Attorney Thomas B. Burton answers the following question:
"What Is The Fastest Way To Set Up an LLC?"
Want to set up an LLC and not sure where to start?
Interested in forming your own LLC in Wisconsin, but hesitant to do it completely on your own? Good news, I have created a complete video tutorial package, designed for young entrepreneurs and individuals with limited funds who are not in a position to hire an attorney to help. This package is designed to offer a middle option between paying an attorney for full representation at hourly rate, and trying to form your LLC completely on your own with no guidance.
This package includes 4 videos created by Attorney Thomas B. Burton, which contain over one hour of of content, guiding you through the steps to form your own Single Member LLC with the State of Wisconsin, file for a Federal Tax ID number (EIN) with the Internal Revenue Service, and draft your own Single Member LLC Operating Agreement. Check out my Form Your Own LLC Video Tutorial package here.
Hello! I am attorney Thomas Burton and today’s question is the following:
“What is the fastest way to set up an LLC?”
Great question, so I'm going to discuss here, in Wisconsin where I am licensed as an attorney, and the fastest way to form an LLC is to go online and file your articles of organization directly with the Wisconsin Department of Financial Institutions. They have an online process that you can use where you enter all the information and pay your fee by credit card, completely online.
If everything is correct and your name is available, your LLC can be filed, formed and registered with the state at the time you do it. Often, I will file an LLC and I get an email back immediately from the state that it's confirmed and registered and LLC can begin conducting business.
Now, filing your articles of organizations, just the first step, you should take other important steps such as adopting an operating agreement, often obtaining an EIN from IRS and other steps would take over in my other videos, in order to maintain the limited liability protection of your LLC, but in terms of the fastest way to form one, doing it online is the fastest. It's also the cheapest because in Wisconsin, they charge you less to file online, that descending the paper or form because they don't really want to deal with that paper.
Now, I know many other states have an online filing process as well. So I'm going to guess that in most states, that is the quickest way.
One thing I'll point out is Legal Zoom, another often try to get to use them to form LLC and while you can do that, you do not have to use them to actually file LLC online. In fact, in Wisconsin, it's fairly simple not super simple, but fairly simple to walk through it.
So in my experience using when I walked through Legal Zoom lately, they try to upsell you on a lot of things you may or may not necessarily need because they're battling it with other software providers and sellers of services.
So if you want to file it online, the quickest way is to do it online. And if you're interested in forming your own LLC, I've created a video package where I go through the process, in four videos of forming your LLC, obtaining an EIN from IRS, adopting your operating agreement and discussing the steps you should take after formation to maintain the corporate formalities and maintain limited liability protection and I’ve put that all together in a video package you can download and the class is less than you would pay me for an hour of my time. So if you're interested in ‘do-it-yourself’ type of thing, I would check that out.
Also in my package, I will tell you exactly what you need, the fees you’ll pay and I don't try to upsell you another services like Legal Zoom does during their interview process.
So the fastest way to form an LLC in Wisconsin is the file online with this, Wisconsin Department of financial institutions.
Great question, and thank you very much.
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