one listed is not incorporating right away, not incorporating right away. And so I would put not incorporating slash organizing right away. Right. Yeah.

What do you think about that Joseph? I like your slash. I think there's a good slash because again, incorporating implies a corporation and we could be forming an LLC. So yeah, I like that caveat.

I think, yeah, you, you know, we've talked about this, right? We talked about the fact that you, you don't necessarily have to have a business entity to run a business. You could be a sole proprietorship operating under a DBA potentially. There's, you know, it's not like a mandatory requirement, but at the same time, I would argue that the benefits outweigh the, you know, the, the benefits of doing that and of forming an organization and of doing it immediately out of the gate. Are many. Yeah.

There's a lot of selfies there. And that's, you know, when you're starting a new business, maybe it's not a business that's funded really well, right? A lot of times you're starting these things and it's, you know, it's on sweat and hard work and there's not a lot of capital. There's not a lot of funds. And so maybe it doesn't always make the most sense to jump right into organizing or an entity or incorporate, you know, incorporating an entity.

So there are times when it doesn't, but if you're Oregon, if you're starting a business that you hope will succeed, especially if you're starting it with other people, I put that caveat in there too. Yeah. For sure.

If it's not just you. Yeah, for sure. And even, uh, even when I started a business with this Joseph guy, like we still have, we still get it started the right way.

Even if you know somebody real well, even if they're family, even if they're your best friends, it's kindergarten. That's all the more reason to do it the right way, because again, you want to take the guesswork out of it. You want to have clear parameters. Cause when you, one of the things you have to do, you know, uh, we'll, we'll talk about this, how, you know, incorporating or organizing gives you legal protections, right? You're minimizing your risk. You're protecting your personal assets. You're creating some tax, uh, relief for yourself.

You're doing a lot of things. Uh, but one of the things that you have to do when you sit down and organize is you have to sit down, whether it's by yourselves or it's with an attorney and you got to answer a lot of questions. Cause when you, when you do it, when you incorporate or you organize, you're going to have to sit down and do an agreement where you say, all right, we, we each have 50%, right. Or we, we don't have, we don't have 50%. We share profits equally, or we share losses equally, or I'm putting in a hundred grand or, and I need to make sure my a hundred grand gets paid out before anybody else gets any profit or this person's running the business. So they need to make sure they have a salary because they're putting in a lot of time and energy and you just, you just kind of figure it out and you get everybody's expectations on paper.

And it's really great. Cause you, you might have, I've seen very smart people, very accomplished business people go into a venture together and have very different ideas of what they're going to be getting out of it. And it's cause they never sat down.

They never went through the trouble. But, but when you sit down and you, you organize an LLC or you incorporate a, a, a corporation, you're going to have to talk about that stuff. You're gonna have to get it out in the open and everybody's gonna have to have clear expectations and that, that goes a long way. Yeah. I can tell you that the time you don't want to sit down and figure it out is when you're rocking and rolling, you're in the thick of it and you know, you're making money or even not making money going through a tumultuous period. Like that is not the time to sit down and talk about it and to flesh these things out. When you're talking about doing business with other people, you want to have the responsibilities dictated and doing well-defined profit share and everything.

You want to go ahead and set those parameters. And one thing that I think is important that a lot of people don't realize is how easy it is to do that. You know, especially speaking from, from experiences in terms of our firm and how we do things, we've got a very streamlined, efficient, easy to use process that we've designed. That's very client friendly where, you know, we're gonna, it's very, it's a lot easier and less daunting than some people think, you know, and we're going to get you in, we're going to get you out. We're going to take care of you. And it's not like some astronomical expense and for the money that you spend to do it, right? You can save yourself so much trouble, so many headaches down that line.

And will too. It's not a one size fits all. So you may come in and not need very much from us and you're not going to pay for very much if you don't need, and you may come in and you may need a very complicated agreement. You may need some promissory notes. You may need, you may need something very sophisticated and, and of course that, that would result in some higher, higher legal fees. But again, it's not a one size fits all and this, this goes into mistake number two. And so we'll just go ahead and mistake number two on this list is hiring a non business lawyer.

