A Small Business Owner’s Guide to Shareholder Agreements, Part I: Voting Power

One topic of conversation that always sparks a lot of interest is how to organize the ownership structure of the company when co-owners or investors are involved.  This post begins a four part series looking at key topics to consider when organizing a company with multiple owners.  In this post, we look at voting power and how it can be distributed.  This topic alone could fill an entire semester in business or law school, so this brief discussion is meant as a beginning point for a review of your own business plans. 

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Selling Your Business - Where to Start?

Whether you have built up your business over decades, or your business has developed quickly, selling a business can be a tricky process.  It may have taken you five years or twenty years, but either way, starting and growing a business to maturity is an all consuming proposition.

Many times, the sale of a business can set up your retirement if you can realize enough value from the transaction.  But how do you begin?

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Federal Judge Blocks DOL Overtime Regulations

The Fair Labor Standards Act is the federal law that regulates, among other things, overtime pay for US workers. It has been a source of concern for small and big businesses that the US Department of Labor was set to enact - effective December 1, 2016 - a new rule which raised the salary cap below which workers must receive overtime pay from $455 a week to $921 per week (the "Overtime Rule").  In other words, the new Overtime Rule was about to make roughly 4 million more workers eligible for overtime: almost all workers who earned up to $47,892.00 annually. 

This rule applied to all organizations: both for profits and non profits. 

The compliance aspects of this were messy to say the least.  

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