Business

Business is (perhaps obviously?) different in different countries, I am focusing on Sweden for now as this is where my business will physically be. We typically have some different ways to register a company, I believe that there is six or so types. I will outline two of them to help you read the rest of my thoughts.

Enskild näringsverksamhet

In English I believe it would be called private business so it's the name I will be using from here on as I am writing mainly in english.

Private business is a form where you as a person register to have corporate tax. This basically mean that you will report tax and VAT and the likes as yourself. In Sweden we have a system where every person has a unique personal number, and companies are also handled as a person, oftentimes we make the differance between physical and legal persons. In this form you as a physical person is also the companies legal person.

You can have employees if you register to do so but out of the box this form is mainly meant for small one-person-companies.

One more thing to keep in mind is that you in many ways share your economy with your company. So if you want to rent offices you will have the responsability as a physical person. This is among the bigger disadvantages and if you would want to scale up in any way or even just rent office-space I would say you need a good insurance as any kind of faliur gets a one to one mapping to your private echonomy!

So in conclusion, this is a good form for many, for what I want to do it's not really an option, at least not in the long run. It might be a starting point however, but I wouldn't rent business premisses in this company form.

Aktiebolag

This is probably the most common way to run a business in Sweden. I believe that the correct word in English would be limited company but as it really is the the common form of company and in the scoop of all of this I will just talk about it as company.

To register a company you first of all need to raise a share capital of 50,000 sek. That is a mandatory requirement to start. You also need a board with at least one member, however you can't do it with only one person as you also need to have at least one suppleant. So at least two people, but if you have at least three members on the board suppleants are optional. It is also common to have a CEO (and remember that the Swedish word VD meaning CEO is quite inapropriate in English ;) ). The CEO is the executive officer assigned and trusted by the board to run the company.

In this form you as a private person doesn't have any private responsability the way you would in a private business. So the security levels are much higher for you yourself.

This is the form to strive for and it's pretty much how the system is built. Another really valid point to concider is that this gives a much more serious impression and there will even be companies which will not do business unless they are registered companies.

What will I do, and why?

At this point in time it's still to early to say, but the only way in the long run is to establish as a company. I might however start up small on the side of my current employment as a private business, the reson would be that I can still do a lot of things such as purchases and other things. I don't want to start too soon as I need to know that I can run everything while still having a good control of my personal life. I don't really have a situation where I can spend full-time on creating the company as I can't afford to do so. So that is not an option and then the option is to take it slow.

Exactly how it will play out is hard to say as I am still starting out and my business plan is not done yet, but all of the things I talked about here is highly relevant in creating the business plan. I am writing a quite thorough business plan and there are a big scoop to cover but in time the steps I need to take to get to a sucessful company will be more clear and the business plan is comming along.