Right? So this is, uh, this is just going to someone, you know, who may, you know, practice family law or practice something else and trying to get them to help you set up a business and they may not have the experience necessary because what they should be doing is advising you, pointing out problems you're going to have. If you don't plan properly and like Joseph said, our system's designed, there's a lot of questions we ask you right out of the gate, just to help us know which way you're going and what you might. And it's because we've seen it, right? That's the benefit. That's why the point you're making is a point because someone who's not well versed in these situations who hasn't done 150 consults, you know, with these pitfalls and seeing these things isn't going to necessarily know what to look out for.

So yeah, it makes perfect sense. And it makes a big difference what your business is going to do. You know, is your business going to hold and manage real property? Is your business going to open up a restaurant and have to get county state, uh, permits as your, is your company going to develop a product as your, is your company going to have a salesman? Are you gonna have to protect intellectual property or are you going to have to like, once you talk to us, you know, you know, we'll be able to point you in the right direction, get you thinking about some things maybe you haven't thought about, but like Joe says, you don't want to figure this all out when you're one doing really good money's coming in the door like crazy. And you find out that other owners have some expectations, uh, of that money that maybe you don't share with them, but you never went down and put it in writing. Or if you're losing money, you definitely don't want to bear the brunt of that loss alone. So it's important that you've prepared everybody for, for good and bad, uh, cause things fail, right?

We have people come in and they put everything together and they do everything they should do. And, ah, man, what's that Star Trek. I'm not a big Star Trek fan who is there are people out there who are big Star Trek people. I don't dislike Star Trek.

I'm a Star Wars kid. It's not a Star Trek. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Me either, man. What's the one with a Picard? Which one is that? Is that next generation? Next generation. I'm pretty sure.

I have no idea. He has this quote and it's a meme now. And every time I see it, I'll sound like a Star Star Trek kid to me right now.

No, man, no, man. I'm not, but, but Picard has this quote where he says, you can do everything right and still fail, right? So you can do everything right and still fail.

And he just, I can't remember the second part of the quote, but it's like, that's, that's just life. That's not, you know, but that's what you could do. You can plan, you can have this great idea. You can plan it out. You can come to me and Joseph, you can get set up the right way and then it can still not work out. But if you haven't made any plans for it, not working out, you know, especially if you have partners, if you have other people with capital, if you have other people with assets, you need to protect those things. You need to know what's going to happen. Judica County radio, Josh Whitaker, Joe Hamer, managing partners right here at Whitaker and Hamer law firm, the power behind the program.

They're practicing attorneys here in North Carolina, your law firm for life office is located Raleigh, Garner, Clayton, Goldsboro, Fuquay, Verina, Gastonia and Moorhead city. If you've got a legal situation you're facing, maybe you're in this top 10 list. Again, this is people that are starting to get into a small business. These are mistakes they are making and take some notes.

You want to avoid these. But if you've got questions, you can always call Whitaker and Hamer, 800-659-1186. That's 800-659-1186. Leave your contact information briefly, what the call is about and an attorney with Whitaker and Hamer will be in touch and you can email your questions to the show for a future broadcast. We'll answer them for you, info at judicacounty.com.

We've got more of the top 10 list when we come back. Welcome back in to Judica County radio. Josh Whitaker and Joe Hamer managing partners, Whitaker and Hamer law firm are your hosts. And again, they're practicing attorneys here in North Carolina, Whitaker and Hamer, your law firm for life office is located almost everywhere.

Raleigh, Garner, Clayton, Goldsboro, Fuquay Varina, Gastonia, and in Moorhead City. I'm Morgan Patrick, consumer advocate. If you're facing a legal situation, you've got questions, you can always call Whitaker and Hamer, 800-659-1186. That's 800-659-1186.

Leave the contact information briefly, what the call is about and an attorney with Whitaker and Hamer will be in touch and you can email your questions to the show, info at judicacounty.com. We'll answer them on a future broadcast. So we're top 10 mistakes people starting a business are making.

First one, not organizing right away, and then two, using a non-business lawyer. So now we are on to number three. Before we get to three, Morgan, we had mentioned Star Trek. We had mentioned Captain Picard and Jean-Luc Picard. And I was trying to give a quote that I'd always seen and I messed it up really bad.

Well, you got halfway through it, right? No one's going to know because no one watches Star Trek. Well, I'm going to give it to you because it's much better.

It's much more eloquent. And actually, I'm going to go home and Google this episode. Go home and watch Star Trek.

You need to study Star Trek and report to us. You're so biased towards Star Wars. I had this friend growing up and he liked Star Wars and his grandma, he asked for Star Wars for Christmas. God rest her soul.

Yes. I'm sure she's not with us anymore and she was a delightful lady and she did her best. This was back before you could just go type it in the internet, have it show up at your house and she went to the store and she got him Star Trek. And then you stopped being his friend. No, I was still his friend.

But you said I had this friend, so I figured that was a falling out for you two. But you think Star Trek figures, what do you do with, I mean, they're not ready. Yeah.

Did they have Star Trek? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Interesting. We had ornaments. That's what I remember.

My mom had ornaments. You know, the ones you'd plug into where the lights go and they make noises. Star Trek? Yeah. I thought they were Star Wars too. I do. Yeah.

They're talking about night lights. But it's not like she was a terrible mother that bought actual toys, you know, of Star Trek. Come on. She's not a monster.

She loved me. Here's the quote. I think about this quote a lot.

It comes, it's one of those things that just sits in the back of my head and it'll come out. So here's the quote. It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life. That's very true, man.

I've been a part of some sporting teams that have committed no errors and still gotten destroyed by superior competition. But I always liked that. I feel like I'm going to tell my kids one day at a very important time and they'll just come to me and I'll remember it, not like the radio where I just forget it and bubble through it. You got some time to work on it. So whenever it's time to lay it out for them, you'll nail it instead of blowing it like you did just now. I'll get some practice in. I can see some Star Trek fan at home listening and just, that's not the quote.

You're blowing it, man. All right. I got to look at my list here. I got to get what our next one is here. I don't like that one.

I'm going to skip it. So we have the top nine. Yeah. The top editing.

I'll come back to it if we run out of time. Yeah. All right. This one, this one. Okay.

So this one's kind of interesting. So this one's saying not having a standard contract. Right. And what I think they mean is whatever your business is going to be, if it's selling something, hiring salesmen, leasing property, buying property, it's not having a standard contract for whatever it is that you're going to be doing in business.

And I talked to someone just today, and that's what we're doing for them. What if we just change that? Because I don't like the way it's worded. Right.

What if we just say not having a contract? You like that better? No. Yes. Maybe. Yeah. I guess the standard contract implies, to me, it reads as like boilerplate, one size fits all. And I don't like that.

Well, I think it does. But what if you're, what if you sell, in law school, everybody sells widgets, right? Yeah.

From the Jetsons. That's the standard. The widget store. Yeah. So you're selling widgets. But it depends on what kind of widget you're selling.

Is it a specific, highly specialized widget, or is it like the same, you're going to sell the same widget to 15 million people? So boilerplate might work. Yeah. No, I'm not saying boilerplate can't work.

What I'm saying are situations where boilerplate shall not work and when you need some more specificity. You know? You know you like that one? He did a very good job with that one. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Generally speaking, though, you should have a contract for your services. Yeah. For the same reason that you want an agreement between you and your other shareholders or you and your other members. The same reason you want to document everything and put it all on paper is the same reason you want to do it with a customer or with someone who's going to be using your business. You don't want there to be any confusion.

We read these all the time. Clients will get these contracts where they're providing services or materials or something else to an out-of-state LLC, right? And so they get these contracts that are all one-sided and like it'll reserve, it'll make you go to arbitration or it'll say you have to litigate this in Wisconsin, just have some made up. And so you want to prevent that. You want to prevent opening yourself up to liability you don't want to have. And so if you're in North Carolina and you're providing services, predominantly North Carolina, you're going to want to make sure if something goes wrong, you're litigating this in North Carolina and you're not litigating this in New York or California or some state where you're going to have to go hire an attorney to represent you. So agreements are made according to certain state laws. Maybe some federal law gets in there, but you want a standard contract. You want to know what your risks are if something goes wrong with that transaction, you can cap your liability, you can get rid of certain warranties. There's a lot of stuff you can do with your own contract, depending on what kind of business you're in. Yes, that is correct.

You killed that one, man, knocked it out of the park. And again, all this entails some sort of legal fees. You're not going to spend your whole budget on legal fees, but if you believe in your idea and you want to take your best step forward, you just got to have everything right. You know what else costs money?

Getting sued or not having a contract. I'm saying man a lot today. I like it.

I think it's your new thing and I'm digging it. I'm going to skip ahead because one of these is, this is number seven. This is our top six things. I'm skipping ahead. Number seven says, only getting legal or professional services in emergency situations. Hey, that's similar to what I just said, right?

Jeez, man, is this list in my head? Don't wait. Don't procrastinate. Yeah, come to us if you need us, but in a perfect world, you're not coming to us with a Superior Court lawsuit in hand. And honestly, coming to us is what is going to prevent you from having a Superior Court lawsuit in your hand because we're going to tell you about those pitfalls. Don't come to me. Come to me if you need me. Don't come to me. Don't hire me for anything. Never come to our office ever, please. Come to us if you need us, but whatever you do, but in a perfect world, you won't have just been served with a lawsuit for however many tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

A billion. Yeah. So, you know, come to us when the problem first starts. Come to us before the, you know, before the problem starts, you know, that way you're on good, solid legal footing. I always tell everybody, anybody can sue anybody for any reason on any day. There's nothing stopping, you know, I could make up something and sue Joseph here. I'll sue you. I'll sue you. I was first. I'm suing you first.

Yeah. I'm suing you for that shirt. And you still have the defendant. They may be able to get sanctioned.

You might be able to get damages, but there's nothing stopping anyone from suing anybody, you know, at any time. And so you just, you got to have all your, your, your ducks in a row, you got to have everything up. And going to get legal services only in emergency situations is not a good practice. That is very much having your ducks, not in a row. You have unaligned ducks in that situation. And me and Joseph, we are not CPAs, but that includes, you know, there's a lot of tax surprises. If you've been a W-2 employee your whole life and you, you step into the self-employed business world, there's, there's a lot of tax surprises that, that you need to be ready for.

There's a lot of deductions you might be able to take if you plan ahead. Not if you have your ducks in a row though. If you have your ducks in a row, you're going to be just fine. Um, but I like that one because I see that when a lot of people just, people will be like, Hey, this is what happened.

And we're not going to, if that happens, we're not going to judge you. We're going to help you. Yeah.

Come to us with your prize. That's yeah. And it look, even with, even with every duck in their row, things still can happen, but I think you would see a drastic reduction of un-rowed ducks, uh, if you've got your stuff together. And if you do the work on the front end, man, the work on the front end, especially when it comes to having a good contract, uh, as between you and your partners, as between you and the general public, you know, dictating your services, it's all about protecting yourself every way that you can. And if you do all that, you're going to be all right.

Even if, even if you do get that billion dollar lawsuit, you're going to be all right. You know? Well, you know, and that's how, that's how we talk about this a lot. That's how me and Joe set up the firm and, you know, each week we come to you and we try to talk about different things that, that, that you might need. Like today we're focusing kind of on business startups. That's kind of where our focus is today, but we'll talk about estate planning. We'll talk about litigation. We'll talk about family law, uh, with several different attorneys with several different practice areas so that we, we can help you with a lot of different, different areas.

And so this is, uh, it's just one of those things, you know, we can help you get set up. We can help you with business law. If something happens and you are sued or litigation folks can step in and, and help there too. So we try to, we try to help you with everything that we, that we can, but I think the vision was always to just be a law firm for the community, right? You know, you go down the street to us and we can do virtually anything that you need.

Not every single thing, not everything, but virtually everything. So that's, uh, that's one, you know, legal services, uh, we need, you need it upfront. And I talk with a lot of people every day who, who, who are taking those steps, who are putting a lot of money into a project and, and may need to make sure everybody's protected.

And, uh, we do it all the time. It's a good, it's a good policy. Judica County radio, Josh Whitaker and Joe Hamer. They're the managing partners at Whitaker and Hamer law firm practicing attorneys here in North Carolina. Again, Whitaker and Hamer, your law firm for life office is located.

Raleigh Garner, Clayton, Goldsboro, Fuquay, Verina, Gastonia, and in Morehead city. If you've got a legal situation, then you've got questions. You can always call the firm for help 800-659-1186 that's 800-659-1186 and leave your contact info briefly. What the call is about and an attorney will return your call and also you can email your questions to the show info at judicacounty.com we'll answer them on a future broadcast. So we have legal mistakes that people are making. It was a top 10 and we are doing some editing is we're having some fun with it and we're getting to, uh, the fellows, uh, top, uh, mistakes that are being made by people that are starting businesses.

We've got a few more to go on the other side, so we will take a break. Welcome back into Judica County radio. Your hosts are Josh Whitaker and Joe Hamer managing partners, Whitaker and Hamer law firm, practicing attorneys here in North Carolina, and again, Whitaker and Hamer, your law firm for life. You can always call us at 800-659-1186. That's 800-659-1186.

Leave your contact info briefly. What the call is about and an attorney with Whitaker and Hamer will be in touch and you can email your questions to the show info at judicacounty.com. We'll answer them on a future broadcast. Let's get back to the list. We have many things to talk about. We have a little bit of a break. We'll see you next time. Thank you.

We'll see you next time. That's 800-659-1186. Leave your contact info, briefly what the call is about, and an attorney with Whitaker and Hamer will be in touch. And you can email your questions to the show, info at judicacounty.com. We'll answer them on a future broadcast. Let's get back to the list. We have mistakes people are making when they're starting a business, Josh. That's right. If you've been with us for the entire show, we have been going down our top 10 list of mistakes people going into business.

Like top seven, actually. First time, second time, third time, people going into business for themselves, the mistakes they make. So this is all about planning to avoid, uh, you know, loss, trouble, lawsuits, misunderstandings, that kind of thing. I'm going to read this quote again. I've read it. I've mentioned it once already. I think you got to start reading it every second. I'm going to start this segment because to me, it really, it really jives with what we're trying to do here. Cause you can make all these plans and still get something back. It's still happening.

It's still, the business could still fail. That wasn't the quote, right? That was just an abbreviated version. Are you gonna do the real quote? I'm going to do the real quote. Do it in his accent. I can't do it.

Okay. So Star Trek, Captain Picard next, is it next, it's next generation. It's the next generation. It's not the new generation. No, it's the new. It might be the new. I think it's the next generation.

I think it's the new. You want me to find out? Yeah. You work on that. You, you hold tight, brother.

I'll be right back. So Captain Picard said, it is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life. But he said it with a cool accent.

Oh, he said it much cooler than me, much more authoritarian, authoritative. But um, okay. So that's what we're doing here.

We're talking about mistakes people make. A lot of these have been pretty good. I'm not a big, I'm gonna read this next one.

This is number six on this list, but I'm going to read it. Doing business with a handshake. Doing business with a handshake. And we've, we've been talking about this, documenting everything, making sure everybody's aware of everybody else's expectations, your partners, your shareholders, your members, your managers, the people that are going to work for you, customers.

You know, me and, me and Joseph, we grew up, we grew up down here when it was a little more rural. Oh yeah. What do you say? Yeah. Oh yeah. Back in the, we were handshaking everybody back then. And I still have a tendency to do that. But I will still, I will still, even as an attorney who tells you not to do it, I would, I will still do some things with a, with a handshake cause uh, you know, if you're dealing with the right people, a handshake means a lot.

It does a lot. Yeah. We do some handshake stuff, man. I'll do a handshake thing with you. That's right.

I'll do one right now. I feel fine with that. Yeah. Yeah. But that's probably not bad. That's bad advice. Bad advice. Bad advice. Right.

You do that at your own, at your own risk and your, and your own peril. Cause God forbid if I, me and Joseph, let's say me and Joseph had a handshake deal to do something. A strong hand.

A firm one. And Joseph dies tomorrow. That's probably yeah.

I have been letting myself go. God forbid Joseph dies, his, his estate's not gonna know about our handshake deal. His heirs aren't gonna know about our handshake deal. And if I just put a hundred thousand dollars down on, on a piece of something, some equipment that me and Joe are gonna start this business with a handshake well I'm out his half of it. Right? Yup, that's true. So, so, so the advice here is don't start anything uh, with a handshake and it bleeds into another one they have is like don't overly favor they're saying this the wrong way but don't overly favor friends and family with with stock with ownership interest with with promises you know your friends and family if they want to be investors that old nepotism is what we're talking about right yeah yeah so if you're you know if your family's lending you some money to get a business started you can definitely talk about starting a corporation where they have some some shares maybe maybe some non-voting shares maybe some shares that get paid uh dividends before anybody else gets dividends maybe some sort of preferential treatment to reward them for putting money down um but but don't go don't go overboard you know you you still you still have to make money you still have to make a profit you know you have to treat it like a like a business yes star trek the next generation is the next that's what it was yeah i'm looking at the top 10 speaking of top 10 list the top 10 star wars shows i mean star trek shows sorry is there 10 yeah there's there's actually 10 yeah there might be more but uh there's like an animated one prodigy the next generation next generation is number three by the way yeah number two the original number one deep space deep space nine i never saw that one at all who did who did it doesn't even have jean-luc percard in it i think it's got this head the guy whose head looks looks kind of i don't know the nice way to say this it looks kind of like a gluteus maximus oh yeah i'm not familiar with it yeah i think i've seen most of the original ones like i said you tell me that's not you tell me that's not accurate look at that what does it look like oh yeah i remember that guy yeah you see the camera i uh i watched most of the originals i think over time did you say you were you you said you weren't a star trek kid you sound like a star trek kid no no no no no no i watched them i was like the same the same phase i was going through i watched most of them and then i watched a lot of uh twilight zone the original twilight okay which is good yeah yeah you've never seen that yes i have what do you think i am man i'm familiar with it yes come on i haven't seen all of it obviously well i don't think i've seen everybody i've seen some of it and then i think the new generation came out like as a kid it's the next generation man i looked that up for the specific purpose of getting the name right man was the new generation that's i don't think that there is a new generation generation are we talking about a pepsi commercial yeah and it might have been a wrestling tag team let me look it up yeah you're thinking of the new age outlaws my brother i'll look it up i'll figure out what the new generation is you just keep going all right no you keep going on your thought train i don't want to derail it oh no no i'm going to the next thing on the list you're trying to hide the fact that you're a star trek kid you fed it you fed it out to the world man the next thing on our list is sloppy employment contracts right so if your business is going to employ people you know we're in north carolina north carolina is an at-will state so you can hire anybody uh fire anybody for for any not a legal reason of course uh but you know employment's a little different north carolina is in some states so you don't have to have an employment agreement you don't have to have a contract uh but but even short of a contract if somebody's going to work for you somebody's going to be president of your corporation if somebody's going to be a fiduciary to you are we doing something for you it helps to have an express uh that stuff right now again so everybody's on the same uh wavelength everybody's got the same expectations and the same uh a lot of these are just documentation man it can help yeah but i'm gonna i'm gonna play devil's advocate here man you know having an employment contract can help in those instances but uh but again it's it's important to keep in mind that you are bound by that contract right so you're talking about a situation where the terms of that contract are going to dictate whether you can terminate that employment just be wary you know yeah definitely keep your head on a swivel you know we never we never recommend you know i i see people use these templates so they'll pull off you know wherever wherever website wherever self-help website they pull them off of and um and then and then they they enter these agreements or they use these as operating agreements or incorporation agreements and then they don't read everything in there and they don't necessarily understand everything in there then something goes wrong and there's a lawsuit or a disagreement or a mediation that that springs forth from it and then they're bound by these terms that they didn't really understand or didn't even mean to include but they're there um so we've seen that happen too so definitely if you're going to put anything putting stuff in writing is great gets everybody on the same page get a written record of it but make sure what's there is what you intend yeah make sure you understand it you think that that would go good that goes without saying but i feel like you still gotta say it make sure it's there like i'll put this in writing this is this is a in writing guarantee to you when i leave here i will get chick-fil-a and i'll put it in my body i can you take it to the bank what's your what's your go-to order what's your go-to order of chick-fil-a joe i'm getting a number three eight count with uh polynesian sauce all day long i do 12 count sorry 12 count excuse me i do the number one and get a side what's the number one it's just the regular sandwich and fries with a side of nuggets i still get the nuggets it's just like a bunch of nuggets you double it up on the chicken you do a sandwich and nuggets and that's chicken chicken chicken chicken a lot of can't hurt you yeah it's healthy yeah it's extra protein man it's barely got any calories to it that's what i heard that's what i read in a book i'm not a dietitian obviously if you can look at me right now judica county radio josh whitaker and joe Hamer chick-fil-a fans and they're the hosts of this show whitaker Hamer law firm where you can find them they're the managing partners practicing attorneys here in north carolina again whitaker and Hamer your law firm for life office is located raleigh garner clayton goalsboro fukuevarina gastonia and in moorhead city if you've got a legal situation you're facing you've got some questions you need some answers you can always call whitaker and Hamer 800-659-1186 leave your contact information briefly what the call is about and an attorney with whitaker and Hamer will be in touch again the number 800-659-1186 and you can always email your questions to the show info at judica county dot com and we'll answer those questions on a future broadcast we are back on the other side to wrap this one up we are back on judica county radio your hosts josh whitaker and joe Hamer managing partners practicing attorneys here in north carolina you can find them at whitaker and Hamer law firm it's theirs raleigh garner clayton goalsboro fukuevarina gastonia and moorhead city the offices are located there conveniently for you if you've got a situation a legal situation i should say you've got some questions you need some answers you can always call the firm 800-659-1186 that's 800-659-1186 leave your contact information briefly what the call is about and an attorney with whitaker and Hamer will be in touch and also you can email your questions to the show info at judica county dot com we'll answer those questions on a future broadcast we are talking today about mistakes people are making when they start up a business josh take it away we have been that's that's been the whole the whole show today has been this top 10 list about uh mistakes people make when they start a business uh and and and i think most of these just came down to to planning you know knowing knowing what your structure was going to be your corporate structure putting it in writing you know asking an attorney asking and again me and me and joseph are not cpas we are not allowed to give tax advice and we wouldn't give tax advice but never when you start a new business that's a really good time to make a good cpa friend and not necessarily as somebody who prepares taxes that not somebody who does that like a legitimate uh certified public accountant a cpa a firm who will help you prepare your taxes for that year uh because there's a lot of mistakes you can make a lot of advantages you can take a lot of mistakes you can make just like on the legal side there's a lot of things you can uh you can do you can be advised on a good attorney who knows what they're doing or is going to be able to point out a lot of pitfalls that you can avoid um because a lot of people make the same mistakes you know over and over and over again because they just you just don't know yeah that's right you don't know until you know but you know who knows whitaker neighbors attorneys that's law that's right so well you know and like we said earlier our firm is always happy to help you know morgan will always give you our email address and our phone number and you can reach out to us we can get you scheduled for a consult get you scheduled for a time to talk if you have a question you want us to answer on the air happy to do that we we uh we do that many a day is sit down and kind of tackle some general questions you know uh you know we're licensed only in north carolina we are north carolina attorneys um but uh but but always happy to help that's that's what we're here for that's that's one of the reasons we do the show uh is is so that we can't we can't reach out to the the folks who listen and let them know we're here uh and we do all kinds of things you know one of our attorneys settled a couple of personal injuries this week right so people who were in car accidents and uh needed to sue for negligence had to you know uh insurance companies not giving them what their accident was like so the accident was worth so we we've got that guy we've had uh our family law attorneys have been in court helping folks with child custody uh you know um separating marital assets alimony child support we've had our attorneys in criminal court you know with uh possession charges traffic charges i was in court the other day you know we we do a lot of superior court uh civil litigations again contracts things like that when when things fall apart so firm covers a lot of bases yes that's true man you said all these things you've been doing and it makes me feel late i've been doing things too uh but i really do like to think of our firm as like kind of a brain trust we've got a lot of folks with a lot of experience and a lot of times we'll sit around and you know we'll have clients who have problems that kind of touch a lot of different areas and and and we'll pull that expert expertise from attorneys in those practice areas uh and we really can put for some effective uh representation that's that's one of our strengths at the firm yeah we come together kind of like the power rangers do you know when they all what's the power what's the big what do they call the big thing you could just say voltron different thing but the mega that's what it is yeah yeah so that was a little past legal megas that's the the power rangers were a little you know what i was thinking about the other day you probably are too you're probably too young for this morning my morgan might be morgan's a little bit older than me uh what was that what was the interactive toy remember there was this one christmas i can't remember it came out and it like it was supposed to like interact with like the tv show oh huh i got captain power stuck in my head was interactive yeah that was that was probably after my uh my toy uh time so yeah i don't remember that yeah because you were you were a few years captain power and the soldiers of the future yeah is that it i think that was it okay they had like a toy line and it was i never had it but i had friends that had it it didn't seem like it really worked but it was supposed to there was times you could shoot the tv screen okay okay and the toys would do stuff if you if you did it right it's kind of like a laser tag sensors on the screen they'd hit sensors on the screen and be hit in return it only lasted one season it was ahead of its time obviously it was ahead of its time if you still remember it so what's it called captain power captain power hold on captain power and the soldiers of the future i like that i wonder how far the future was in the future i wonder if it was like now it was probably like 2012 yeah exactly yeah that's crazy in 1987 another edition of judica county radio is in the books josh whitaker and joe haimer are your hosts they're the managing partners whitaker and haimer law firm practicing attorneys here in north carolina again whitaker and haimer your law firm for life they have offices conveniently located raleigh garner clayton goalsboro fuquay verina gastonia and in moorhead city if you have a legal situation a legal question and you need some answers you can always call the firm 800-659-1186 again call whitaker and haimer 800-659-1186 leave your contact information briefly what the call is about and an attorney with whitaker and haimer will be in touch and as always you can email your questions to the show we'll answer them on a future broadcast info at judica county dot com that's info at judica county dot com for josh whitaker and joe haimer i'm morgan patrick we'll see on the radio next week judica county is hosted by attorneys licensed to practice law in north carolina some of the guests appearing on this podcast may be licensed north carolina attorneys discussion on this podcast is meant to be general in nature and in no way should the discussion be interpreted as legal advice legal advice can only be rendered once an attorney licensed in the state in which you live has the opportunity to discuss the facts of your case with you the attorneys appearing on this podcast are speaking in generalities about the law in north carolina and how these laws affect the average north carolinian if you have any questions about the content of this show you can direct such inquiry to joshua whitaker at jmw at mwhlaw.lawyer